Closing session

Health after Covid-19

The perception of having passed the pandemic is real, although we are far from having overcome it. With the appearance of new variants, which reached the West with a good part of the population already vaccinated, the feeling is that we are close to controlling the worst health crisis of the last century. But if at this point we have been able to process some certainties, after almost three years as intense as they are uncertain, there are two that point to the immediate horizon. The first is that perhaps this pandemic is just an announcement of others to come; The second is that, as in all crises, those who end up paying a higher cost are those who have fewer resources to face them. The equity gap is widening and not only between rich countries and less favored economies, but also within the most advanced countries.

The case of the US, with an erratic and changing policy regarding the epidemic, in the midst of a key electoral process for the ultra-nationalist government of Donald Trump, reveals a brutal imbalance in the impact of the virus between populations with resources and those more vulnerable. The pattern of inequality that was beginning to be seen in people's health as a result of dietary patterns, housing, education or exposure to environmental factors is repeated as a result of the COVID pandemic. The question is knowing how to make evidence a critical element when making decisions.

Health has an unavoidable political component: it is not only an individual good, it is also a condition to guarantee economic, social or family relationships. COVID has transformed the idea we had of collective security. Our security in the West has mutated like the virus and now depends on the ability to stop a pandemic and respond to health problems, at least as much as having armies capable of defending a territory. The list of global threats has changed and the pandemic, far from being an anecdote in history, seems to be rather the announcement of what is to come. With deforestation, the destruction of the ecological balance or global warming, contact between animals and individuals increases and the capacity for disease transmission multiplies. The local reality also generates increasingly polluted cities and purchasing and consumption patterns that increase the risk of epidemics due to chronic diseases resulting from obesity or deterioration of mental health. Each of these risks poses a collective challenge that must be met in order to prevent health from becoming an even more critical factor of inequality than the economy or education. How can we face the future of health?

SPEAKERS

• Keshia Pollack Porter, chair of the Department of Health, Policy and Management of the Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University.
• Rafael Vilasanjuan, journalist, director of Analysis and Global Development at ISGlobal and member of the Civil Society Steering Committee of GAVI (The Vaccine Alliance).

Session video

A changing world, an eternal world

Globalization presumed that GDP growth would lead to political homogenization and general stability that has not occurred. On the contrary, in a world in constant change (technological, economic, social), of rupture of the structures established since the industrial revolution, the resurgence of the extreme right, populism or Islamism makes us think of the appearance of dynamics in the sense On the contrary, they propose a return to one's supposedly own roots, a recollection that looks at a past that is often fictitious but that is perceived as real and desirable. This happens everywhere, but can Russia be a paradigmatic example of this vision, of that feeling of radicalization, of closure, of refuge in a world of its own? And should the attack on Ukraine be seen as a concrete act moved by geostrategic reasons or is it a manifestation of the deep Russian soul, of the fantasy of a chosen people, which goes beyond any practical or ethical consideration?

SPEAKERS

• Sophy Roberts, writer, author of The Last Pianos of Siberia.
• Jordi Alberich, economist, content director of Dénia Festival de les Humanitats.

Session video

Institutional closure

• Vicent Grimalt, mayor of Dénia.
• Josep Ramoneda, writer and journalist, content director of Dénia Festival de les Humanitats.

Session video