Never again. Health and sustainable development in the light of the pandemic. What went wrong?

My title is health and sustainable development in the light of the pandemic. And my message is, never again. I’m going to be saying something about the lessons that we have learned from looking at what has been happening in Europe and to some extent further afield. To begin I’d just like to say that this is the summary of the work that has been done in the Pan-European Commission on Health and Sustainable Development. I have been very privileged to chair its Scientific Advisory Committee and also to be the main raporteur for the project. It’s a project with a team that hasn’t had many people with particular expertise in health on it, but this I think, is a good thing, it brings together two former prime ministers, Mario Monti and Helle Thorning-Schmidt from Italy and Denmark, three former presidents, and people from international banks and civil society and elsewhere. We just published our report a few weeks ago, and I hope some of you have had a chance to read it.