Trade and Supply Chains

Trade has long been one of Europe’s strengths, enabling economic growth across the continent, building links with allies and partners across the world, and contributing to greater resilience. As Europe and the wider world continue to face major challenges, be it the climate crisis or geopolitical instability, it is more important than ever to support open, rules-based trade. Getting trade policy right means taking actions that support both resilient, diversified supply chains for critical and often life-saving medicines, and the innovation needed to develop them.

The innovative pharmaceutical industry is a strategic sector for Europe: in 2023 life sciences companies spent around €45 billion on R&D in the EU, employed around 865,000 people directly, with about three times more indirectly. And with a long-standing manufacturing base, EU medicines exports totalled over €270 billion in 2023. More importantly, patients worldwide depend on Europe as a key source of medicines. For Pfizer, this means helping provide medicines and vaccines to more than 600 million patients in over 180 countries, including in Europe; over 14,000 Pfizer manufacturing colleagues work in our production sites across 8 EU Member States to support this.

How does trade policy help enable this? With most global growth happening outside Europe, its core focus is on removing barriers, opening new global markets, promoting regulatory standards, and fostering innovation through strong intellectual property (IP) protections. Today, digital trade is also vital, reflecting the growing significance of global data flows to the discovery and development of new breakthrough medicines.

Beyond the opportunities, trade policy, when deployed effectively, is also a key source of resilience, by enabling diversified supply chains that can flex to meet national, regional or global crises. Taken together, effective policies both enable continued investment in healthcare innovation and support patient access to medicines. They are also a source of competitiveness for Europe.

Tackling global challenges – the power of partnership

The COVID-19 Pandemic showed how partnership and innovation can help tackle the world’s largest problems. Underpinned by WTO rules, IP protection enabled the collaboration, discovery and development of new vaccines and treatments. These drivers also supported scale-up and supply: by the end of 2021, within 13 months of the Pfizer-BioNTech Vaccine receiving its first authorization, we had shipped more than 2.6 billion vaccine doses to 163 countries and territories around the world. By January 2024 that stood at over 4.9 billion vaccines to 183 countries and territories.^[1]

This was possible through partnership and dialogue to get the fundamentals right:

• Collaborating to diversify and scale up production in Europe, the US and other key regions;
• Avoiding costs, delays or barriers to the movement of key goods;
• Strengthening regulatory cooperation and capacity building.

Building resilience, creating opportunities

The focus of international economic policy continues to shift towards supply chain resilience, economic security, strategic autonomy and other important themes. The EU’s policy tools should at the same time evolve to play to its strengths as an outward-looking, knowledge-based economy. In a competitive and challenging geopolitical environment, success in Europe means:

• Empowering companies in managing their supply chains, improving workers’ skills and leveraging technological innovation.
• Stronger government-industry dialogue, and closer collaboration between partner governments, particularly in other G7 or OECD countries to drive global leadership on shared goals on innovation and supply.
• Looking beyond Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) by also negotiating Mutual Recognition Agreements (MRAs) and more targeted agreements, including for critical medical goods.

Policy recommendations

1. Drive resilience and patient access by defending open trade and global supply chains, underpinned by a rules-based trading system and effective enforcement.
2. Maintain Europe’s own strong IP protection and continue to advocate for effective IP globally, enabling innovation to flourish.
3. Build on existing ties with key allies such as the US, UK and Japan to eliminate regulatory barriers and promote bilateral trade, and seize major opportunities, such as free trade agreements (FTAs) in the Asia-Pacific region, to expand access to other markets.

^[1] For more information, please see: https://www.pfizer.com/CovidEquitableGlobalAccess