by Rhoda Wilson, Expose News:
The European Union (“EU”) exports over $6 trillion in products annually. The bloc boasts a diversified economy encompassing fuel and mineral industries, cars, vaccines and technology.
Regarding vaccines and packaged medicines, EU countries make up at least 36% of global trade, with Germany being by far the largest exporter of these products from the bloc.
Is it merely a coincidence that Germany is the World Health Organisation’s (“WHO’s”) largest contributor and the European Commission is the fifth largest contributor?
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A week ago, Visual Capitalist published a graphic of the EU member states top exports as of 2022.
Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Finland, Greece, Lithuania, Sweden and the Netherlands have petroleum gas or refined petroleum as their top export product.
Besides petroleum, automobiles and automobile parts significantly contributed to the EU economy. Austria, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Portugal, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Spain had automotive products as their top exports.
Other products helped diversify the EU economy, Visual Capitalist wrote. France’s top exports were planes, helicopters and/or spacecraft, while Italy and Denmark excel in the packaged medicines industry. Ireland has a significant pharmaceutical industry, hosting major companies such as Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Merck and Novartis.
According to the data table provided by Visual Capitalist in support of their graphic, the EU’s packaged medicine industry exported a total of US$110.1 billion to countries outside the EU split as follows:
- Denmark – packaged medicines worth US$15.9 billion
- Ireland – vaccines worth US$47.3 billion
- Italy – packaged medicines worth US$34.4 billion
- Slovenia – packaged medicines worth US$12.5 billion
However, this information only shows the value of medicines exported for those EU countries where medicines were the largest export. It does not include, for example, Germany’s pharmaceutical exports because Germany’s largest export was cars.
To get a better feeling for the value of pharmaceutical products the EU exports we briefly looked at the source of Visual Capitalist’s information.
For their graphic, Visual Capitalist used data from The Observatory of Economic Complexity (“OEC”). According to OEC’s classification, pharmaceutical products include the subclasses “packaged medicaments,” “vaccines, blood, antisera, toxins and cultures,” “special pharmaceuticals,” “unpackaged medicaments,” “bandages,” and “glands and other organs.”
In keeping with Visual Capitalist’s basis for preparing their graphic, we have limited our overview to the two pharmaceutical products that appeared in its ‘EU Exports by Country’.
In 2022, the total exports of “packaged medicaments,” globally, was US460 billion. These are products exported by countries and so do not include products that are produced for domestic consumption.
OEC’s list of top exporters of packaged medicaments were Germany ($74.8B), Switzerland ($45.4B), the United States ($38.2B), Ireland ($34.8B) and Italy ($34.4B) – a total of US227.6 billion for the top 5 exporters, representing 49.5% of global exports or global trade.
Visual Capitalist’s graphic for the EU also revealed “vaccines” as the top export for Ireland. These are categorised under OEC’s pharmaceutical products subclass “vaccines, blood, antisera, toxins and cultures.” This subclass includes vaccines for veterinary use. The total exports globally were US$330 billion, including US$4.05 billion for veterinary use.
OEC’s top exporters of vaccines in 2022 were Ireland ($47.3B), Belgium ($47.1B), United States ($46.8B), Switzerland ($46.7B), and Germany ($45.5B) – a total of US$233.4 billion for the top 5 exporters, representing 70.2% of global exports.
In the paragraphs above, we’ve highlighted EU exports in bold. In both of the two subclasses of pharmaceutical products, three of the top five exporters are EU member states. The total EU exports from the top exporters of both subclasses are US$283.9 billion, representing 36% of the global exports of US$790 billion (US$460B + US$330B).
Although we have not extracted data from all EU countries for all pharmaceutical products, it is already clear that packaged medicines and vaccines are a significant portion of the EU’s trade.
Why are we noting this? While we wouldn’t want to start any “conspiracy theories,” we also don’t believe in coincidences.
WHO is a few years behind in publishing its annual reports. The latest financial statements are for the year ended 31 December 2021. According to WHO’s summary of contributors, the largest funder is Germany, followed in a very close second by Bill Gates’s organisations (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation plus GAVI). The European Commission is the fifth largest contributor to WHO.
