Healthy Societies: Disease Prevention as the Default

“Healthy Societies: Disease Prevention as the Default” is a plenary table at the Falling Walls Science House, run by the Volkswagen Foundation and the German Science and Humanities Council. It takes on the fact that disease prevention delivers measurable health and economic gains yet remains commercially unattractive and structurally undervalued in systems that reward treatment and short-term returns. Incentives across policy, healthcare, and markets are misaligned, and making the healthy choice the default, in line with Wellbeing Economies, calls for new business models, targeted investment, and innovation systems linking science, industry, and society. On the panel are, among others, Graham Cookson (Office of Health Economics), Mariana Dyakova (WHO Collaborating Centre on Investment for Health and Well-being), Yik-Ying Teo (National University of Singapore) and Ásta Valdimarsdóttir (Ministry of Health of Iceland), chaired by Wolfgang Wick (German Science and Humanities Council).