EDANA and 10 other European Associations signed a letter to the to the Trade and Health attachés of the Permanent Representations and to the European Commission ahead of the Trade Council Meeting of 16 April 2020.
The European industry is working around the clock to increase capacity and ensure supply of critical medicines and medical and protective equipment (e.g. diagnostic tests, ventilators, protective masks, gloves and gowns, Intensive Care Unit medicines and equipment, and protective clothing) to patients and healthcare workers across Europe in light of the Covid-19 pandemic. To that end, industry is pushing capacity limits to meet the exponential rise in demand and needs continued coordinated and collective action from the EU and Member States to maintain open trade and efficient supply chains, both within the EU and with the EU’s trading partners. This enables us to better address the challenges in getting essential supplies to the patients and healthcare workers that need them.
We invite EU governments to partner with industry, and to intensify their co-operation as this crisis evolves. Such collective work needs to not only happen among EU Member States as is already increasingly the case today; it also requires engagement with trading partners globally, as reflected in the recent G20 Trade Ministerial Statement. This would also manifest the EU’s leadership role in defending an open and rules-based global trading system.