Speaker:  Sir Michael G. Marmot MBBS, MPH, PhD, FRCP, FFPHM, FMedSci, FBA

Professor of Epidemiology and Public Health, Director of UCL Institute of Health Equity

Host: Dr. Zhihui Li, Assistant Professor

Time: 16:00-17:00, Oct. 28^th

Venue: Zoom meeting  (ID:451-737-8784  Password: 1028)

Talk Title: Build Back Fairer in the UK & the Eastern Mediterranean Region

Abstract:  As the world emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic ‘Build Back Better’ has become the mantra. Important, but we need to Build Back Fairer. The levels of social, environmental, and economic inequality in society are damaging health and wellbeing. Taking action to reduce health inequalities is a matter of social justice. In developing strategies for tackling health inequalities, we need to confront the social gradient in health, not just the difference between the worst off and everybody else. Inequalities in mortality from COVID-19 and these rising health inequalities as a result of social and economic impacts, have made such action even more important.

Biography:

Sir Michael Marmot has been Professor of Epidemiology at University College London since 1985.  He is the author of The Health Gap: the challenge of an unequal world (Bloomsbury: 2015), and Status Syndrome: how your place on the social gradient directly affects your health (Bloomsbury: 2004). Professor Marmot is the Advisor to the WHO Director-General, on social determinants of health, in the new WHO Division of Healthier Populations; Distinguished Visiting Professor at Chinese University of Hong Kong (2019-), and co-Director of the of the CUHK Institute of Health Equity.

Marmot has led research groups on health inequalities for nearly 50 years.  He chaired the Commission on Equity and Health Inequalities in the Americas and chaired the Commission on Social Determinants of Health (CSDH), and produced the report entitled: ‘Closing the Gap in a Generation’ in August 2008.  At the request of the British Government, he conducted the Strategic Review of Health Inequalities in England post 2010, which published its report 'Fair Society, Healthy Lives' in February 2010. This was followed by the European Review of Social Determinants of Health and the Health Divide, for WHO EURO in 2014; Health Equity in England: Marmot Review 10 Years On, in 2020; Build Back Fairer: the COVID-19 Marmot Review in 2021; and the Report of the Commission on Social Determinants of Health in the Eastern Mediterranean Region, for WHO EMRO, also in 2021.

In 2000 he was knighted by Her Majesty The Queen, for services to epidemiology and the understanding of health inequalities.