Emer Cooke Emer Cooke, Executive Director of the European Medicines Agency, chats to Bridget Hourican about a year like no other and the path to COVID recovery W e had to massively step up our communication activities because of the public interest and to combat the misinformation. The number of queries from the press and public went up 600% in a year. We’ve held three public meetings online in three months [December 2020 to March 2021], each attended by over 3,500 people – these were not our usual numbers, pre- pandemic!’ In November 2020, Emer Cooke (BSc 1982) took office as the fourth Executive Director of the European Medicines Agency (EMA), the first woman to be appointed to this role. EMA is the EU agency in charge of evaluating and supervising medicinal products - once an acronym only familiar to people in the industry, it is now, in these pandemic times, a household name. In January 2021, as a few EU member states began to cast doubts on the safety of the AstraZeneca vaccine, the whole continent waited in trepidation for EMA to evaluate, and then breathed a sigh of relief when the vaccine was judged safe. ‘We’re committed to a strong process of vigilance once vaccines come on the market,’ says Cooke, ‘generally we have a lot of time to analyse and weigh up, but with COVID, people needed answers really fast. One of the things we’ve all learnt from this pandemic is the need to have as coordinated an approach as possible between regulatory bodies – not just within Europe, but globally.’ Director of EMA is an extraordinary role to take up in the middle of the largest global public health crisis in a century, but she was unfazed since she was coming from the nerve centre of the global approach, the World Health Organisation (WHO), where she was appointed Head of Regulation of Medicines and other Health Technologies in 2016. From January 2020 she was, she says ‘in expert meetings, listening, trying to understand how transmissible it was and whether it could be contained. When it became clear that this was a pandemic, my main focus was on regulation, communicating to authorities all over the world on what to expect, and seeing if we could help mitigate shortages they might have - in PPE, tests, therapeutics etc - and seeking to ensure that in the event of vaccines becoming available, that they would have the right regulatory procedures in place.’ Working in the WHO had been ‘an aspiration’ since she was a pharmacy student in Trinity, when as chair of the Dublin University Pharmaceutical Students Association, she helped organise a trip to Switzerland in 1980, where they visited
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