Following the Health for Common Good campaign that led to the inclusion of a European infrastructure for vaccines, medicines and biomedical innovation among the recommendations of the “Report COVID-19 pandemic: lessons learned and recommendations for the future”, voted by the European Parliament in July, Forum on Inequality and Diversity (ForumDD) urges ENVI committee to confirm the recently approved position and thus write the history of public health in Europe.
Today Fabrizio Barca and Andrea Morniroli, Co-coordinators of the Forum on Inequality and Diversity, have written a letter to all ENVI committee’s MEPs, who are discussing a draft report on the review of European pharmaceutical legislation which will be voted in April by the European Parliament. Currently, the report includes the proposal of a European Medicines Facility that would aim at establishing the health priorities of the EU, directing the research and development of medicines, with particular attention to those not sufficiently covered by the private sector.
This proposal, which the ForumDD has supported since 2019, was included last July among the recommendations of the “Report COVID-19 pandemic: lessons learned and recommendations for the future”. An important first step that was also made possible thanks to the “Health Common Good” campaign that ForumDD launched in those months and to the commitment of all the MEPs who believed in it. Now, the vote in the ENVI Committee is crucial to follow up on what was approved last July by the European Parliament and ensure that the new European Pharmaceutical Legislation can finally lead to the implementation of this fundamental facility.
In fact, the Report that is now under discussion will be then endowed to the new EU Parliament, as a starting point for the negotiation within the Council and the Commission on the revision of the current legislation, with the aim to improve in a timely, fair and affordable way the access to medicines and to promote innovation.
“This is a crucial moment for our proposal, and that is why we are asking MEPs to support it,” says Massimo Florio, member of the ForumDD and first proponent of the European public health infrastructure. “The role of MEPs last July was strategic and can be strategic this time as well. The exclusion of the creation of a European infrastructure for vaccines, medicines and biomedical innovation from the Report would be a step backward in the public interest as well as damaging the credibility of the institutions themselves, contrary to the July vote”.
The ForumDD will continue to focus attention and mobilization around the proposal. To support the campaign all citizens can also sign the petition “A European infrastructure for vaccines, medicines and biomedical innovation” launched by ForumDD and signed by, among others, Silvio Garattini, President of the “Mario Negri” Institute for Pharmacological Research, former Health Ministers Rosy Bindi and Giulia Grillo, and Nobel Prizes Amartya Sen, Barry Barish, and Giorgio Parisi. The ForumDD can also counts on the support of The Democracy Collaborative, a U.S.-based think tank for a democratic economy, that also supports a similar proposal in the U.S. Congress.
For further information on the Health Common Good campaign: https://www.forumdisuguaglianzediversita.org/salute-bene-comune/
