11
Mar
2025
Watch
Presentation of the proposal on Critical Medicines Act (CMA) (debate)
Mr President, Mr Commissioner, the Critical Medicines Act is an extremely important file. The world is in a de- globalisation phase. Dependencies reduction and self-sufficiency have become a logical trend. This for sure includes medicines, their availability and affordability simply matter. Therefore, we welcome the ambition to maintain a list of critical medicines for which European research and production capacities would be granted. But it is not an easy task. As critical, we consider a wide range of medicines, including those old simple molecules whose production was, due to cost optimisation, transferred outside the EU in the past decades. And now we want them back. Also, we shall consider what should be the role of the EU here. In my opinion, mainly coordination of fair distribution of supportive projects among Member States to avoid duplication and at the end, after implementation, coordination of logistics of critical medicines. However, we believe that tools like CMA and Pharma Package can contribute positively to increase medicine supplies resilience on our continent, and in this regard, Mr Commissioner, you have our full support. However, I would like to extend that attracting private investments of pharma industry in the EU would require at the same time, in parallel, energy cost reductions, decreasing of obligations linked to the medicines lifecycle and also less bureaucracy, which is exactly the opposite of which some of your colleagues, Mr Commissioner, are doing.