Overview

The European Union’s health policy has been a history of crisis and crisis response. Each integrative step forward has been in response to a health challenge that integration exacerbated – and to which more integration was Member States’ response. The COVID-19 response also saw a necessary and significant expansion of pre-existing EU public health policy initiatives. However, without a change in the treaties to ‘upgrade’ public health to a domain of shared competences, it falls short of a European Health Union capable of increasing resilience and better responding to future health emergencies, let alone one capable of improving health for all Europeans.