School of Public Health, University of the Western Cape, Bellville, South Africa.
Department of Social Policy and Intervention, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
Glob Public Health. 2020 Nov;15(11):1740-1752. doi: 10.1080/17441692.2020.1811366. Epub 2020 Aug 25.
The UN has described the health, social and economic consequences of Covid-19 as a global crisis unlike any other encountered in its history. Although a pandemic of this nature was not unforeseeable, its arrival seems to have caught the world off guard, hurling us into a state of partly haphazard disaster mitigation. It has shed sharper light on the failure of global health in its current form to tackle acute and systemic challenges in a rapidly changing world, and the unequal patterns in society that leave us vulnerable. This commentary argues that, despite its devastating effects, the Covid-19 pandemic can be a longer-term positively transformative event for global health. However, this will require going beyond the development of more effective plans for health emergency preparedness, to confront the crisis in global health governance and leadership, and rethink the roles of key actors involved in world health. It ultimately calls us back to the very concept of 'global health': the values it should encompass, what we should expect from it and how we might envisage reshaping or 'co-creating' it for the future.
联合国将新冠疫情对健康、社会和经济造成的影响描述为一场全球危机，称其为联合国历史上从未遭遇过的危机。虽然这种性质的大流行病并非不可预见，但它的到来似乎让全世界猝不及防，使我们陷入部分偶然的灾害缓解状态。它更清楚地表明，目前的全球卫生体系未能应对快速变化的世界中存在的急性和系统性挑战，以及使我们易受伤害的不平等社会模式。本评论认为，尽管新冠疫情造成了破坏性影响，但它可能会成为全球卫生领域的一个长期积极变革事件。然而，这将需要超越制定更有效的卫生应急准备计划，以应对全球卫生治理和领导力方面的危机，并重新思考参与世界卫生的关键行为体的作用。它最终要求我们回归“全球卫生”的概念本身：它应包含的价值观、我们对它的期望，以及我们如何设想为未来重塑或“共同创造”它。
