This episode was recorded as a live broadcast at The Good Business Festival on 24 March 2022.
Aspen UK partnered with The Good Business Festival in Liverpool for our three-part series The Joy of Disagreement. Click here to find out more about the festival.
Big Pharma: lessons from the pandemic
Professor Iain Buchan – Chair in Public Health and Clinical Informatics, and Associate Pro Vice Chancellor for Innovation for the University of Liverpool
Dr Danny Sriskandarajah – CEO of Oxfam Great Britain
The past two years have been seminal for Big Pharma. When the world desperately needed Covid-19 vaccines, the pharmaceutical industry developed, produced, and provided them in record time.
For years campaigners have highlighted the moral ambiguity of profit-making from the discovery, development, and marketing of life-saving drugs. But during the Covid-19 pandemic, drug companies have been able to execute incredible expedited innovation to meet global needs and have collaborated in an unprecedented fashion with research organisations and governments to do so.
Has the industry changed for the better, and will these changes stick? Could the industry’s solutions-based model be applied elsewhere? How quickly could we solve the climate crisis or income inequality using this model of public-private partnership, streamlined approval processes, and industry agility?