About : The Global Health Impact Project

Traditionally, bioethicists have focused on principles for equitable allocation of scarce health resources in pandemic preparedness and response. Rather than proposing criteria for shifting resources around, we may have a greater and more equitable health impact by reducing demand and increasing resources. This requires addressing the need for preventive measures, for re-assessing manufacturing and distribution systems, health care workers, funding, trust in science, community engagement, and principles for prioritization. We will consider how to measure success in these endeavors and the appropriate scope of allocation efforts but also ethical questions that arise in trying to constrain demand and expand supply. Value choices will underlie each of our determinations, and deciding which approaches are best requires ethical inquiry and debate among experts in the field and public discussion.

As the COVID-19 pandemic surges around the world, for the first time many individuals in wealthy countries have learned what it is like to lack access to essential medicines. For people in low- and middle-income countries, limited access to essential health services has always been a problem. As globalization increases the global health threats we face, we require global responses. What are our obligations to promote health and wellbeing beyond borders? Should we modify rules of aid and trade to protect the health of all? The Global Health Impact Project aims to shed light on these questions to improve our ability to address current and future health crises.

What can the history of public health teach us about how to protect everyone's ability to meet their basic needs? How can we address inequality, poverty, oppression, and violence that undermine efforts to advance health? This project addresses these questions and engages students, academics, and the public in discussion and debate.

Adopting a human rights perspective on health supports international rights to access essential medicines. How can we make progress in fulfilling these rights? What are governments', the pharmaceutical industry's, and civil society's obligations in doing so? This project addresses these questions and considers access to essential medicines in the larger context of advancing access to basic health systems and the social determinants of health.

Organizations like the Global Fund, World Bank, and GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance are responsible for allocating millions of dollars in aid to low-income, high disease burden countries. Our project seeks to examine the empirical determinants of this allocation and its ethical consequences to ultimately examine whether the allocation is just and maximally effective.

This project responds to the question "How can we advance our understanding of the nature of good lives?" Appealing to both theoretical and empirical evidence, it defends the view that, to live minimally good lives, people need a certain range of conditions and pleasures that make life worth living. In relation to global health, this brings up the question of whether those without adequate access to medicines for endemic diseases such as HIV and malaria will be able to live a minimally good life. We will confront these issues so that these disadvantaged communities around the world may be able to live truly well without the worry of being unable to lead healthy lives.