The Global Health initiative was formally created as Section on May 3, 2024 following the unanimous vote by EUPHA’s Governing Board.
The Global Health Section acts as the focal point to feed information to other sections and collect their input to develop an aligned (section-informed) position for global health across EUPHA, ensuring aligned consultation input across fora, support project work within and beyond Europe,
curriculum development, capacity-building, but also to support relations with other stakeholders, incl., associations, initiatives, bodies, etc. in the global health ecosystem.
The discussion on creating a dedicated section for global health started during WCPH2020 in the context of exploring various aspects related to the pandemic and implications for cross-border travel and movement within and beyond borders, human rights, discrimination and cross-cutting topics such as the COVID-19 certificates/digital passes. From the beginning of 2020 a small group of people from EUPHA embarked upon exchanges on global health, with the first activities developed for WCPH2020, and with exchanges expanding during EPH2021 with multiple activities, e.g., brief webinars, including supporting the launch of the Open Academic Letter in Support of the TRIPS waiver, multiple internal meetings for positioning, including a late-breaker abstract for the Global South exploring global and regional dimensions of pandemic responses, critically, highlighting the need to avoid neocolonialist approaches and ensure discourse and collaboration are informed by those particularly affected in the South, with the participation of the Africa CDC, the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare in Tanzania, and researchers and practitioners from South America and India. All of the domains identified in the EU’s COVID-19 response were systematically analysed, with engagement starting in May 2020, in preparation of the WCPH, with work ranging from travel measures and the EU digital COVID certificate, Global solidarity, and the emergence of the Pandemic treaty negotiations.
