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Résumé :
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The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) is an EU agency responsible for detecting and assessing communicable diseases. However, due to member states’ reluctance to relinquish control over public health, the Centre’s powers have historically been limited, including a ban on offering advice about how to manage public health risks. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the ECDC’s mandate was expanded, formally ending the paradox of assessing threats without being allowed to provide guidance on how to address them. Yet, even prior to this change, the Centre had occasionally issued recommendations for managing specific health threats, such as the 2002 SARS-CoV-1 outbreak, HIV/AIDS, antimicrobial resistance (AMR), and the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. This study is thus concerned with the ECDC’s empowerment. Tracing the ECDC’s empowerment through time tells the story of the emergence of infectious diseases as a field of EU politics. This book explores the puzzle of the ECDC’s empowerment by examining the role of reputation in this process. Over more than two decades, the Centre’s reputation has played a crucial role in helping actors engage in inferential processes that shape the Centre’s scientific role in disease control. The findings of this study suggest that a power-centred approach is, paradoxically, the most effective way to ensure that even the EU’s least powerful agencies undergo rigorous scientific scrutiny, and that even with heavy legal constraints, there is a path for European agencies for a form of discreet empowerment. (4ème couv.)
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