EU health policies must be led by common sense

The European Parliament’s plenary session held a joint debate under the title Health and disease prevention on two reports of the European Health Union. Fidesz MEP Edina Tóth in her plenary speech underlined that EU institutions must act in close cooperation with Member States towards the protection of the health of European citizens but without depriving their competences.

“It is important to place much more emphasis on health issues in the future and in order to successfully manage health crisis, a faster response to unforeseen health treats is needed. By the reinforcement of the mandate of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) EU institutions together with Member States will have the potential to ensure that the health of European citizens is protected, and thus helping to improve the health care of the citizens. However, this must not be accompanied by decreasing of competences from the Member States,” the politician pointed out.

MEP Edina Tóth emphasized: “The EU must step up its efforts in line with the more general objectives: to strengthen the protection of citizens against cross-border health threats, to promote the availability and affordability of medicines, medical devices and other crisis-related products, however, the extension of the mandate of ECDC to monitor non-communicable disease prevention cannot be supported”.

“In this respect, it should be also recalled that in early 2020, when the health threat posed by the coronavirus was already known, the same Centre did not properly analyse the situation and did not make recommendations to Member States. This further demonstrates that the most important thing now is to the reinforce the ECDC’s original role and not to extend its competences,” she added.

“To Hungary and the Hungarian government human life, the lives and the safety of citizens comes first, and therefore I am concerned about the proposals of the European Parliament creating new structures that would make crisis management for Member States more difficult or even hamper it,” MEP Edina Tóth closed her remarks .