The country of Pasteur finally has its own vaccine against Covid-19. The European Medicines Agency announced on Thursday the marketing authorization for the VidPrevtyn vaccine, produced by the French company Sanofi. This authorization only concerns booster doses “in adults previously vaccinated with an mRNA or adenoviral vector vaccine against Covid-19”, specifies the EMA in a press release.
“Sufficiently robust data on the quality, safety and immunogenicity of the vaccine are now available to recommend its marketing authorization in the EU”, writes the European health agency in its press release, noting a stronger effectiveness of the booster dose against the Omicron variant of Covid-19 for the Sanofi vaccine than that of Pfizer.
Still more permissions to get
The vaccine will not be administered immediately. After this authorization from the European agency, it is up to the European Commission to give its approval. According to its website, this Thursday, 300 million doses had been ordered from the manufacturer (against 2.4 billion for Pfizer, for comparison). Once dubbed, the Sanofi vaccine will also have to be examined, in France, by the High Authority for Health for it to be truly authorized.
“It is, it must be recognized, a failure (…) compared to the speed that was needed”, admitted last May the boss of Sanofi, Serge Weinberg. The French group’s vaccine comes a little less than two years after the authorization in Europe of the Pfizer vaccine, the first which had been authorized, and while now more than 81% of French people have received at least one dose of vaccine since the launch of the vaccination campaign.