Mike Beke, a senior consultant at Ecorys, and Timothy Yu-Cheong Yeung, a researcher at KUL are two of the eleven authors of a study by the European Parliamentary Research Service; on Tuesday 28 February they made a presentation to MEPs on their study on the EU’s public health response to the Covid-19 pandemic to MEPs. The study is intended to support the work of the special COVI commission that has been established to learn lessons from the pandemic.
It is divided into five chapters: the EU vaccine strategy and national strategies, independent scientific evidence on vaccine effectiveness, review of the European crisis response framework, EU prevention and preparedness for future health threats, and European public health competences.
Among other points, Timothy Yeung stated that while the vaccine supply contract with AstraZeneca raised questions of transparency, the European joint procurement strategy has been hailed a success.
The European Medicines Agency has adopted a procedure for the conditional marketing of vaccines. The report notes that the first marketing authorisation (for the Pfizer vaccine) was slower than in the US, where the procedure is more flexible. However, it is difficult to draw comparisons with the EU since the procedures are different.
Progress in immunisation also varies between Member States. For the authors, there is a negative correlation between vaccine hesitancy and trust in government. This negative correlation tends to decrease over time.
Mike Beke said the study pointed to the problem of a lack of transparency in defining a “public health emergency”, the initial slow delivery of vaccines, the lack of choice in terms of vaccine suppliers and the initial lack of capacity to deal with all kinds of emergencies.
However, according to the authors, in respect of the stakeholders that were consulted, the European Union has generally been successful in using resources to provide a European level of protection and prevention during the pandemic.
The study shows that stakeholders positively evaluated various new tools that the EU has developed to respond to public health emergencies: the strengthened mandate of the EMA, ECDC, HERA, the regulation on cross-border threats, joint procurement, etc.
As for the experts, many of the health recommendations from the Conference on the Future of Europe can be implemented without changes being made to the EU Treaty, including the ‘One Health’ approach, while including health in all policies is central, with the EU already holding coordinating powers. Coordination must become a reflex.
In order to promote transparency, the authors have proposed a rule-based framework to provide predictability to stakeholders as to what should be disclosed in European contract negotiations for medical countermeasures, specifying the legal basis, if companies wish to withhold certain information.
More info: https://aeur.eu/f/5kk (Original version in French by Émilie Vanderhulst)