Summer Conference Events

The COVID-19 response has put a spotlight on health sector spending, be it protective equipment for front-line staff, vaccines, or medicines. Globally, US $13 trillion is spent on contracts with private companies each year and spending on health is one of the largest areas – and also one of the most opaque.

With the desperate Covid-19 situation in India continuing to dominate the headlines, our panel examines what went wrong. Supriya Sharma, Executive Editor at scroll.in talks about covering the Covid-19 crisis on the ground and the work journalists have to do to to show what the situation is like in hospitals and in the community.

Have the convulsions of Covid-19 opened to the door to a creeping censoriousness, surveillance and authoritarianism? Are big tech companies shutting down debate and stoking conspiracy theories by excluding controversial voices, and is the technology for coronavirus surveillance and the social measures to combat it as useful as it seems?

Katherine Eban, an award-winning New York-based investigative journalist, reports on public health and pharmaceuticals for Vanity Fair and is the author of the New York Times bestseller Bottle of Lies: The Inside Story of the Generic Drug Boom.

The Covid-19 pandemic has made all of us follow science and heath reports like never before, reinforcing the importance of the work that health and science reporters do. Meet some of the people behind the headlines, sharing their experience of covering the health and science beat during a global pandemic: from misinformation to reliable sources, from scientific and government reports to witnessing human resilience and tragedy.

Leading data journalists Helena Bengtsson of STV (Sweden), John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times (UK), and Pamela Duncan of the Guardian (UK), explain how data analysis plays a crucial part in the coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic.