EU still not ‘fully prepared’ for next health crisis, warns audit body

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The EU is not “fully prepared” for the next health emergency, the bloc’s audit body has said, as flaws exposed by the Covid-19 pandemic persist.

A report by the European Court of Auditors showed that a lack of co-ordination between member states on data and testing slowed the EU’s response to the Covid-19 outbreak in early 2020, and warned that closer co-operation was necessary to deal with future health crises.

“Four years later, the lessons learned [from Covid] must be effectively applied at EU level so that history doesn’t repeat itself,” said João Leão, the ECA member responsible for the audit, which was published on Wednesday.

Even though the EU had a detailed health emergency plan in place before the pandemic, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) struggled to add the extra capacity needed to carry it out, the auditors said.

The ECDC initially “underestimated the seriousness” of the surge in Covid infections, the auditors said. It only recognised the need for immediate targeted action three days after Italy declared a national lockdown in March 2020. They added that the health agencies often had “little leeway to recruit additional staff”.

EU health commissioner Stella Kyriakides this week said a shortage of medical professionals remained a “serious” problem in many countries, outlining a €1.3mn initiative to recruit more nursing staff.

While the EU has directed more resources to public health agencies, the report warned that a “more complex organisational framework” could weaken its capacity to respond to emergencies. The Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority, which was established in 2021, was replicating the tasks of existing agencies, it added.

In its reply to the audit, the European Commission acknowledged the “need to clarify the respective roles” of its agencies.

Auditors pointed out that EU agencies had to rely on low-quality data because national governments, which control individual country’s health policy and services, used different methods for collecting Covid data, meaning that “some countries had significantly under-reported numbers of infections and deaths”.

They said the ECDC should develop by 2026 a “robust European surveillance system” that would allow it to collect comparable data for infectious diseases from across the EU.

Tensions with the UK and AstraZeneca grew over the relative scarcity of Covid jabs in the EU during the early months of 2021, but the audit acknowledged that the EMA did speed up its process for authorising vaccines, helping to limit the pandemic’s impact on the region.

A lack of harmonisation within the EU’s health industry had also made it difficult to run joint clinical trials within the 27-country bloc, which can slow member states’ access to innovative medicines.

Europe’s share of global clinical trials fell from 25.6 per cent to 19.3 per cent from 2010 to 2020, as the US and China increased investment in research and development, according to the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations lobby group.

“Evidence suggests that the clinical trial environment in Europe is not improving and we are likely to see a further drop in immunisation trials,” said Nathalie Moll, EFPIA’s director-general.

The commission has outlined proposals to speed up the authorisation processes for new medicines.

The report comes as the World Health Organization is urging a co-ordinated effort from EU member states and other rich nations to send mpox vaccines to Africa. The global health body last month triggered a second international public health emergency in barely two years over the infectious disease after a surge in cases in about a dozen African countries including the Democratic Republic of Congo.

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