Contributor(s): Professor Kalipso Chalkidou, Dr Panos Kanavos, Professor Margaret Kyle, Professor Ken Shadlen | The panel will examine a range of issues related to the development and use of vaccines and treatments for COVID-19, including the range of incentives for innovation and national approaches to purchasing, price negotiations, and intellectual property and trade policies. Kalipso Chalkidou (@kchalkidou) is the Director of Global Health Policy and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development. Previously, she was the Director of Global Health and Development Group at the Institute of Global Health Innovation, Imperial College London, helping governments build technical and institutional capacity for improving the value for money of their healthcare investment. She is interested in how local information, local expertise, and local institutions can drive scientific and legitimate healthcare resource allocation decisions whilst improving patient outcomes. She has been involved in the Chinese rural health reform and also in national health reform projects in the USA, India, Colombia, Turkey and the Middle East, working with the World Bank, PAHO, DFID and the Inter-American Development Bank as well as national governments. Between 2008 and 2016 she founded and ran NICE International, a non-profit group within the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). Panos Kanavos is Associate Professor of International Health Policy in the Department of Health Policy (LSE), Deputy Director at LSE Health, and Programme Director of the Medical Technology Research Group (MTRG). He is an economist by training, and teaches health economics, pharmaceutical economics and policy, health care financing, health care negotiations, and principles of health technology assessment Margaret Kyle is Chair in Intellectual Property and Markets for Technology at MINES ParisTech. Her research concerns innovation, productivity and competition. She has a number of papers examining R&D productivity in the pharmaceutical industry, specifically the role of geographic and academic spillovers; the firm-specific and policy determinants of the diffusion of new products; generic competition; and the use of markets for technology. Recent work examines the effect of trade and IP policies on the level, location and direction of R&D investment and competition. She also works on issues of innovation and access to therapies in developing countries. Ken Shadlen is Professor of Development Studies and Head of Department in the Department of International Development at LSE. He researches the global politics of intellectual property, with a particular focus on understanding both the drivers of variation in pharmaceutical patent patent systems in developing countries, and the consquences of such variation for biomedical innovation, access to drugs, and health policies. Ernestina Coast is Professor of Health and International Development in the Deptartment of International Development. Her research is multidisciplinary and positioned at an intersection of social science approaches including health, gender and development. This event is part of LSE's public event series - COVID-19: The Policy Response. COVID-19 represents an enormous challenge for the social sciences to help governments and non-governmental organisations respond to the economic and societal consequences of the pandemic.