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Bringing together esteemed academics, public health practitioners, journalists, and policymakers from all sides of the COVID-19 policy debate in conversation with one another with an eye toward reforms in science and public health to better serve the public.

With millions of lives lost, the COVID-19 pandemic wrought havoc on the world. Despite decades of planning for the “next” pandemic, public health systems faced tremendous stress and often buckled and failed. Universities served as centers for valuable scientific work, but did they fail to support their academic freedom mission by sponsoring vigorous discussion and debate on matters of pandemic policy? To do better in the next pandemic, we need to learn the lessons of the COVID-19 era. 

The conference was organized to highlight some of the many important topics that public health officials and policymakers will need to address in preparing for future pandemics. The speakers represent a wide range of views on this issue. We look forward to a civil, informed, and robust debate.

The conference was supported in part by contributions from Dr. George F. Tidmarsh and from Collateral Global, a UK Charity.

AGENDA

Program Conductor/Emcee: Laura Carstensen, Professor of Psychology, Stanford University

Opening Remarks: Jonathan Levin, President, Stanford University

Welcome and Introduction: Jay Bhattacharya, Professor of Health Policy, Stanford School of Medicine

Panels

Panel 1: Evidence-Based Decision Making During a Pandemic

The interventions undertaken to control the COVID-19 pandemic—stay-at-home orders, extended school closures, social distancing, mask mandates, vaccine mandates—were unprecedented in their scope and global impact. How well did these policies work to protect the public from COVID-19 and what were their unintended consequences? How can scientists better inform pandemic policy in real time during the next pandemic?

Moderator: Wilk Wilkinson, Derate the Hate Podcast Creator/Host
Speakers:

• Monica Gandhi, Professor of Medicine, Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases, and Global Medicine, UCSF
• Charlotte J. Haug, Executive Editor, NEJM AI
• Marty Makary, Professor of Surgery, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine
• Andrew Noymer, Associate Professor of Population Health & Disease Prevention, UC Irvine
• Douglas K. Owens, Professor of Health Policy, Stanford School of Medicine
• Josh Salomon, Professor of Health Policy, Stanford School of Medicine
• Anders Tegnell, Senior Expert, former State Epidemiologist of Sweden, Public Health Agency Sweden

Panel 2: Misinformation, Censorship, and Academic Freedom

During the pandemic, the challenge of balancing public health protection with the preservation of free speech became a focal point of debate. On one side, governments and public health authorities took measures to limit the spread of misinformation, sometimes by restricting certain content on social media and influencing traditional media narratives to align with official guidance. On the other side, some scientists and academics voiced concerns about these restrictions, arguing that they hindered open discourse and the exchange of diverse perspectives. This raises important questions: Does limiting speech during a public health emergency protect the public by reducing harmful misinformation, or does it risk silencing valid dissent and promoting a singular, approved viewpoint?

Moderator: George Tidmarsh, Adjunct Professor, Pediatrics and Neonatology, Stanford School of Medicine
Speakers:

• Scott Atlas, Robert Wesson Senior Fellow in Health Policy, Hoover Institution
• Alex Berenson, Journalist and Author
• Gardiner Harris, Journalist and Author
• Neil Malhotra, Edith M. Cornell Professor of Political Economy, Stanford Graduate School of Business
• Michael McConnell, Richard and Frances Mallery Professor of Law, Director of the Constitutional Law Center, Stanford Law School, and Hoover Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
• Jenin Younes, Litigation Counsel at the New Civil Liberties Alliance

Panel 3: Pandemic Policy from a Global Perspective

Because the world economy is global in scope, pandemic policy decisions made by Western governments had profound impacts on the health and economic prospects of people worldwide, including the collapse of global markets, severe supply chain disruptions, large-scale government borrowing to finance pandemic policies, and global inflation. How can the interests of the world’s poor be better represented in the decisions of Western government during the next pandemic?

