Priti Patnaik

Journalist & Publisher

Geneva, Swizterland

Founding Editor, GENEVA HEALTH FILES

Priti Patnaik

Journalist & Publisher

Geneva, Swizterland

Founding Editor, GENEVA HEALTH FILES

WHO’s Allocation Framework on COVID19 health products
WHO’s efforts to put in place a plan to divvy up COVID-19 health products equitably across the world is now being hashed out, even as member-states and companies strike up bilateral deals in the hope of getting preferential access, particularly to vaccines, when they become available. It is not clear whether WHO will be able to prevail on countries to implement what it hopes will be a global allocation mechanism to ensure equitable allocation.
Geneva Health Files
Trade Global Health Science Intellectual Property
COVID19 Tech Platform – Countries pass up opportunity for a binding mechanism to ensure equitable access to meds
New text on WHO’s call to action on the COVID19 tech platform. Member states of World Health Organization are letting go of an opportunity to enforce binding mechanisms on sharing and pooling technology related to fighting COVID19 that would ensure equitable, affordable access to medicines, diagnostics and technologies.
Geneva Health Files
Global Health Science Trade
Giving in to supply constraints: WHO’s Allocation Plan
New Details on WHO’s Draft Allocation Framework – A Deep Dive. With more than 13 million cases of COVID19 in mid-July 2020, and rising, WHO has an unenviable and difficult task at hand, to map and decide who gets vaccines and medicines first. As expected, as it works its way on devising an allocation framework (first reported here), it is inevitably having to wrestle with politically contentious decisions in the backdrop of rising vaccine nationalism and countries striking up bilateral deals with drug companies.
Geneva Health Files
Intellectual Property Development Trade Science Global Health
Elections at the World Trade Organization
Rising protectionism sparks keen interest in saving the multilateral trading system. As home to World Health Organization, Geneva is already at the centre of pandemic-related policy making. Last week saw yet another flurry of activity, on the shores of Lac Léman – at the World Trade Organization.
Geneva Health Files
Global Health Trade Development
The re-emergence of the WTO as a key forum for global health
The coronavirus pandemic is slowly, but surely casting the World Trade Organization as a significant platform that could witness systematic efforts at the multilateral level to ensure better access to health products. This could be in the form of more formal deliberations amongst members to find ways to neutralise barriers to intellectual property, and not just patents, but other types of constraints that have affected access to diagnostics and health technologies.
Geneva Health Files
Trade Science Intellectual Property Development Global Health
“Policy Coherence” in the pandemic?
What the trilateral report on public health, IP and trade, says on the pandemic? A range of policy options drawn from different disciplines, is shaping the response to the pandemic, particularly in making medical products more accessible. From the use of flexibilities in copyrights for text and data mining to help drug discovery, to the use of competition policy to improve access to testing; from temporarily relaxing procurement rules, to easing regulatory processes; among many others.
Geneva Health Files
Trade Science Intellectual Property Global Health
On Gavi’s table: plans to let countries trade “vaccine credits” like stocks
The Covax Exchange: Gavi’s plans to let countries trade in vaccines. Vaccines for COVID-19 are not yet a reality, but plans are afoot to enable trading in stocks of potential vaccines. Gavi says the plan will allow countries to exchange vaccines doses with each other, allowing each economy to optimise to their own needs.
Geneva Health Files
Science Development Global Health Trade Intellectual Property
W.H.O. Reform Proposal; Vaccine Prices
The reform proposal led by Germany and France to strengthen WHO’s emergencies response and bolster global health security, could result in a balance of power tilting in favour of donor countries, diplomatic sources in Geneva say.
Geneva Health Files
Development Global Health Trade
Vaccine safety; Dissonance in "equitable access"
READING THE ASTRAZENECA-OXFORD TRIAL. WHAT’S AT STAKE?
Geneva Health Files
Intellectual Property Science Global Health Trade
Gavi & Civil Society: Unhappy Engagement
The hesitation of letting the door open to include civil society organizations, to effectively contribute to defining discussions on vaccines for the pandemic, especially for a massive immunization agency, is perplexing.
Geneva Health Files
Trade Science Global Health Intellectual Property
COVID-19 Diagnostics: The Full Picture
The pandemic has revealed the entrenched inequities in the world, and the access to diagnostics for COVID-19 is also illustrative of this.
Geneva Health Files
Science Intellectual Property Trade Global Health
GAVI COVAX FACILITY: Questions on access, pricing & governance
A first look at Gavi’s COVID-19 Global Access COVAX Facility (Preliminary Technical design) Gavi – The Vaccine Alliance, is putting together a plan to devise the supply of COVID19 vaccines when they become available, to those who need it. The question of how should the world work towards equitable access, is an incredibly complex one.
Geneva Health Files
Intellectual Property Science Development Trade Global Health
Feminist Foreign Policy and COVID-19
Many health workers fighting the COVID-19 pandemic and working to provide health security are on the front lines equipped only with commitment, courage, and the burden of expectations. In many countries, they are on the field without even the basic adequate protection of gloves and hand sanitizer.
Think Global health
Science Trade Intellectual Property Global Health
COVID-19 meds as global public goods – World Health Assembly
If the world needed proof of international cooperation in the midst of the ever-widening gulfs between increasingly nationalistic democracies, it got one – the first ever virtual World Health Assembly that concluded 19th May. Not only did capitals express solidarity, there was a resounding support for treatments and vaccines as global public goods.
International Health Policies
Trade Science Intellectual Property Global Health Development
Yes, COVID-19. But what about other infectious diseases?
Even as health workers scramble to contain raging COVID-19 epidemics across the globe, a host of services for other infectious diseases such as cholera, Ebola, measles, and polio are simultaneously being disrupted. While SARS-CoV-2 has infected millions and claimed more than 250,000 lives, experts are warning that the impact of other diseases neglected due to the pandemic may be just as significant in the months and years to come.
The New Humanitarian
Science Development Global Health
The EU’s pledging event for COVID-19 and implications for global health
World Health Organization is being weakened even as there are fervent calls to strengthen it, in order to protect multilateralism in global health. The pledging event, led by the EU, on Monday, May 4th, could be a sign in the shift in power away from WHO, observers say. A range of interests is actively shaping global health, even as the world continues to bury its dead from the pandemic.
Geneva Health Files
Global Health Intellectual Property Science Trade

