Is Europe…getting it right?
Image: @lasmaa
Scott L. Greer
Long ago in March and April the EU appeared irrelevant to COVID-19, and to the lives of Europeans preoccupied with the pandemic. But now, it turns out: the EU has having a pretty good crisis, as Sarah Rozenblum of the HMP Governance Lab explained in Le Monde - a new definition of public health in EU law, a health budget that is about 25 times larger than the previous one, and even shared European debt! I argued a few weeks ago that the scale of the pandemic, in a tightly knit EU, might call for another European rescue of the nation state, and it seems a lot of member state and European policymakers thought the same way. With colleagues, we will be exploring this transformed set of circumstances in a couple of forthcoming publications.
Right now, though, the game is still on: How much transformation will we see in EU public health and health systems policies, and for what purpose? Anniek de Ruijter of the University of Amsterdam and I have a new open-access viewpoint in the European Journal of Public Health. Our focus is on what the EU can do without a treaty change, and how it can use the newfound interest in European public health. We were lucky to have a wonderful response by Aaron Reeves highlighting what it can do to help with the longer term social and economic consequences, while another piece by Helmut Brand and Timo Clemens substantially agrees with us on a good future for the EU- and they are all open access, too.
Prof. de Ruijter and I argue for better surveillance and health systems strengthening, including investment in member state health system capacity as well as data collection. Such funds must include standards- on one hand, it is shameful that EU funds so often prop up authoritarian regimes, notably that of Hungary. Beyond basic standards of the rule of law, they should also include public health standards. Data on health developments moves remarkably slowly in many countries. This pandemic has seen too many cases of countries, such as Belgium, being internationally insulted precisely because they have better and more honest reporting of cases and deaths than their peers. Investment in better surveillance and data collection by the EU, combined with higher standards, could prod member states to improve the situation so that individuals and governments could make properly informed decisions about international and local lockdowns.
We also argue for attention to data protection and privacy law. These are substantially European areas of law. The history of public health tells us clearly that collecting and using personal data on health is politically, morally, and legally fraught. Antibody tests, for example, might be egregiously misused to decide who can work. Right now many European surveillance and other programs are being taken under, essentially, emergency rules. That is not stable, and is not contributing to the success of high-tech or low-tech surveillance and contact tracing. Proponents of privacy and data rights, effective public health, and democracy should try to come together in order to steer the inevitable debate about how privacy and data protection should work in the EU during and after this crisis.
