Poland takes the helm of the European Council in a world vastly different from 2011, when we last held the presidency. Russia’s aggression against Ukraine has triggered serious socio-economic consequences for the European Union and challenged the international order. We can no longer have any illusions about the need to spend more on defence and security.
Security covers many aspects beyond the purely military, including economic, food, information security and, importantly, healthcare. Therefore, it’s timely that the European Parliament’s Subcommittee on Public Health (SANT), which I chair, will become a full, independent legislative committee at the start of 2025, as the Polish presidency begins.
The Polish presidency has outlined several priorities related to health. First, the digital transformation of healthcare, including the implementation of the European Health Data Space, which is so important for cross-border health services and for research into new medicines and therapies.
Secondly, health promotion and disease prevention, which fits perfectly with our ambitions in Parliament to adopt a European strategy for cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases in this term.
And thirdly, promoting the mental health of children and young people in the context of digitalisation. Poland aims to adopt dedicated Council conclusions on this topic, which is also consistent with our efforts in Parliament related to the mental health strategy adopted in the last term. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has announced a pan-European study on the impact of digitalisation on the mental health of young people and children.
Beyond monitoring implementation and strategic issues, the Polish presidency will also have to deal with legislation, including key legal acts in the area of health. This will include advancing the Council’s work on the pharmaceutical package of legislation, and we hope the Polish presidency will be able to open trilogue negotiations with the Parliament, where we have been ready to negotiate since April 2024.
We need new innovative therapies, we need to address rare diseases, we need new antibiotics, we need equal access to medicines in all EU member states and we need medicines that we can afford. For all of that, we need the right balance in the pharmaceutical package.
When I met Commissioner Olivér Várhelyi before his confirmation hearing in Parliament, he promised to deliver the Critical Medicines Act within the first 100 days of the new European Commission. He repeated this pledge during his hearing. I have been pushing in Parliament for this legislation over the last five years as a way to complete the pharmaceutical package – because what good is it to develop and pay for a medicine if it’s not physically available in Europe because it goes to other markets first?
In the last few years, the Covid-19 pandemic and the blockage of the Suez Canal by a single beached container ship have shown how fragile global supply chains can be. The EU is too dependent on imported medicines and we in the SANT committee are concerned about what the increasingly uncertain future may bring. We need to think about the situation European patients would face if, for whatever reason, supplies from Asia were cut off overnight.
Any security strategy for Europe must include health security. As Jean Monnet observed, the EU moves forward when faced with a crisis because we can provide an effective response to Europeans’ common challenges. When it comes to healthcare, this is one such moment.