On the evening of Wednesday 15 September, the European Parliament definitively adopted the report by Véronique Trillet-Lenoir (Renew Europe, France) on the proposal for a regulation on strengthening EU preparedness for cross-border health threats and the report by Joanna Kopcińska (ECR, Poland) on the draft revision of the mandate of the ECDC, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.
Both draft regulations are part of the EU legislative package that is intended to shape a European Health Union (see EUROPE 12600/24) and will still need to be negotiated with the EU Council.
Both reports were supported by a very large majority of MEPs - 594 in favour, 85 against and 16 abstentions for the first report, 598 in favour, 84 against and 13 abstentions for the second. The plenary debate preceding these two votes, however, was punctuated by interventions from right-wing MEPs who said that the EU was going too far in making such health provisions.
Joëlle Mélin (France), rapporteur for the ID group, denounced an “instrumentalisation of the health crisis for the benefit of the pro-Europeans” and judged the text on cross-border threats “particularly dangerous in that it lays the foundations for the future HERA authority” (see other news).
Similarly, the Belgian Johan Van Overtveldt (ECR), although in favour of strengthening the existing agencies, criticised the HERA project and the creation of new entities. Other voices were also raised, mainly within the ID group, to denounce “a serious intrusion of the European Union in the health policies of the Member States”.
Mrs Trillet-Lenoir had already expressed her concerns about these speeches at a press briefing on Tuesday and regretted that “health is becoming a divisive issue in the Parliament as soon as it comes to increasing the EU’s capacities in this area”.
“What we seem to forget is that the post-Covid-19 world is fundamentally different. We cannot treat public health issues as we did before. We need a strong European legal framework. We need to be able to act at European level while respecting Member States’ competences”, Health Commissioner Stella Kyriakides argued in the debate.
Adopted texts
In contrast to the declarations by opponents, Parliament has rightly added an amendment to Mrs Trillet-Lenoir’s text stating that “the health provisions of the treaties remain largely underused in relation to the objectives they were intended to achieve”.
For the rest, the adopted texts call, among other things, for more transparency when signing contracts for medical countermeasures. They also require Member States to develop national preparedness and response plans and to provide timely, comparable, and high quality data.
They also want to ensure that the ECDC’s mandate is extended beyond communicable diseases to also cover major non-communicable diseases such as cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, cancer, diabetes, and mental illness.
On this last point, the Health Commissioner expressed some reluctance, believing that this provision could duplicate work being done in Member States and increase the burden on their already limited resources. “This would substantially stretch resources within the Agency, therefore weakening its focus rather than strengthening it”, she added.
To see the adopted text on cross-border threats: https://bit.ly/39bwL7p and the one on the ECDC: https://bit.ly/3nE0sXb (Original version in French by Agathe Cherki)