The European Parliament’s Special Committee on Covid-19 (COVI), set up to learn lessons from the pandemic, invited several experts on Monday 6 February to discuss how to improve the resilience of production chains for critical medical products during the pandemic.
Committee Chair Kathleen Van Brempt (S&D, Belgian) announced that she had written to Public Health and Food Safety Commissioner Stella Kyriakides to attend a meeting with COVI coordinators so that MEPs could get more information on the revision of the third contract signed with Pfizer-BioNTech for the supply of Covid-19 vaccines and a status report on deliveries.
MEPs heard from Matthias Bauer of the European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE), who believes that there is too much emphasis - particularly from the European Commission - on Europe’s dependence on other countries. For Mr Bauer, the real priority for healthcare autonomy would be to focus on competitiveness as regards long-term innovations and to avoid short-sighted policy experiments, such as attacks on intellectual property rights. He said the EU needs regulation that includes incentives for investment in research and innovation and in production capacity.
Chad P. Bown of the Peterson Institute believes that the US federal government has been successful in diversifying the vaccine portfolio and that government subsidies have been significant and provided sufficiently in advance to establish production capacity before emergency vaccine approvals. The government was involved in the operation of supply chains, including through information available under the Defence Production Act; it rationed scarce supplies needed for vaccines and some vaccine contracts included financial incentives for doses delivered by a given date.
However, the US government was not able to streamline supplies in a generally effective way until the formation of the working group with the European Commission.
For Mr Bown, however, the EU has done a better job of sharing vaccines and supporting solidarity schemes for vaccine distribution globally. The EU and the US should jointly subsidise their interdependent production chains, resolve bottlenecks and streamline supplies under pressure, for example, through a trade and investment agreement facilitated by a body like the WTO.
Sibilia Quilici of Vaccines Europe believes that the intellectual property framework has worked well and has not been a barrier to access to vaccines. She stressed the importance of collaboration between public institutions that collect information and producers, particularly in order to understand the demand for vaccines. Ms Quilici welcomed the regulatory flexibility obtained by producers as a matter of urgency and hoped that it would be maintained.
Professor Massimo Florio from the University of Milan believes that major public and private infrastructure is needed in the EU to fill the investment gap in research and development. (Original version in French by Émilie Vanderhulst)