Please watch the video of his Tedx Talk on the Health Impact Fund before attending the event:

YouTube Video

The Health Impact Fund (HIF) is a proposed pay-for-performance mechanism that would offer innovators the option to register any new medicine, thereby undertaking to make it available worldwide for ten years at no more than the lowest feasible cost of production and distribution. During this decade, the registrant would be compensated from fixed annual reward pools divided among registered products according to their health impact. The HIF would greatly increase poor people's access to medicines as well as the overall cost-effectiveness of the worldwide provision of medicines. But is it realistic? This lecture discusses the piloting of health impact assessment, involving the introduction of one medicine into a defined pilot area, as well as the latest thinking on how reliable long-term funding for the HIF can be secured. It is possible, at no or low cost, to adjust the rules governing the global pharmaceutical industry to make it responsive to the needs of the poor. This adjustment could serve as a model and catalyst for broader reforms of existing global governance institutions.

Thomas Pogge is currently Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University. He is also Professorial Fellow at the ANU Centre for Applied Philosophy and Research Director at the Centre for Study of Mind in Nature, University of Oslo. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. He is a prolific writer and lecturer, who has written extensively on moral and political philosophy, including books on cosmopolitanism, global justice and extreme poverty. His book World Poverty and Human Rights is regarded as one of the leading works on global justice. Pogge also heads a team that is working towards developing a complement to the pharmaceutical patent regime that would improve access to advanced medicines for the poor worldwide. His work on global justice and eradication of world poverty is marked by an emphasis on negative duties. He has argued that the massive persistence of severe poverty reflects not merely a breach by the global rich of their positive duty to assist people in great need but also a violation of their negative duty not to contribute to the imposition of a global institutional order that foreseeably and avoidably renders the basic socioeconomic human rights of millions unfulfilled.

The Mortara Center and the Master of Foreign Service Program Program are proud to conclude the Global Governance Speaker Series this spring with Thomas Pogge, Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs, Yale University. A host of critical challenges--economic, social, environmental, political--cross borders and challenge national governments and multilateral institutions like never before. How should we respond to these policy challenges? How can we forge effective solutions? Will the key actors, institutions and legal structures of the twenty first century be transformed in the process? Please join us for our final multidisciplinary exploration of these issues with one of the world's leading scholars. A reception will follow the lecture and Q&A session.

Thomas Pogge Bio