Bart 
De Wever

*** Rede gehalten am 23. Juni 2026. Nur das gesprochene Wort gilt.***
 

Ladies and gentlemen,
We are the "Pharma Valley" of Europe.
And we may safely call Puurs-Sint-Amands the driving force behind our biopharmaceutical sector.
I am therefore honoured to be here at Novartis today.
A company that has been anchored in our economic fabric for many decades.
The forerunners of Novartis go back to the modest business in medicinal raw materials that the Basel merchant Johann Rudolf Geigy founded in 1758 – more than 250 years ago.
And after Novartis added a new chapter to that rich history in 1996, the company grew into one of the jewels of the European pharmaceutical industry.
Biopharma today is one of the most technologically advanced and research-driven sectors of the economy.
Developing new medicines and proving that they work is a testament to human ingenuity.
A testament to the innovative power that has so enormously raised our standard of living over the past two centuries.
Yet it is anything but self-evident.
When you consider how far medicine has come, it is hard not to feel humbled.
And it is that journey I would like to reflect on for a moment.
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Last month I read the fascinating story of Chagyrskaya 64, a tooth roughly 60,000 years old that was found in a cave in Russia.
Research revealed that this tooth is the earliest documented case of treating tooth decay.
Fortunately for the patient, it was carried out with a primitive but nonetheless remarkably precise drill.
Now, there is something special about that tooth.
It belonged to a Neanderthal.
Neanderthals – those brutish cave-dwellers, so the story goes, who clubbed one another over the head until homo sapiens came along and outsmarted them.
But that popular image squares less and less with the evidence that even they were already concerned with pain relief, with treating the sick, and with caring for the weaker members of their community.
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Tens of thousands of years later, long after the Neanderthals had vanished, humankind learned to write. 
And from the very earliest texts that survive – clay tablets from Mesopotamia, papyrus scrolls from Egypt – medical knowledge is already there.
Take the remarkable Ebers Papyrus, written around 1500 BC.
Twenty metres long, with an overview of the treatment of hundreds of ailments, both physical and mental.
I would not recommend all of them.
We have, for instance, moved on from administering opium to crying children.
The text is also shot through with incantations, instructions for offerings to the gods, and the power of amulets.
But the Ebers Papyrus is a telling example, because in the text and in the margins one of its owners made annotations.
He – or she – added comments, made changes, and even noted whether or not something worked.
Yet the line between healing and working miracles was wafer-thin in an age when physicians sometimes knew that something worked, but rarely why.
Medicine was a matter of tradition and authority, not of evidence.
Clinical trials to establish whether a treatment was effective simply did not exist.
To us – modern, enlightened people – that sounds incomprehensible.
But it explains at once why harmful treatments such as bloodletting and purging were accepted and applied for centuries without much debate.
It may surprise you, but the first to raise serious doubts about this and to propose proper investigation was a Flemish physician and chemist.
In the first half of the seventeenth century, Jan Baptist van Helmont had a groundbreaking idea.
As the enfant terrible of medicine in the Low Countries – he refused a degree from the University of Leuven because he considered it a threat to his scientific freedom – he scandalised his colleagues by questioning the value of bloodletting.
He was convinced that bloodletting and laxatives led to dehydration, and that this was harmful to recovery.
He therefore called for a large trial, dividing several hundred fever patients into two groups.
Van Helmont would treat the one group without bloodletting.
His opponents would treat the other group with it.
The winner would be the one with the fewest funerals on his conscience.
Morbid method aside – I trust Novartis offers its own trial participants rather better prospects – Van Helmont's idea was a real game-changer.
In the end, nothing came of the experiment itself.
We remember Van Helmont today chiefly as the man who coined the word "gas".
Indeed, “gas” is a Dutch word, derived from the Greek chaos.
His contribution to chemistry was praised by Boyle and Lavoisier.
His medical ideas, however, largely fell on deaf ears.
But the seed of the clinical experiment had been planted.
It would take another century before the Scottish naval surgeon James Lind proved the effectiveness of citrus fruit against scurvy in 1747 through a comparative study of twelve patients given different treatments.
And two hundred years later, in 1948, the English medical statistician Austin Bradford Hill laid down the principles of the randomised controlled trial in his work on tuberculosis.
We might call that the birth of the modern pharmaceutical industry.
A story that began with Van Helmont, and that we are still writing today.
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Ladies and gentlemen,
The history of medical treatment is, then, a remarkably rich one.
From the cavities in Neanderthals' teeth to Van Helmont's contention that treatments must be objectively tested: medical innovation has never been the product of chance, nor of the miracles that for so long intertwined medicine and faith.
It rests on critical enquiry and on rigorous experiment – on R&D, as we say nowadays.
It rests on skill and talent.
And it rests on the determined will to keep investing, year after year.
The firm anchoring of Novartis in our economy is part of what gives this country a leading role in Europe in life sciences, medical innovation and the biopharmaceutical industry.
We are world-class in nuclear medicine, in drug development, in vaccines, and in advanced cell and gene therapies.
We have outstanding companies – such as Novartis – and we are praised for our universities and research institutions.
But nothing is self-evident.
The pharmaceutical sector in Europe faces – like the chemical industry – great challenges.
In 1990, Europe still accounted for roughly half of all global investment in medical R&D.
Today, that position has been taken over by the United States.
