If you stay ready, you don’t have to get ready: Rethinking global health security

“Defending the WHO is necessary but not sufficient to address the weaknesses that the corvid-19 crisis has revealed. Fundamentally, those weaknesses revolve around the interplay between, first, underfunded national and local health systems and second, international coordination which relies on goodwill and is too weak in a world of great power rivalry,” write Jonas Gahr Støre, Leader of the Norwegian Labour Party and former Health and Foreign Minister as well as David Miliband, CEO of the International Rescue Committee and former UK Foreign Secretary in their recent op-ed. Mark Leonard invited the two author to his podcast talking about how the global health system could be reformed: what role should Europe play? And is it likely that the US position to global health changes with a potential Biden win? And can China also to play a positive role in global health security?

Further reading:

• “Global Health Security Needs New Thinking” by David Miliband and Jonas Gahr
• “Health sovereignty: How to build a resilient European response to pandemics” by Jonathan Hackenbroich, Jeremy Shapiro, and Tara Varma

This podcast was recorded on 31 July 2020.

Bookshelf:

• “The United States Needs a New Foreign Policy” by William J Burns in The Atlantic

• “Wolf Hall” by Hilary Mante

• “Dinner at the Center of the Earth” by Nathan Englander

• “The years” by Annie Ernaux

• “The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century” by Tony Judt

• “Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power” by Jon Meacham