Moderator: Eran Bendavid,  Professor of Medicine and of Health Policy, Stanford School of Medicine
Speakers:

• Kevin Bardosh, Director and Head of Research, Collateral Global, and Evidence Informed Fellow, Kellogg College, University of Oxford
• Peter Blair, Associate Professor of Education, Graduate School of Education, Harvard University
• Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology, University of Oxford
• Anup Malani, Lee and Brena Freeman Professor, University of Chicago Law School
• Yann A. Meunier, MD, Professor in Global Health, International Institute of Medicine and Science, Inc., Rancho Mirage, CA, and CEO, HealthConnect International, LLC
• Vinay Prasad, Professor, Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, UCSF

Panel 4: COVID-19 Origins and the Regulation of Virology

The stakes in the debate about the origin of the pandemic could not be higher. If the pandemic started from an inadequately regulated wildlife trade or zoonoses, reforms to reduce the likelihood of human contact with wild species is vital. On the other hand, if the pandemic started due to dangerous laboratory experiments and inadequate protocols to prevent leaks, then more stringent regulation of such experimentation is warranted. What is the evidence on these topics, and what is the path forward?

Moderator: Jan Jekielek, Senior Editor, The Epoch Times
Speakers:

• Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology, University of Oxford
• Laura H. Kahn, Co-Founder, One Health Initiative
• Bryce Nickels, Professor of Genetics, Lab Director, Waksman Institute of Microbiology, Rutgers University, and Co-Founder, Biosafety Now
• Simon Wain-Hobson, Emeritus Professor, Pasteur Institute, Paris
• Alex Washburne, Scientific Consultant, Selva Analytics LLC

Conference Closing Remarks: John Ioannidis, Professor of Medicine and of Epidemiology and Population Health, Stanford School of Medicine

Photos are under copyright. If used, you must credit: Photos by Rod Searcey/Department of Health Policy

Fernando Alarid-Escudero, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Health Policy at Stanford University School of Medicine. He obtained his Ph.D. in Health Decision Sciences from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, and was an Assistant Professor at the Center for Research and Teaching in Economics (CIDE) Región Centro, Aguascalientes, Mexico, from 2018 to 2022, prior to coming to Stanford. His research focuses on developing statistical and decision-analytic models to identify optimal prevention, control, and treatment policies to address a wide range of public health problems and develops novel methods to quantify the value of future research.

Laurence Baker is a Health Policy professor, a senior fellow with Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and an Economics professor (by courtesy). His research focuses on the impacts of changing financial incentives, regulations, and organizational structures on health care provision and costs. He studies the impacts of managed care and related insurance arrangements on things like health care costs, prices for health insurance, and the availability/utilization of medical technologies. 

Sylvia Plevritis is a professor of Biomedical Data Science, a professor of Radiology, and the chair of Biomedical Data Science. Her research program focuses on genomics, biocomputation, imaging and population sciences and works to decipher properties of cancer progressions to guide advances in early detection and treatment response. 

Joe Selby was a founding executive director of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). Much of his research has focused on diabetes outcomes and quality improvement, as well as primary care delivery, colorectal cancer screening strategies, and disparities in diabetes mellitus treatment effectiveness. 

Katie Attwell is an associate professor with the University of Western Australia School of Social Sciences. Katie specializes in mandatory vaccination policy in Europe, Australia, and the US, focusing on the tactics governments use to motivate people to get vaccinated and how policies are designed. 

Mark Navin is a professor and chair of philosophy at Oakland University (Rochester, MI) and Clinical Ethicist at Corewell Health. His research is primarily in clinical ethics and ethics in public health.  

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Laura Carstensen is a professor of psychology at Stanford, where she's the founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity. Her research focuses on ways in which motivational changes influence emotional experience and cognitive processing. 

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Abstract: Along virtually any dimension, older people report better emotional well-being than younger generations. Considering the many losses older people experience, these findings are referred to as “the paradox of aging.” Socioemotional selectivity theory offers an account based on motivational shifts associated with perceived time horizons. This talk will overview the theory and evidence generated by tests of related hypotheses. 

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Talk Title: What Makes Care Integration So Hard and What To Do About It

Care integration remains a seemingly intractable challenge in health care. In this seminar, we’ll examine why, probing deeper for explanations than simply that care is badly fragmented (which it is), so hard to integrate. By considering findings across multiple studies, methods, and theories, we will derive insights and explore promising solutions.

Sara Singer is a Primary Care and Population Health professor at Stanford. Her research focuses on ensuring patient safety, integrating services and service providers, implementing technological innovations that enhance the value of health care, and determining how policymakers can make changes to ensure higher-quality, more affordable healthcare. 

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Laura Hatfield is an associate professor of health care policy (biostatistics) at Harvard. She is currently working to improve methods for control group selection in observational health services and outcomes research, and her research focuses on developing statistical methods that incorporate multiple information sources and loss functions to improve decision making.