The world expects effective global health interventions: Can global health deliver?

Holst, Jens

The COVID-19 crisis offers unique challenges and opportunities for global health. The initial management of the pandemic was dominated by virologists, supported by epidemiologists who did not always meet indispensable scientific requirements. Interdisciplinary and complex global health concerns and expertise, however, did not have tangible impact on the COVID-19 debate, and even less on the strategies to contain the pandemic. As an explicitly political concept global health must safeguard its broad socio-political approach and counteract all tendency towards biomedical reductionism. Global health is universal and goes beyond health security. Above medical and biotechnological solutions, it requires the consideration of both downstream and upstream determinants of health such as the political, economic, ecological and social conditions that led to the crisis.