The World Health Summit (WHS) is a bizarre animal of global health dichotomies. Public sessions full of prepared remarks and platitudes, some bordering on the advertorial. Splashy evening sessions where powerful speakers preach to the converted. The real action must be in private, right? The public portion is window dressing for the real (trans)actions that keep global health running.

This was our first time at WHS. We have attended other small and large health conferences but the undercurrent of wealth at WHS is notable. From the venue to the food to the ample staff and outstanding audio/visual support, the whole thing was *slick* and sanitized of almost all critique. And I can assure you some of us had a lot of time for contemplation because the women’s bathroom lines were appalling and organizers should be ashamed of themselves to have such limited options in 2026.

The disconnect between the space and delivery with the actual lived experience in global health was jarring. Even more jarring was how little space there was to question the structures producing those realities in the first place. We even attended a “public-private-philanthropic partnership” session on the last afternoon and there was not a single government representative on stage and literally no one acknowledged it: not the moderator, not the speakers, not the audience. What kinds of PPPPs are being promoted here if the public isn’t in them? Is public accountability now optional? On the rare occasion when someone in a session flagged that maybe this whole display was for policy elites to aura farm each other, there was applause from the audience so that tells us that folks (the kids on the ground floor to quote Kristof’s friend) were paying attention.

We’ve been around long enough to understand how this all works. Capitalist global health needs capital. Global health seems increasingly comfortable asking the wealthy to save it, and considerably less asking where the wealth comes from. So who is this whole thing for? Maybe WHS should plug the gap always bemoaned about health reaching out to finance by inviting Ministers of Finance and offer an actual venue for multisectoriality and advocacy. And perhaps some discussion of how wealth and corporate power are generated and distributed alongside the rightful demands for debt restructuring. But we suspect that if organizers skipped the public façade and just delivered the “rooms where it happens” they would get substantial pushback and rightfully so.

The whole summit was just devoid of any sort of self-reflection about global health’s own political economy and who gets to set its agenda. If the goal was to be the Davos of Global Health, then WHS achieved it. But it would have been nice to have our own Mark Carney moment of speaking truth to power. Instead, as the champagne flows and health systems struggle, WHS reflects a global health system in which private wealth buys influence, philanthropy substitutes for public responsibility and the language of investment increasingly replaces that of rights and justice. So, is WHS the necessary evil of capitalist global health? Perhaps. Although by the end, we were less sure which part was the necessary one.

–By C and M, first time attendees and likely never destined for the private rooms