Preparing the EU for the next health crisis: a Medical Countermeasures Strategy

Preparedness and response save lives when diseases with epidemic or pandemic potential spread within hours or days. That is why ensuring that medical countermeasures are rapidly, sufficiently and equitably available, to protect people from health emergencies is a prerequisite for our readiness for the next crisis.

The Medical Countermeasures Strategy embraces this change of mindset to proactively prepare and protect people from health threats, acknowledging the fact that medical countermeasures are strategic assets to make EU stronger, healthier and better prepared. With this strategy, the EU aims to reinforce its preparedness for the next health emergency, irrespective of its origin, from pandemics to human-made biosecurity threats or conflicts, by ensuring access to and availability of medical countermeasures at all times. This will be achieved through the following objectives:

1. Stimulating and fostering innovation in the area of medical countermeasures, as well as their development, production and availability by following a One Health and full value chain approach to ensure a comprehensive and complete end-to-end approach from threat and identification, prioritisation, and assessment, through the research and development pipeline, to manufacturing, and deployment.
2. Driving joint priority setting, close cooperation with Member States and collaboration with EU candidate countries and global partners.
3. Scaling-up public and private partnerships and enhancing cross-sectoral collaboration including civil-military cooperation.