From innovation and medicines to investment and resilience, health is increasingly tied to Europe’s wider political choices. In Strasbourg, we had the opportunity to hear from MEP Peter Agius (EPP, Malta).
Regarding promoting health innovation in Europe and ensuring that this innovation is used in Europe, MEP Peter Agius highlighted a range of measures in the Pharmaceutical Package, alongside two key measures under the Critical Medicines Act aimed at addressing pharmaceutical supply issues in Europe.
He explained that one of the Act’s tools is the regulation of stockpiling, aimed at preventing situations in which a particular active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) needed by the pharmaceutical industry is available in huge quantities in one Member State, such as Germany, but is not available at all in another, such as France.
He said the Act therefore establishes a system of notification, control and monitoring of stockpiling, including how much of a particular ingredient is being stored when that ingredient is needed by other Member States.
Agius said the second measure is joint public procurement, allowing Malta to purchase medicines together with other Member States. He said the mechanism worked well during the COVID-19 pandemic for vaccine procurement but has not been replicated elsewhere.
He said he strongly pushed for it in the Health Committee and, with support from colleagues across political groups, helped reduce the number of countries required to launch a joint procurement exercise from nine, as originally proposed by the European Commission, to five.
Taking a firm position, he said:
“I don’t want us to finance big companies developing innovative cures and medicines, and then have these companies simply choose not to put them on the market anymore. This is happening all the time. What I want to see is that, if you have benefited from the EU health budget, you are obliged to put your product on the market in all 27 Member States.”
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