The Diplomat
The President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, and the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, presented yesterday in Brussels a European project to promote the production of vaccines and the resilience of health systems in Latin America and the Caribbean.
“Only two years ago Europe was just beginning to emerge from the first brutal confinement caused by COVID-19, but it was not only Europe that suffered: other regions of the world were tremendously affected by successive waves of this cruel virus. One of the hardest hit regions was Latin America and the Caribbean,” said Sánchez during the presentation of the Team Europe Initiative (TEI), a project promoted and supported by Spain and which has the collaboration of Germany and Portugal and of financial institutions and regional organizations.
According to Moncloa in a press release, the project, which aims to strengthen public health in Ibero-America and achieve universal access to vaccines in the region through the decentralization of their production, has been made possible thanks to the “dialogue between the European Commission and regional health organizations about their own needs” and is coordinated by the State Secretariat for International Cooperation. On the Spanish side, the Center for the Development of Industrial Technology (CDTI) and the Spanish Agency for Medicines and Health Products (AEMPS) are participating in the TEI. According to the President of the Government, the project is structured around three axes: technology transfer and research and development at all stages of the production chain, exchange of experiences at the regulatory level and mobilization of private sector investment in the region.
Pedro Sánchez also thanked Von der Leyen for her support in fostering relations between the EU and its Latin American partners. “The initiative we are launching today is a European awareness of the needs of Latin America and the Caribbean and an example of the European Union’s willingness to renew the way it relates to the region,” he said. For her part, the EU President said she was “very glad to be with Pedro Sánchez at the launch of this new partnership for vaccines and medicines between the EU and the Latin America and Caribbean countries”. The vaccines, she assured, will be manufactured “in Latin America, for Latin Americans, with world-class technology”.
Sánchez, who travelled to Brussels yesterday to participate in the Western Balkans Summit and in the European Council meeting -which will last until Friday-, was also received by the President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, on the occasion of the naming ceremony of the Clara Campoamor building at the European Parliament headquarters in Brussels. During the ceremony, the head of the Executive vindicated “the essential leadership of women who strengthen the European Union and our democracies, especially in the most complex and uncertain stages” and warned that, a century after Clara Campoamor defended the right of suffrage for women, some of their rights are questioned or relegated to the background by different political forces.
