Jens Holst

On 15 October 2022, the Virchow Prize was awarded for the first time by the newly created Virchow Foundation for Global Health. The celebration took place in the slipstream of the annual World Health Summit (WHS) 2022, organised by the WHS Foundation GmbH. The WHS Foundation is a 100% holding company of the Charité—University Medicine Berlin and co-organised the first iteration of the Virchow Prize with the WHO. The Virchow Prize is promoted as a global health complement to the Nobel Prize which is awarded, in scientific fields, to natural scientists for outstanding discoveries in 'academic, political, social or economic/ industrial innovation'.
The very first iteration of the Virchow Prize for Global Health went to scientific achievements that, to some extent, signal a biomedical preference over other public health priorities. Appropriating the name of Rudolf Virchow to this new foundation and prize requires some scrutiny, because Virchow's thinking reached far beyond a merely biomedical concept of health. Moreover, the Virchow Prize is funded by the Friede Springer foundation. The participation of the widow and heiress of Germany's largest newspaper publisher in the Virchow Council can be understood as another indicator of the subversion of key global health goals such as universality and equity by the financial aristocracy. A consistent translation of Virchow's writings into today's reality would ultimately suggest reducing the power of the financial aristocracy and its philanthropic organisations.

The paper entitled "The Virchow Prize: Cementing commodification, coloniality and biomedical reductionism in global health?" is available online here.