Posted Sep 29, 2022, 8:00 AM
As the EU’s new health authority, Hera (Health Emergency Response Authority), prepares to celebrate the 1er October its first anniversary, its managing director, Pierre Delsaux, continues to organize its growth. “We started last year with ten people, we will be 85 by the end of the year, and a hundred at the start of 2023”, indicates the senior Belgian official in an interview with “Echos” and seven European publications.
“Regarding the Covid, it is still too early to say if we are out of the woods,” specifies Pierre Delsaux. We expect the number of cases to increase this fall and winter. The real question is whether new, more dangerous variants will prevail. The CEO remains cautious: last year in October, we thought the epidemic was under control, before Omicron radically changed the situation.
To pursue the European vaccination strategy, Hera, born of lessons learned from Covid, has secured millions of doses of boosters. It has already distributed around 40 million boosters adapted to the original Omicron strain and to the BA-1 variant to the Member States. In September, it also sent more than fifty million doses of the vaccine adapted to the BA-4 and BA-5 variants. “The bottom line is that both types of boosters are effective against Omicron as a whole. »
Covid: 1.3 billion doses
Pierre Delsaux did the accounts: since the start of the pandemic, the Commission and then Hera have distributed 1.3 billion doses to member states. “Without the European lever, the Member States would not have been able to buy vaccines, even the biggest ones. To the manufacturers, we can say that we represent a block of 500 million people with a single interlocutor, they cannot ignore us. »
The senior official also wishes to clarify that, contrary to what the narratives of hostile powers have insinuated, the EU has not been “selfish”. Of the 4.2 billion doses produced on European soil since the arrival of vaccines, two-thirds have been exported (to Canada, for example, which at first received none from the neighboring United States) or donated to poor countries.
Monkey pox under control
With regard to monkeypox, which today seems to be marking time, Hera was able to buy 334,000 doses of vaccine from the world’s only producer, the Danish laboratory Bavarian Nordic. And some 10,000 treatments in the United States. Hera has, in this case, settled the purchases directly on the European budget and then delivered the Member States free of charge.
In the case of Covid vaccines, the European level negotiated the contracts but it was the Member States who settled the purchases. “So this was a first for monkeypox. We can consider drawing inspiration from it in the future, but we do not have the vocation to buy all the vaccines that the EU needs”, specifies Pierre Delsaux.
Hera’s mission is to respond to crisis situations and prevent future ones. As part of this preventive aspect, it is currently working on three areas: the most worrying new pathogens, bacteriological, chemical and nuclear threats (particularly in view of the war in Ukraine), and finally multi-drug resistance to antibiotics.
The health authority, which has an annual budget of nearly one billion euros – which can potentially be greatly increased in the event of a crisis – is also developing a project called EU FAB, in which it will pay laboratories committing to make their production capacities available as soon as possible in the event of a new emergency similar to Covid.
Because we know there will be. “Climate change, which changes the distribution of animals and insects on the planet, plays a role. In a globalized world, diseases circulate extremely quickly. You have to be ready for the future”, explains Pierre Delsaux.
