 Okay, and can I welcome everybody to the seminar this afternoon? My name is Catherine Meenan and I chair the Germany group in the Institute. We're very pleased that this afternoon we have with us the German Federal Minister for Health, Jens Spahn, who's a member of the Bundestag. He's going to talk to us for about 20 minutes mainly on issues of EU health policy and the changes that have come about since the beginning of the year and how he sees it going forward. Then we have a question and answer and you'll be able to use to join the discussion using the question and answer function on Zoom which you'll see there at the bottom of your screen. Sending your questions please identify yourself when you're doing that and I'll put them to the minister and we try and use the time as effectively as possible. You can also join the discussion on Twitter using the handle at IIEA. So now I'd like to formally introduce Minister Spahn and hand over to him. He was appointed German Federal Minister for Health in 2018. He's been a member of the Bundestag since 2002, when he must have been the youngest member of the Bundestag at the age of 22. Before becoming Minister for Health, he had a variety of positions including Parliamentary, State Secretary of the German Ministry for Finance and Speaker for Health Politics in the CDU CSU Parliamentary Group. He's a master's in political science. So Minister, over to you and thank you for being with us. Catherine, thank you very much indeed and thank you to all of you to make it possible to have this digital exchange and I only can say thank you in general for the good cooperation we had and still have of course with the Republic of Ireland on a very personal base with Leo Varadka and Simon Harris which both I had very close contact regarding the Brexit issue and many many other issues of the past years and of course with Steven Donnelly as well now in this crisis. Steven has taken part in a digital conference of the EU presidency of Germany yesterday so actually it's a good way for me today to give something back to Ireland and to the discussion we have. To the pandemic situation and the first message of an airborne virus somewhere in China reached the Federal Ministry of Health and me personally I would never have imagined the devastating effects COVID-19 would have on all of us and actually on all of our all-days life. From direct effects on health to short and long-term economic and social impacts COVID-19 has changed the way we live around the world. When discussing financial rescue packages or the reasoning behind wearing a mask we sometimes forget the unthinkable number of death and long-term illnesses due to COVID-19. Many have lost their lives and irrevocably more people will in the next months. Our thoughts go out to all who have lost loved ones. Apart from thinking about how to reduce the economic and social impacts of COVID-19 we have to first and foremost continue our work on keeping the numbers of infections and deaths as small as possible. COVID-19 is an ongoing pandemic and I know that Ireland as well as Germany and all other European countries are just in the middle of fighting this virus and bringing back control now in the second wave that has hit Europe even harder actually in many extents and the first one. So ladies and gentlemen as we getting close to the end of Germany's presidency of the Council of the European Union unfortunately it's only six more weeks to go till the end of the year and the presidency let us take a look back on what we have achieved and which important steps need to be taken in order to reach our joint goal of a stronger European health capacity or as the Commission named it yesterday European Health Union. So actually as the immediate response to the pandemic early this year EU member states including Germany turned to the most function level for rapid decision-making and you just mentioned Catherine before this I was in the finance ministry and we have developed as the European Union and within the Eurozone mechanisms to decide and to be able to decide very quickly if necessary so we have the developed crisis mechanisms for financial crisis and we had to experience in this health crisis actually that there was no real mechanism for European decision-making in this frankly spoken it even took very very long till we have had pulled ends together and finally met for the first time as Health Ministers and we are still working on the right mechanisms actually for exchange but on a very personal basis that just mentioned Stephen Donnelly and many others on a very personal base bilateral it works very well and somehow we get the decisions needed but still compared to a financial crisis there's still many things especially mechanisms to be developed so therefore from coordination was not as possible in the era of health that we would have wished for one thing was obvious whatsoever a virus doesn't know any borders obviously and so our cooperation shouldn't either as German Minister of Health my priority is to mitigate the effects of the pandemic at national level but finding a joint European and global answer to this transportery crisis is more than just additional it is a necessary compliment as we are still experiencing multiple waves of the number of infected people around the world these priorities remain unchanged since the early days of a razor disorderly EU coordination we have shown our strength in coordinating our efforts and engaging in mutual solidarity organized by the German presidency we have held multiple informal video conferences on ministerial and deputy level a type of event that i'm not a big fan of frankly spoken but which made it much easier to talk to my fellow regularly i by the way i'm very convinced video conferences are much easier to do while you are meeting every now and then in person because you need to know each other to really know what the other one wants and with many new health ministers