The policy responses to COVID-19 have involved severe restrictions on the contact we have with other people. By and large, the restrictions have been imposed on everyone irrespective of their risks from the virus. Some people consider this to be the most effective way to deal with impact of the virus, whilst others have argued that our policy responses ought to be targeted at those most at risk of morbidity and mortality. This panel discussion will seek to flush out the costs and benefits of these and other possible approaches.

Sally Davies (@UKAMREnvoy) is Master of Trinity College in Cambridge and also the Special Envoy on AMR (antimicrobial resistance) for the UK Government. She has formerly held positions of Chief Medical Officer and Chief Medical Adviser to the UK government. She was a member of the WHO Executive Board. And Co-Convenor of the UN Inter Agency Coordinating Group on AMR.

Paul Dolan (@profpauldolan) is Professor of Behavioural Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is author of the Sunday Times best-selling book Happiness by Design, and Happy Ever After. 

Sunetra Gupta (@SunetraGupta) is a professor of theoretical epidemiology at University of Oxford. Her main focus is the evolution of diversity in pathogens, using mathematical models to generate new hypotheses regarding the processes that determine the population structure of these pathogens.

Carl Heneghan (@carlheneghan) is a clinical epidemiologist and professor of evidence-based medicine in Oxford university, as well as director of the centre for evidence-based medicine and a practising GP. He was one of the founders of AllTrials, an international initiative which calls for all studies to be published, and their results reported. His work includes investigating drugs and devices, advising governments on regulatory evidence, working with the media assessing health claims and research on common presenting conditions in primary care,  including work on antivirals Tamiflu. He set up and directs the Oxford COVID Evidence Service.

David Hunter is Richard Doll Professor of Epidemiology and Medicine and Director of the Translational Epidemiology Unit at the Nuffield Department of Population Health, University of Oxford, UK.  His early work was on HIV transmission in East Africa and he subsequently went on to research diet and cancer etiology through large-scale prospective studies.  He founded the Program in Genetic Epidemiology and Statistical Genetics at Harvard and was co-chair of the steering committee of the Breast and Prostate Cancer Cohort Consortium at the National Cancer Institute.  He was co-director of the NCI Cancer Genetic Susceptibility Markers poject focussed on genome-wide association studies, and Dean for Academic Affairs at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.  He is Chief Science Advisor to the Early Disease Detection Research Project UK (EDDRP UK)." 

Julia Black is Strategic Director of Innovation and Professor of Law at LSE.

The School of Public Policy (@LSEPublicPolicy) equips you with the skills and ideas to transform people and societies. It is an international community where ideas and practice meet. Their approach creates professionals with the ability to analyse, understand and resolve the challenges of contemporary governance.

This event forms part of LSE’s Shaping the Post-COVID World initiative, a series of debates about the direction the world could and should be taking after the crisis.

Twitter Hashtag for this event: #LSECOVID19

Podcast & Video

A podcast of this event is available to download from Lives, Livelihoods and Lockdowns: debating COVID-19 policy trade-offs.

A video of this event is available to watch at Lives, Livelihoods and Lockdowns: debating COVID-19 policy trade-offs.

Podcasts and videos of many LSE events can be found at the LSE Public Lectures and Events: podcasts and videos channel.