The European Commission published, on Wednesday 30 November, its first State of Health Preparedness Report. The 2022 report focuses on medical countermeasures preparedness capacities and European support to Member States to strengthen these capacities.
The report identifies 10 key lessons learned from the Covid-19 pandemic.
For each of the 10 points, the report presents, on the one hand, the actions taken, highlighting, for example, the mobilisation of €30 billion to strengthen the resilience of Europe’s preparedness and health systems, the regulation for an emergency framework, the adoption of the regulation on cross-border measures, the strengthened mandate of the ECDC (see EUROPE 13049/19) and, on the other hand, the actions envisaged to fill the gaps identified in relation to these 10 points.
Some of the planned initiatives are included in the 2023 work plan of the European Health Emergency Response and Preparedness Authority (HERA), also presented on 30 November. This work plan will have a budget of €1.3 billion.
The first work programme concerned the establishment and operationalisation of HERA, the development of a working method and links with stakeholders.
This second work plan focuses on five elements: - the establishment of a system for intelligence gathering and improved threat assessment: the Medical Countermeasures Intelligence Platform (MCMI); - the development of medical countermeasures (the Commission announced it will invest €80 million in ‘Covid-19 Vaccines 2.0’ projects to foster the development of next generation vaccines); - the establishment of a funding scheme - ‘HERA INVEST’ - with a budget of €100 million, which should make it possible to raise additional private investment for the development and production of countermeasures; - strengthening access to these countermeasures, including through improved resilience of supply chains and production capacities; - a European strategy for the storage of countermeasures.
Links: https://aeur.eu/f/4dl ; https://aeur.eu/f/4dh (Original version in French by Émilie Vanderhulst)