As WHO, CEPI, and Gavi meet and consider how best to manage the planning and deployment of a COVID-19 vaccine, we feel the voice of older adults, one of the most vulnerable, important, and essential groups should feature prominently in the COVAX process.

The Global Coalition on Aging (GCOA) is pleased to announce that the 2020 Silver Economy Forum will kick off on July 29, followed by a series of virtual events in September. The special preview event, Silver Economy Sustainability in China and Globally: Lessons from COVID-19, will take place on July 29, at 8:00 AM EDT / 2:00 PM CEST / 8:00 PM CST.

In this video, IAPB Head of Policy and Advocacy Jessica Crofts-Lawrence interviews Michael Hodin, CEO, Global Coalition on Aging, as he discusses the strong link between vision health and active aging, and the health consequences of COVID-19 on those with age-related eye conditions.

New York, NEW YORK (July 14, 2020) – The American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR) and the Global Coalition on Aging today released a report, Adult Vaccinations: Opportunities for Action, Barriers to Engagement, Paths to Healthier Aging. The new report shares insights from an expert symposium hosted by the two organizations in late 2019 on the urgency of vaccinations for adults to promote healthy aging.

In this webinar, expert speakers from ILC-UK, Johns Hopkins University, and the Global Coalition on Aging will explore what we are learning from the experience of older adults in COVID-19 about how health ecosystems – from the central healthcare system to care settings, caregivers, employers, and individuals – all must adapt to the needs of an ageing society, both during the pandemic and beyond.

With unprecedented efforts and resources put behind the development of a COVID-19 vaccine, there are good reasons to believe that one will be discovered. But even once such a vaccine is discovered, a very large part of the population will need to make use of it for the virus to die out.

We have been preparing for COVID-19 but just didn’t know it. While not explicitly designed for this pandemic, key healthcare advances like remote care, home care and pharmaceutical innovation now put our health ecosystem in the position of scaling solutions that would not have been possible otherwise.

The New Social Contract: Empowering individuals in a transitioning world, a global survey report published by Aegon in 2019, identifies people’s top four current life priorities as: being healthy and fit (62%), enjoying life (59%), planning for their financial future (49%), and focusing on family (45%). Since the end of last year, the entire world has been upended by COVID-19.

Brenden Greeley’s “The economy is king in Donald Trump’s re-election bid” (Opinion, December 20) accurately and optimistically concludes that our US economy will “get [another] massive wave of hiring around mid-year”. But in his earlier, also accurate assessment that “working age adults continue to join the workforce” he misses another, equally powerful piece of the puzzle: for employers and policymakers in any growth economy to take the necessary 21st-century step of opening jobs to those of us over the quaint 20th-century retirement age of 60 or so.