Health securityis nationalresilience

For a long time, health policy and security policy were treated as separate worlds. The COVID-19 pandemic changed that: shortages of protective equipment, overstretched intensive-care units and fragmented information showed how much the functioning of the state depends on the health system. Since 2022, the changed security situation in Europe has added a further dimension — the question of how hospitals, medicine supply and health administrations would cope with a large-scale crisis, including the case of national or alliance defence.

Health security, in this sense, is less about a single threat than about the ability of a complex system to keep working under strain. It depends on reliable supply chains for medicines and medical devices, on laboratory capacity and countermeasures against biological threats, on hospitals that can expand care when needed, on trained staff, and on authorities that know in real time where capacity exists. Many of these elements lie with different actors: the federal government, the sixteen Länder, municipal public-health offices, health insurers, hospital operators and manufacturers.

Nina Warken's ministry approached the subject in three ways: through the budget, through European and international cooperation, and through a planned framework law. These are described below as initiatives of the Federal Ministry of Health during her tenure, which ended on 29 July 2026.

Much of the supply of generic medicines, including many antibiotics, depends on a small number of manufacturers outside Europe. A national stockpile can bridge short disruptions, but long-term security requires production capacity and diversified supply chains — something no single member state can achieve alone.

This is why the ministry treated supply security as a European question. At the EU health ministers' council (EPSCO) in Luxembourg on 20 June 2025, Warken supported the European Commission's proposed Critical Medicines Act as a tool to strengthen manufacturing in Europe, and presented it alongside the EU pharmaceutical package and the revised Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive as part of a shared effort to make Europe's medicine supply more independent and resilient. European policy.

Internationally, she met WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in Geneva in May 2025, when the ministry announced an additional €10 million for WHO reforms, and again at the World Economic Forum in January 2026. Global surveillance of disease outbreaks is part of the same chain of preparedness.