As the U.S. and other Western countries pull back from foreign aid, the European Union is trying to position itself as the grown-up still showing up.
In a new global health strategy unveiled Wednesday, the European Commission cast the EU as a steady partner for developing countries at a moment when global health funding is shrinking and becoming increasingly transactional.
“The EU has been and will remain a credible, reliable, principled and predictable partner on global health,” said Jozef Síkela, European commissioner for international partnerships.
The message was aimed as much at Washington as at the developing world.
President Donald Trump has withdrawn the U.S. from the World Health Organization and sharply reduced foreign aid spending. Other European countries — including the U.K., France, Germany and the Netherlands — have also cut aid budgets as governments turn inward politically and fiscally.
Oxfam warned the U.S. aid cuts alone could cause 3 million preventable deaths a year, mostly in children.
Global leaders have since been scrambling to reshape their response to the health needs of developing countries to prioritize building resilient health systems rather than relying on a donor-recipient relationship.
Without calling out the U.S. or other countries by name, Síkela said the EU “cannot fill the gap left behind by other partners.” But it “will not step back from its own commitments to health.”
Helping overhaul this system is one of the key goals of the initiative, along with supporting countries as they build resilient health systems.
The strategy also condemns the “instrumentalization” of health and says closing “the emerging gaps in global health resilience” is crucial.
The U.S. has come under fire from global health advocates for offering funding deals with developing countries that formerly received USAID support, in return for them boosting disease surveillance and providing America with access to disease data and in some cases rare minerals.
“Health is increasingly instrumentalised in the pursuit of geopolitical and geoeconomic interests,” writes the Commission. “Global health governance is shifting away from multilateral cooperation and humanitarian principles towards at times overtly transactional bilateral approaches.”
Staying the course
The Commission wants to help strengthen countries’ health systems, fight fake news and tackle “dangerous dependencies” in supply chains — though it hasn’t announced any new funding for its plan.
To boost prevention, preparedness and response to crises, the EU will invest in drugs, vaccines and diagnostics. It will also help set up a new global therapeutics development coalition and EU hubs for therapeutics and diagnostics.
The EU will also help map global health spending, in collaboration with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Health Organization and the World Bank.
As part of the strategy, the Commission also wants to diversify global supply chains and manufacturing of critical health products, supporting manufacturing in partner countries.
The strategy also touches on health misinformation and disinformation, though new action on this is limited — despite Commission President Ursula von der Leyen mentioning it as one of the drivers of the new strategy last year.
The Commission says it will help improve access to reliable scientific data and work with partners on health communication.
“We have seen that there is a higher risk of disinformation during health crisis. We need to do more to safeguard the integrity of the information space,” said Síkela. “We need to foster trust in science and countering disinformation, misinformation and foreign information, manipulation and interference.”
He added that the Commission also plans “to support all initiatives which directly deal with misinformation, disinformation, fake news.” ]]>