EU's health emergency response authority to start operating in 2022

KRANJ, Slovenia - The European Union's (EU) Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority (HERA) will start operating at the beginning of the next year, the EU's Health and Food Safety Commissioner Stella Kyriakides said on Tuesday.

HERA is to strengthen the European Health Union and better prepare the EU to respond to serious cross-border health threats by enabling rapid availability, access and distribution of needed countermeasures thus enabling a faster EU response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Kyriakides also told a news conference after an informal meeting of the EU health ministers in Slovenia that over 75 percent of adults in the EU have been vaccinated against COVID-19 so far. Still, she urged the member states to continue vaccinating in order to end the pandemic.

The EU needs to improve its autonomy regarding medicines, Slovenian Health Minister Janez Poklukar told the same news conference.

"The debate showed that the European Union has to work towards better autonomy in the area of medicines as the pandemic showed that we are overly dependent on the markets outside the EU. We have to improve production capacities in this sector," Poklukar said.