Pandemics: improving preparedness and management

European science and ethics advisors have issued an Opinion on more successfully preventing and pre-empting emerging infectious diseases. Their recommendations include enhanced international coordination, strengthened systems of epidemic and pandemic preparedness and management as well as how to uphold fundamental rights and social justice in times of health emergencies. The recommendations also concern systemic issues, most notably related to sustainability and social justice, taking European values and respect for fundamental rights as points of orientation.
The Opinion was developed jointly by the European Commission’s independent Group of Chief Scientific Advisors, the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies and Peter Piot, Special Advisor to the President of the European Commission on the response to Covid-19.