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How the pandemic strengthened the EU by Camino Mortera-Martinez
The EU has tried for years to become more resilient to global shocks. The new European Health Union is a good start. But the world is changing fast. The EU muddled through the eurozone and migration crises. But it responded more deftly to the Covid-19 pandemic, with EU member-states borrowing jointly to pay for the pandemic and its aftermath, and purchasing vaccines together. This effective response was mirrored in the EU’s swift reaction to Russia’s February 24th attack on Ukraine. The Union cannot be complacent, however. There will be other emergencies. The EU needs to prepare for the next big health crisis in a world that is increasingly splitting into two blocs. In November 2020, the European Commission published its proposals for building a European Health Union (EHU) on the basis of several elements. The first is to empower the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). The ECDC will now be able to monitor the public health situation in member-states and issue recommendations to help them prepare better for health emergencies. If there is an outbreak of a disease, the ECDC will be able to deploy a newly-created ‘EU health task force’ on the ground. Second, EU law-makers have decided to give more competences to the European Medicines Agency (EMA). At the beginning of the pandemic, the EMA was often not informed of shortages of critical medicines, protective gear like masks, and devices such as ventilators – and was thus unable to help EU governments procure
those in the international market. During the early months of the pandemic, member-states engaged in a race to buy equipment and masks in a largely unregulated marketplace – a race that richer member-states found easier to win. The EMA also had patchy access to clinical trials databases, because Covid-19 medical treatments were developed swiftly and under different national programmes that were not always reported back to the Amsterdam-based agency – which made authorising treatments and vaccines for use in the EU more difficult. The EMA’s new powers should be able to solve these problems. The EHU’s biggest innovations are a law on panEuropean health risks; and a new and powerful department in the European Commission in charge of preparing for and responding to crises. The regulation on serious cross-border threats to health establishes new obligations for memberstates and EU institutions to monitor and share information on diseases. Crucially, it regulates the joint procurement of vaccines so that, next time a crisis hits, the EU can follow a playbook instead of rushing to organise their purchasing through informal channels, as was the case during the pandemic. The regulation also allows the Union to buy drugs, tests and personal protection equipment, which will allow the EU to pull its common weight in the hope of avoiding