Through its most-favoured-nation pricing, the United States is also pushing pharmaceutical companies to delay the launch of medicines in Europe.
Meanwhile, China is increasingly tilting the field in its favour.
That realisation has given rise to the call for a European Critical Medicines Act.
A reliable supply of critical medicines is not merely a health issue.
It is a matter of strategic security.
We cannot, however, point only to the Far East or to the other side of the Atlantic.
Rather than complain, we would do well to take a critical look at our own European policy.
There is a problem with the attractiveness of our market and especially with the slow and fragmented process from approval to market access.
There is also a great challenge on the R&D front.
And yet it is precisely medical innovation that could make Europe indispensable on the world market.
Europe is still a major producer – but its share of global innovation is crumbling away.
For a long time, R&D and innovation were Europe's great strength, and this country's in particular.
But innovation, sadly, cannot be stockpiled.
And when it crumbles, the consequences are not immediately visible.
Look at German industry, which after a long period of stagnation and keeping up appearances has recently taken a heavy blow.
In this country, too, investment in medical innovation is falling.
That has to do with the shifting geopolitical strategies of other large blocs, which seek to control the critical supply chains of the globalised economy.
But it also stems from the absence of a forceful European response.
That response must be based on the premise that the pharmaceutical industry and medical research are strategic infrastructure – as vital to Europe as its energy and its defence. 
They sit at the crossroads of health policy, industry and resilience.
Anyone who wants to pursue a sound policy to strengthen the biopharmaceutical sector in Europe must therefore acknowledge that it is a strategic sector.
This federal government does so wholeheartedly.
And a strategic sector requires clear objectives.
For that, we must look at what we in Europe are lacking.
And that is speed and investment.
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First: speed.
I have already spoken of the slow process between approval and market access.
In Europe, a medicine takes on average 578 days to make that journey – more than a year and a half.
In Belgium, the legal maximum is 180 days, but in reality the procedure stretches to some 476 days.
That is still below the European average – which is good. 
But it is hardly a feather in the cap of a country that wishes to keep living up to its leading role in Europe – however excellent our policy may otherwise be for early-phase research.
To take Germany as a good example: the average there is 124 days.
As it is in the United States. 
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Second: investment.
The European Union's share of global clinical trials has fallen to 12 per cent.
China, meanwhile, accounts for around 30 per cent – a shift that has taken just a few years.
This is reflected, too, in the number of new medicines China brings to market.
Between 2015 and 2024, European pharmaceutical companies brought 130 new medicines to market.
Their American counterparts, in the same period, accounted for 257.
American venture capital and stronger competition reward risk — and therefore research.
But China has now caught up with both Europe and the United States. 
Since 2024, it has led the world in newly approved medicines. 
Medicines that are the result of research and clinical trials conducted entirely in China are, on the European market, no longer an exception.
That shift carries a further risk for Europe. 
When clinical trials move elsewhere, the rest of the system tends to follow, leaving European patients with less early access to new treatments, and our hospitals and research institutions with less expertise.
China stimulates research with a far more generous tax regime: fiscal support for R&D stands at 32 per cent there, twice the European average of 16 per cent.
But China goes further than that.
It shields its market and pumps far more public money into its industry than Europe does – according to the OECD, three to nine times as much.
That is a strategy that distorts the global market, and Europe lacks the means to put anything comparable up against it – even if we wanted to.
We shall therefore have to rely on the strength of our companies and our market.
And that strength is well served by faster access, less fragmentation and greater appeal to investment.
Belgium intends to remain a leading destination for clinical research — and that means cutting red tape, with simpler and faster regulation and far closer cooperation between the clinical-trials college, the ethics committees and our researchers.
But on a European level, the unification of the single market and the realisation of the Savings and Investment Union are indispensable.
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Ladies and gentlemen,
Faster, simpler procedures and a stronger investment climate are levers for our biopharmaceutical industry.
But all our efforts to build a clear European policy for the sector as a strategic objective would be worthless without fertile ground.
And that ground is our researchers, our experienced workers, and the companies that underpin our pharmaceutical industry.
It is they who deserve our recognition – and our support
I am deeply honoured to share in this anniversary.
But we must not rest on our laurels.
If we want there still to be something to celebrate a few decades from now, then there is work to be done.
I, for one, have taken up that task as Prime Minister with both hands.
And I know that everyone in this room is ready to do the same.
Centuries ago, no one took up Jan Baptist van Helmont's wager to put a questionable practice to a proper test.
Let us not make the same mistake today.
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Ladies and gentlemen,
One last thing.
Everywhere I go these days, people ask me whether I have not brought my cat Maximus along.
Now, you should know that Maximus suffers from feline immunodeficiency and is not allowed to leave the Wetstraat.
I had rather hoped that Novartis might be working on a remedy for Maximus.
If even a Neanderthal could have his toothache seen to 60,000 years ago, then surely – surely! – there had to be someone at a pharmaceutical giant like Novartis working on Maximus's condition.
But that hope was short-lived.
Because Novartis, I discovered, quietly got rid of its animal-health division some years ago.
It passed to an American peer and is now part of an independent company. 
That company also has an office in this country.
Not here in Puurs… but in Antwerp, of all places.
You could have been working on a cure by now.
Instead, Maximus remains under house arrest.
I’ll let you reflect on that.
I wish you, nonetheless, a fruitful exchange and a most enjoyable reception.
Thank you.