Healthcare Priorities of German Presidency of EU Council
- 02/07/2020
- Articles
The German government assumed yesterday for the latter part of 2020 the rotating Presidency of the Council of the European Union. The policy priorities of that Presidency were spelled out in the attached document entitled “Together for Europe’s recovery”. Not surprisingly, healthcare forms a focal point of these priorities in a number of diverging ways:
- Crisis management of health emergencies: an important aspect involves the strengthening of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control;
- Creation of EU-wide contact tracing and warning system;
- Improvement of supply chains for pharmaceuticals, medical devices and personal protective equipment: this implies increasing the autonomy of the EU and enhancing internal cooperation in matters such as the local production of critical medicines;
- Better deployment of the Joint Procurement Agreement;
- Further development of EU ERAvsCorona Action Plan – this is the plan specifically approved in April 2020 to tackle Covid-19 under the aegis of the European Research Area;
- Safeguarding the worldwide access to Covid-19 diagnostic tests, vaccines and medicines on the basis of epidemiological criteria;
- Improvement of pan-European access to and exchange of health-related data: a part of that effort will be directed to the creation of a GDPR-compatible code of conduct for the use of healthcare data.