About

Priti Patnaik

Writing

Reporting

Investigations

Research

Editing

Analysis

I am the Founding Editor of Geneva Health Files, a website that tracks the governance of global health.

I have been working as an independent journalist in Geneva, Switzerland for most of the last ten years. My areas of interest include global health, international trade and illicit financial flows. Prior to Geneva, I have also been a journalist in New York and New Delhi.

I have spent the past decade reporting on a range of issues related to international development from finance, commodities, to health and trade. Outside of journalism, I have also worked at a trade law firm and at a UN public health agency in Geneva.

Prior to Switzerland, I worked in New York City, where I reported on debt and bankruptcy in the immediate aftermath of the financial crises in 2008 in different newsrooms.

My career in journalism began in the layered and challenging Indian city of New Delhi in 2003. Like many aspiring young Indian reporters, I headed to New Delhi, fresh from journalism school and ended up working for financial newspapers. For five years, I reported on public finance, monetary policy, India’s banking and insurance sectors and the wider politics.

I have a master’s in Development Studies from The Graduate Institute in Geneva (2013), a master’s in Business and Economic Reporting from New York University (2010). In addition, I have a post-graduate diploma in journalism from Asian College of Journalism. I graduated with a bachelor’s in science, in genetics, chemistry and microbiology from Osmania University, Hyderabad. I also have a bachelor’s degree in economics from a distance-learning program.

Given my diverse interests, I am keen on working on assignments where science, law and economics come together.