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Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs
News article13 July 2022Directorate-General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs

Joint Industrial Cooperation Forum: first meeting on industrial preparedness for future health crises

Today, the Commission is organising the first meeting of the Joint Industrial Cooperation Forum to discuss how to ensure that the EU is better prepared to react to future health emergencies. Lessons learned from the COVID pandemic show that strong industrial cooperation is essential for early identification, development, production and distribution of critical medical countermeasures in times of crisis.

The new Forum brings together the Commission, national representatives as well as industrial organisations representing relevant supply chains including pharmaceutical, medical device, biocidal products, personal protective equipment industries and animal health organisations as well as health procurement and distribution organisations. The primary role of the new Forum will be to identify possible bottlenecks across these supply chains and provide recommendations to address them where possible.

The new Joint Industrial Cooperation Forum has been set up the Commission’s Health Emergency Response Agency (HERA), jointly with the Directorate-General for Internal Market, Industry and Entrepreneurship and SMEs to support their work on preparedness and response to health crisis. To ensure wide representation of relevant industry supply chains, 19 organisations have been selected to take part in the Forum following a call for applications published on 28 March 2022. This will facilitate access to a network of relevant actors that can be rapidly activated to address specific bottlenecks in the supply chains.

The forum will also play a role in contributing to industrial matchmaking events with the aim of creating new industrial partnerships and strengthening overall resilience of the medical supply chains. The work of the Forum will also build on experiences gained through the work of the Task Force for the Industrial Scale Up of COVID vaccines and therapeutics and complement the work of the HERA Civil Society Forum to ensure comprehensive responses to future emergencies.

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Joint Industrial Cooperation Forum

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