“We don’t have the virus, but we have a political virus.” Prof Dr Axel R. Pries, president of the World Health Summit in Berlin, said that at the summit’s regional meeting in Nairobi in April 2026, about six months ago. He was talking about countries viewing health “from a very national, sometimes even nationalist perspective.” This week, speaking with Euronews at the summit in Berlin, he returned to the same diagnosis—and offered a cure: the European Union, in a “leading role.”
Pries is a physician and physiologist who previously served as dean and board member of Charité. He has run the World Health Summit for six years. His argument is simple enough: “In a world of multiple crises, global health must once again be seen as a team sport.” Health policy, he said, now has to depend on multilateral cooperation. The Covid pandemic proved “you cannot tackle problems purely at local level.” He also named mental health and non-communicable diseases, which don’t respect lines on a map.
The Brussels Apparatus Takes a Bow
In Pries’s telling, the EU is built for this. “I would not say that Europe should be the leader. But Europe should be one of the leading actors – and it absolutely has what it takes.” He pointed to Europe as a hub for medical innovation, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine awarded days ago to researchers from Berlin and Würzburg for work on optogenetics, and cooperation between countries with different political and social systems. Germany, Europe’s largest economy, can take “a certain leadership role,” he said, but only in a wider ensemble with France and the United Kingdom.
Corporate examples came in the same breath. Pries named Denmark and Novo as examples of large European companies. At a summit about the health of the world’s people, the case for European leadership rests on a pharmaceutical firm’s balance sheet and a prize.
Sovereignty by Another Name
The whole interview speaks in the language of states positioning themselves. “Europe should not allow strategic dependencies in health to emerge,” Pries said. “If we fail now to agree on common strategies, things will become very, very difficult.” Dependencies, strategies, leading actors: this is how governments and blocs talk about people’s bodies when they’re deciding who sits at the table.
Next comes a German Health Security Act. A draft is due for discussion in early 2027, next year. Pries called it an important step toward pandemic preparedness, then stressed that health issues can only be solved through multilateral partnership. “No country today can produce medicines or vaccines entirely on its own,” he said. Ideally, production would happen under the WHO umbrella.
Fighting Over the Umbrella
The sharpest passage took aim at Washington. Pries criticised bilateral health-data agreements, a core element of the America First Global Health Strategy: “you cannot claim on the one hand that you are always first and on the other that you are building partnerships.” He argued that only an overarching framework the WHO can implement would create fair conditions. WHO reform would be welcome, he said, but it shouldn’t be shaped by the idea that multilateral structures are no longer wanted.
Look at what’s on the table: a contest between one great power’s bilateral deals and a continental bloc’s institutional framework. Both arrangements are made over the heads of the people who’ll live with them. Pries himself pointed out that the UN system’s last major reform came after the Second World War. He said he hoped multilateralism could be promoted this time “purely out of a sense of insight.” Nobody in the interview asked who else might be in the room, or whose insight counts.
What the Interview Doesn’t Mention
The interview discusses Europe’s leadership role, cooperation across different systems and strategic independence. It says nothing about the people at Europe’s own borders, who rarely get a seat at any summit. A health regime built on “global” cooperation and organised by states, blocs and corporate champions will decide who counts as part of the team. Pries insists, “we do not want to face a Covid pandemic every five years.” Fair enough. The question nobody put to him in Berlin is who gets care when the next one arrives, and who gets left outside the fence.