Meeting in plenary session on Thursday 21 May, MEPs debated the European Union’s preparedness for health crises with Apóstolos Tzitzikóstas, European Commissioner for Sustainable Transport and Tourism.
The outbreak of Hantavirus, which caused three deaths on board the cruise ship MV Hondius at the beginning of the month, has in fact rekindled the debate on post-Covid-19 management.
Mr Tzitzikóstas opened the discussion by assuring MEPs that the European health security framework had been strengthened and was immediately operational. This framework is based on “daily coordination” between the Health Security Committee, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and the European Reference Laboratory for rapid diagnostics.
The Commissioner cited as an example the activation, on 6 May, of the Union Civil Protection Mechanism (UCPM) following a request from Spain, making it possible to coordinate six repatriation flights and evacuate more than 70 people to European hospitals (see EUROPE 13866/7). Experts from the Health Task Force were thus deployed on the ground and medical countermeasures remain available in the EU’s strategic stockpiles.
Given the absence, at this stage, of an approved vaccine against Hantavirus, he announced that the Commission was exploring several avenues with the Horizon Europe programme. “The lessons learned from the Covid-19 pandemic remain crucial (...), because viruses do not respect borders”, he insisted.
For their part, while MEPs welcomed the EU’s responsiveness in the process of repatriating the ship’s passengers, they called for greater strategic autonomy and greater industrial preparedness for health crises.
Oliver Schenk (EPP, German) called for “not once again becoming trapped in dependencies, whether for diagnostics, medicines or protective equipment”. This demand for investment is also shared on the far left by Catarina Martins (The Left, Portuguese), who pointed to the Union’s financial trade-offs: “This proves that if you cut health budgets to build more weapons, that is not the way forward”.
For their part, the sovereignist and far-right groups firmly rejected this dynamic, seeing in it a willingness for permanent interference in Member States’ competences. “Step by step, the exception becomes the norm, the logic of temporary emergency becomes a permanent philosophy of government”, explained Christine Anderson (ESN). (Original version in French by Justine Manaud)