just within the past six months in different countries in the EU besides all these video conferences it will be important to meet in person again sooner or later so this intensified cooperation has simplified EU coordination on health a lot the goal now has to be the implementation of stable structures as i just mentioned on european level on which member states can rely on in times of crisis we will have to examine examine the flaws in EU coordination made visible by the pandemic this is why i support the global health summit in italy next year as it has recently been proposed by commission president Ursula von der leyen in her state of the union address this summit needs to be a forum to rigidly discuss the lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic bringing together the views from the EU the G7 and the G20 in her speech Ursula von der leyen was also speaking of a stronger and that was what they made more concrete yesterday a stronger european health union a notion that contains many interesting aspects that deserve for about scrutiny scrutiny i can fully support this idea in regards to a robust EU crisis management in health as well as closer EU cooperation in areas where a true european added value can be generated we need a stronger european health capacity firmly resting on the strong shoulders of EU member states and let me just mention that one shortly we really need to make clear where there is the additional european added value and where is the national capacity just for example the the UK occur okay they are not uh uh in the EU anymore but the NHS of the UK and as far as I know that counts for Ireland too it's very much in the DNA of the country it's traditionally culturally historically developed um and so is the german system the Bismarck system so-called it has a long tradition the french system so you we should not try through coordination to have one big health system in Europe because that is a very national cultural thing but at the same time there are many areas where there can be added value for all EU citizens and all health systems through cooperation and this pandemic has has just shown one uh a very important one so ladies and gentlemen in july germany took over the presidency needless to say that we had to reshape our presidency program in light of this unprecedented crisis the presidency in this challenging times called for priorities in three fields immediate COVID-19 crisis response strengthening of EU crisis management for the future and the further development of the overall EU health coordination including significant progress in various fields that we have worked on for many years we summarized this ambitious set of priorities under our guiding principle acting together towards european health sovereignty with the emphasis on lessons learned lessons to be learned from the COVID-19 pandemic we have chosen four focus areas for our presidency first the aim to strengthen our preparedness for any future pandemic COVID-19 has illustrated the need for a strong european center for disease control and prevention the ecdc in Stockholm with the member states together with the european commission and european parliament have to support the ecdc in further developing its expertise in disease prevention to the benefit of all member states and EU citizens by the way you know that germany has a robot core institute uh france has the uh the institute pastor at other countries at the institutions but i know from colleagues from especially smaller member states that they don't just don't have these institutions not this number of experts even not at universities and how much they are relying on the expertise of the ecdc and the advice that is given from the ecdc so uh this is really an european added value for many many member states that there is a strong european authority with the ecdc and we want to make it even stronger and to achieve this goal and following the example of its us equivalent by the way the uscdc the ecdc's mandate as well as its financial capacity and workflows have to be expanded and by the way i only i don't want it to be only expanded um for EU uh uh issues or EU pandemic or epidemic or disease uh situations but for activities abroad uh for example in the congo area regarding ebola as well that is not yet in the commission's proposal by the way but i was down there in the congo area last year in september and i saw a very strong uscdc being engaged there and i saw germany and france and others being engaged there but there was no real european activity so the strengthening of an ecdc to me means as well as strengthening of the work and not just within europe but as well worldwide in concrete terms is involves the setting up of a so-called health states task force intended to provide quicker crisis support to the member states for the more a standardized EU wide digital early warning system has to be created so that on the basis of common criteria potential health hazards can be evaluated in real time and appropriate predictions made so in general we want to strengthen the ecdc and this and in many many other regards the second focus of our presidency lies on the ensuring supply of medicinal products in the EU churches in particular of apis active pharmaceutical ingredients of medicinal products in the off patent sector and the dependency on the third countries on and on a few manufacturing sites for these products are issues of major concern for health systems and by the way issues that have already been there before corona germany and other member states have already asked the commission last year to develop a pharmaceutical strategy because we have suffered from shortages from china and india already before this crisis but this crisis has even made more clear which big problem there is so actually we want to develop a more concrete set of measures together with the commission and so i'm very grateful that yesterday the commission