One year after the European Commission presented the new EU Pharmaceutical Strategy (see EUROPE 12609/10), the European Parliament will vote on its position on the text on Wednesday 24 November.
MEP Dolors Montserrat (EPP, Spain), rapporteur on this dossier (see EUROPE 12710/9), detailed in plenary on Monday 22 November the six main objectives of this text as Parliament would like to see them applied.
It will, she summarised, put patients at the centre of all health policies, reduce the time to market for medicines, provide a therapeutic solution for the 30 million people suffering from rare diseases for which no treatment is available in the EU, ensure the competitiveness of the European pharmaceutical industry, and make the EU a “world leader” in Health.
Ms Montserrat’s report was welcomed by European Health Commissioner Stella Kyriakides, who was in the Chamber on Monday. “We are still at a very early stage” of implementing this strategy, the Commissioner stressed, adding that the Commission was currently working on the revision of the European pharmaceutical legislation.
During the discussion, however, some political groups expressed scepticism about the report, especially the provisions concerning industry.
“This report does not talk enough about the industrial aspect”, argued Pernille Weiss (Denmark), rapporteur for the EPP. The MEP regretted that the report lacked clarity on patent protection. “Intellectual property is crucial for a company that decides to set up in country A or B”, she argued, saying that the aim of the report was also to ensure that innovative industry and SMEs would have a sustainable foothold in the EU.
The MEP therefore called on the Parliament to look further into this issue before embarking on the legislative work on pharmaceutical legislation.
Too complacent a position
On the other side of the Chamber, Czech MEP Kateřina Konečná, speaking on behalf of The Left, denounced the “very low level of ambition when it comes to intellectual property rights reform”.
The MEP said that compulsory licences - which allow States to authorise a third party to manufacture a patented product without waiting for the patent holder’s consent - should be used more often. “This should be the standard approach in times of pandemic”, she said.
MEP Tilly Metz (Luxembourg), rapporteur for the Greens/EFA, also regretted that “this report gives preference to voluntary licences in a global pandemic context”. An amendment aimed at “putting voluntary and compulsory licences on an equal footing” was therefore tabled by the Greens and The Left. However, it was rejected on Tuesday.
Ms Metz said she was “disappointed” to see “regulatory flexibilities” in the text put to the vote and Ms Konečná regretted the lack of guarantees for “stronger control” of public sector funding for pharmaceutical companies.
Her colleague Marc Botenga (The Left, Belgium), rapporteur for the ITRE committee, also found the text too industry-friendly. “A European pharmaceutical strategy should have as its first objective to reduce our dependence on large multinational pharmaceutical companies”, he continued, arguing for the creation of a public biomedical infrastructure in the EU.
“It is time to put an end to the exorbitant prices set by pharmaceutical companies, which, at the same time, have received substantial public subsidies”, insisted Tilly Metz, demanding that medicines prices reflect the real costs of their development.
The MEP welcomed the fact that Parliament, despite everything, was calling for pharmaceutical companies receiving public subsidies to be forced to be more transparent and to make their products more accessible.
To view the report: https://bit.ly/3oX5cWQ (Original version in French by Agathe Cherki)