EFPIA welcomes the call for solidarity, collaboration and partnership in addressing the COVID-19 crisis at yesterday’s informal virtual meeting of Europe’s Health Ministers organised by the Croatian Presidency of the EU.

Solidarity remains critical to ensuring the supply of medicines to the patients across. We support the proactive, solutions-focused approach of Commissioner Kyriakides who presented the Guidelines on the optimal and rational supply of medicines during the meeting.  As an industry, we will continue to do everything we can to work with EU Institutions, Member States, Regulators and other actors in the medicines supply chain to continue to ensure the supply of innovative medicines to the patients who need them. EFPIA members have enacted their pandemic preparedness plans for more than three months now and in a lot of cases this has meant already that they have increased capacity and they have been able to cope with the sudden exponential surge in demand for both COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 treatments.

Our industry’s commitment to ensure the safe supply of medicine to patients, along with a series of commitments on the search for diagnostics, vaccines and treatments for use against coronavirus, as well as providing support for governments, health systems and organisations on the ground are encapsulated in the European research-based pharmaceutical industry’s commitment to tackling COVID-19, published earlier this month.  #WeWontRest in the fight against COVID-19.