finally made first a concrete proposal because this general idea of bringing back production of certain apis to europe needs to be underlight of course with concrete measures like the question of do we give incentives for invest investments here in europe and how do we need to change procurement the procurement framework how is the pricing done how do we control by the way the good manufacturing practices inside of the european union and outside so we want to strengthen the EMA as the authority in that area and we want to change the concrete legal base in this area that at the same time we need to define the right degree of globalization you can imagine that counts for islanders for germany countries that are so much depending on export of course should not be in favor of a policy that actually wants to bring back all productions because if that is done by every country on the world we will lose our wealth and it won't be very efficient but there are certain areas where we need to bring back at least additional production to europe and that is what the pharmaceutical strategy should aim for and so the third focus is cdc bringing back production in certain areas to become more independent and the third focus besides these two is a digital health area and the work towards european health data space improvements in the processing of health data with a view to digitalization big data and ai have been widely discussed in yesterday's high-level conference digital health 2020 who on the move one of the highlights of our presidency and as i have just mentioned steven donnelly has taken part uh as well the commissioner kiri akides teller and i agree that together with the member states first steps towards a european health data space as well as a development of targeted codes of conduct in the area of health the covet nine ten pandemic brought the need for more efficient processing of health data into sharp focus and demonstrated that secondary use of health data can strengthen infectious disease surveillance for example the exchange of data on intensive care beds to ensure swifter coordination of transponder health services in a crisis and in the middle of this continent i can tell you that germany has taken patience and is still taking from the netherlands belgium france the chech republic and and some others and we would of course ask our neighbors wise versa if needed and for that it makes sense to have a data exchange in that regard as well so talking about the european health data space what is important to me is it's about regulation the conference yesterday made very clear uh what is mostly needed for an added value for startups for all stakeholders in the health sector is that there is a legal framework a legal base regulatory framework uh in regard to health data very sensible and sensitive data is health the most sensitive you can think of a personal data and for that we don't need 27 different approaches in germany by the way with 16 federal states we have 16 different approaches so we don't need 27 different approaches uh for a startup to scale it needs one approach one code of conduct one legal framework one legal base in the area of health uh that they can rely on and that is what we want to develop interoperability standards that is at the yesterday i called it boring work because you know the new technology new apps that's always sexy and you can show something regulatory work is always kind of boring and less sexy but it's very very important to make europe and the european union more sovereign in regards to digital health especially compared to kind of capitalism surveillance uh by corporations in the u.s and state surveillance by china it's our own european approach that we need to stand for and to develop to remain sovereign the last issue i want to mention is the work within the w.h.o we are would be happy let me put it that way if the new president-elect of the united states would stop the process of the u.s leaving w.h.o but nevertheless in some regards u.s and the current administration do have a point the w.h.o needs reform its governance structures need to reform the emergency structures need to reform the funding need the reform it's not good that i mean there's always the complain that most of the funding comes from private institutions that's right but the problem is that state institutions within w.h.o the member states of w.h.o just don't fund it enough an institution like the w.h.o can only be as good as member states let it be as good as member states give information to the w.h.o and especially give funding to the w.h.o and that is why within our presidency for the european union we have developed a common approach of all 27 together in the last council meeting end of october to have a common position on w.h.o reform and of course now we try to get in other players on the world to work on that with us so actually these are many many important topics to develop a european added value for our citizens in the area of health one more to just name is you for health i don't know if you realized the beginning of this week you for health was got more money in the tree look of parliament commission and the council up to six billion from just two billion and so we want to make sure within the tree look for you for health that till the end of this year we get it finished the legal base and that at the beginning of next year all member states can use the money now the higher amount of money actually through this compromise so that will be the last legal package i would say that we can and will finish under the u german presidency but of course germany will remain very engaged in the who helps policies after the presidency in all areas that really give an added value that's my most important topic added value on a european level that should be done by europe and the rest should be done by the member states thank you very much indeed i'm looking forward to the discussion