On Friday, the WHO Director General declared an end to the Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) for the disease caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. I welcome this important milestone and would like to share some thoughts about what this means for EMA.
COVID-19 was declared a PHEIC on 30 January 2020. For more than three years, the pandemic wreaked havoc across the world, causing millions of deaths worldwide, both from the virus itself and from the huge disruptions it caused to routine patient care.
From the EU and EMA perspective, we have much to be proud of in the way we responded: the EU Vaccine Strategy made sure that each and every EU country was able to have access to safe, effective and high-quality vaccines and therapeutics to protect their citizens. EMA provided robust scientific recommendations, timely evaluation of new vaccines and therapeutics – adapting its recommendations as the virus evolved – and helped mitigate shortages…
