“We hope to be able to have the final registration from the European Medicines Agency at the end of April”, indicated its director general Franck Grimaud.
Soon a first French anti-Covid vaccine on the market? The serum developed by the Valneva laboratory, based in Saint-Herblain, near Nantes, should be delivered to Europe, including France, “probably in May“, declared Thursday evening its general manager Franck Grimaud on Franceinfo. “We hope to be able to have the final registration by the European Medicines Agency at the end of April.“, he said, for “first deliveries to Member States a few weeks later».
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The Franco-Austrian biotech plans to participate in both the primary and booster vaccination campaigns. “We immediately hope to participate in the first vaccination of unvaccinated people, there are still 3 to 4 million in France, ten million in Germany for example“said Franck Grimaud. “The issue immediately behind are the reminders, which will probably become annual, like the flu“, he underlined.
Unlike the two main vaccines used in France, those from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, Valneva’s product does not use messenger RNA technology but the more traditional inactivated virus technology. Such an effective technique, according to Franck Grimaud. “In terms of the antibodies that we generate, we are at the level of messenger RNA vaccines.Used for several decades in the pharmaceutical sector, it could also convince recalcitrants to messenger RNA and viral vector technology, also recent, used by AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson.
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“Between 15 and 22 euros” the dose
Franck Grimaud also confirmed that he had signed an agreement with the European Commission for the supply of “60 million dosesto around 20 EU Member States,including 24 million firm doses ordered this year“. Valneva has not communicated on the price of its vaccine. On Franceinfo, the director general of biotech only took up the range mentioned in the agreement with Brussels, i.e. “between 15 and 22 euros” the dose. For comparison, Pfizer charges 19.50 euros per dose, and Moderna 21.50 euros.
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The Kingdom of Bahrain has also ordered one million doses of the vaccine from the Franco-Austrian laboratory. “Other negotiations are in progress in the Middle East, in Southeast Asia, in Latin America. We hope to sign other agreements by the end of the year“, informed the boss of the company to the 800 employees, adding that his vaccine was also “being registered in the UK».
London had however terminated last September a contract for 100 million doses. However, the British state has “heavily supported“the development of the Valneva vaccine, emphasized Franck Grimaud, providing the laboratory with grants to carry out its clinical trials and then to build a factory in Scotland, “which will have the capacity to produce 100 million doses, with the first doses coming out in the second half».