There won't be any, because EU is by design and vote not meant to have any response. We're not United Federation of Europe; the EU explicitly doesn't dictate medical policy across member states.
You're closing 3 popups on every website because the authors of those websites are huge assholes. There is no need for a consent popup on a website unless the website is doing something shady. Perhaps the greatest failure of GDPR is that this point needs to be explained ad nauseam.
Anyway, this is irrelevant. EU was explicitly not meant to rule on healthcare-related matters for its member nations, so it's not ruling. That's a fact of the matter. Perhaps after all of this, people will vote to include healthcare into the EU's purview - and only then we'll be able to criticize its response to the next crisis.
No, those website authors are NOT assholes. They are providing awesome services I appreciate and take advantage of every day, otherwise I wouldn't visit them.
I don't know what you think they are doing shady, but it never bothered me. Until some EU-asshole decided to protect me from myself, I guess.
When everybody is breaking the law maybe it is the law that is broken, eh?
> They are providing awesome services I appreciate and take advantage of every day, otherwise I wouldn't visit them.
GDPR is there to ensure those awesome services aren't also taking advantage of you, by requiring them to disclose when they want to do so, and to ask you to explicitly agree to be taken advantage of. Clarity in business relationships is good, isn't it?
> When everybody is breaking the law maybe it is the law that is broken, eh?
Not necessarily, not when it's broken for profit and to the detriment of the parties that doesn't partake in that profit. Going by your law of reasoning, slavery and child labour should've never been banned (after all, "everyone" in plantations/factories would be found breaking that law), and environmental protections should've never existed either ("what do you say I can no longer dump toxic waste into the river?").
> GDPR is there to ensure those awesome services aren't also taking advantage of you
You still haven’t explained how exactly I was taken advantage of. Because I never had anything to complain about. On the contrary, I was quite happy until EU started "helping" me.
> Going by your law of reasoning, slavery and child labour should've never been banned
Are you really comparing logging visitor IP addresses to slavery, child labor and toxic waste???
> You still haven’t explained how exactly I was taken advantage of.
Every possible kind of data you radiate during your visit to such a site is collected and passed on to third parties that aggregate it to build a detailed profile of you, based on the information from sites you visit, services you use, games you play, places you shop, etc. That profile is nowadays primarily used to target you with advertising and direct marketing efforts - or, in other words, to suck money out of you, a little bit at a time. You're losing money because of this data collection - that's the primary reason for that collection in the first place - but it happens slowly and naturally, so you don't notice.
And then there's a good chance that such profile of you will eventually find its way to your insurance provider, healthcare provider, or that your government decides to take a step towards totalitarianism, and then they'll have everyone's digital twins available for the secret police for free. I agree that the last one is hypothetical, but not that hypothetical, all things considering.
> Are you really comparing logging visitor IP addresses to slavery, child labor and toxic waste???
No, I'm just showing the logical consequences of your "When everybody is breaking the law maybe it is the law that is broken, eh?" through examples that are a little bit more clear-cut.
Also, it's not "logging visitor IP" that causes the popup, it's "logging visitor IP, associating it with a bunch of UUIDs, and sending those UUIDs, along with whatever information the visitor's browser could gather and the server could give, to a bunch of third parties who also receive similar packets of information from other sites you visit". Also2, it's not "everybody", it's just businessmen. Normal people don't go around, record data about others without their knowledge or consent, and sell it to data brokers.
It's well established within the EU that healthcare is a handled on a national level, so the EU won't respond to COVID-19 like the US does on a federal level.
The countries within the EU all have responded to COVID-19 in some way or another.
More like the other. In the western states whistleblowers on cases like this are immediately punished and the documents are being put down. While in the more eastern states even some government agencies are independent enough to criticise wrong policies or coverups. The few German whistleblowers were immediately silenced, in Austria there are several, still open in the public. The best are internal documents about the government expert commission, which had to resign, as the chancellor mostly cared about publicity, not so about facts or expertise. I'm sure the same happened in Germany, here a high ranking interior ministry manager complained about media damage control of the culprit politicians, which would essentially cause more deaths than less. Doctors don't dare to speek out to keep their jobs. The government expert board is wholly incompentent coming up with fantasy projections every new week which is immediately proven wrong when the real data is coming out in the next week. The gathered raw data is not public, kept private, only the wrong models and projections are being published daily. There are exact and good models by competing universities, but they are not used. Institutes are playing politics, not science. Government offices are not independent.
The EU response to covid-19 is in vaccine development (funded by the EU and helped by freedom of movement for scientists); temporary restrictions on travel into the EU for non-essential purposes; coordinated effort around reducing restrictions; joint procurement and provision of medical equipment and PPE; increased production of PPE; €160m for startups with innovative ideas to tackle covid-19; an EU wide data platform; support for businesses during and after lockdowns; support for education; relaxation of state aid rules to allow governments to support businesses; coordination of freight transport across Europe with priority for items in high need; etc etc.
