Prashant Yadav

Prashant Yadav is a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and one of the world’s leading experts on healthcare supply chains, global health, and access to medicines. A professor who has held faculty positions at INSEAD, the MIT-Zaragoza program, and the University of Michigan, and a lecturer at Harvard Medical School, he has also held senior roles at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum. His writing has appeared in the Financial Times, The Economist, Nature, and Foreign Affairs.

On Open Door Salon, Yadav argued that geopolitical crises are not separate events but a recurring pattern that disrupts pharmaceutical supply chains the same way each time. Wealthy markets carry buffers; low- and middle-income countries, small buyers, and humanitarian programs do not, and they get pushed to the back of the queue. A self-described believer in markets and a business school professor, he made the case that the market does not see the patients who most need it, those on lifelong HIV treatment, second-line tuberculosis drugs, or childhood vaccines in fragile settings.

He read the erosion of confidence in the US FDA as a gold-standard regulator, the expanding but transactional model of China’s bilateral health diplomacy, and the question of why other wealthy and emerging economies have not raised their share of global health funding. His prescription emphasizes reform over dismantling for institutions such as the World Health Organization, and a larger role for entrepreneurs, especially young people inside affected countries, who reach the gaps that large institutions move too slowly to fill.