It is the sixth vaccine against Covid-19 recommended for adults in the twenty-seven countries of the European Union. The European Medicines Agency (EMA) approved, Thursday, June 23, the vaccine against the coronavirus of the Franco-Austrian biotech Valneva.
“The European Medicines Agency has recommended granting marketing authorization for the vaccine” from Valneva for people “aged 18 to 50,” the European regulator said in a statement. “After a thorough assessment, the EMA’s Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use concluded by consensus that the data on the vaccine were robust and met EU criteria for efficacy, safety and quality,” he added.
The Franco-Austrian biotechnology company Valneva, based near Nantes, is developing an inactivated virus vaccine, a more traditional technology than that of messenger RNA. This is also one of the arguments put forward by the laboratory to promote its vaccine, which believes that the latter could convince people not yet vaccinated.
Serial disappointments
Valneva has multiplied the disappointments for this vaccine: in September 2021, the British government, which had placed an order for 100 million doses, terminated its contract, which had caused the stock market price of the company to fall. In May 2022, it was the turn of the European Union, with which Valneva had an agreement for 60 million doses by 2023, to let it be known that it was considering terminating its order, in a context of significant global production.
In response, Valneva has proposed a plan to try to remedy the situation in an acceptable way and which the European Commission must consider. Nth episode in this soap opera: last Friday, the laboratory called for more orders of its vaccine from European countries in order to be able to maintain this contract.
Five other vaccines have been approved in the European Union: messenger RNA vaccines from the American groups Pfizer and Moderna, those from the Swedish-British laboratory AstraZeneca and its American competitor Johnson
