The European Union’s initiative to enhance its medical stockpiles and improve health crisis readiness is facing significant challenges, primarily due to national security concerns over reserves. Many member states are hesitant to disclose information about their stockpiles due to fears that it may expose vulnerabilities.
Five years after COVID-19 was declared a global emergency, the EU’s efforts to boost medical stockpiles for better crisis response are hindered by a lack of clarity on what individual countries have in their reserves.
“Stockpiling of medicines is considered a national security issue in many member states so the information is classified because it can reveal some weaknesses,” Laurent Muschel, Director General at Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority (DG HERA), told Euronews.
Countries fear that revealing gaps in their preparedness against specific health threats – whether from pathogens or chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) risks – could expose weaknesses that adversaries might exploit.
“The EU is building a stock of strategic countermeasures for which we need to consider both the European and national stock,” Muschel added. In response, the Commission is planning to propose a strategy for medical countermeasures against public health threats, which will include tools like joint procurement and a broader EU stockpiling plan.
This plan will be complemented by the Critical Medicines Act, expected to be presented later this month, which aims to prevent medicine shortages and strengthen supply chains.
“One way to approach it for me is to look at the different threats and threat by threat look at what is necessary at European level and what is necessary at member state level,” Muschel said.
To enhance preparedness, DG HERA is collaborating with each member state to assess potential threats, set targets, and determine the division of responsibility between the EU and individual countries. Despite the challenges, Muschel remains optimistic about the EU’s preparedness. He believes the EU is “much better prepared than five years ago” to face a health crisis, bolstered by regular testing of emergency protocols to apply lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Muschel identified avian flu as the most significant current risk to the EU.
“With regular cases of human infections in the US and the risk of mutation leading to human-to-human transmission, we consider it the biggest threat,” he said, underscoring the need for readily available vaccines.
“So far, the cases have been only from animals to humans, but the more people are getting infected, the more there is a risk of mutation,” he added.
The situation is complicated by the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the World Health Organization (WHO), limiting international communication.
“That’s the role of the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention to inform the rest of the world on how the epidemiological situation evolves,” Muschel said.
“I remember that President Trump was criticising China for not being transparent during COVID-19 so I do hope that the United States will not do a similar mistake and that the flow of information will continue,” he added.
