The French company Valneva, with which the European Commission had announced that it was on the verge of concluding a contract for the advance purchase of Covid-19 vaccines (see EUROPE 12635/3), indicated, on Tuesday 20 April, that it was “deprioritising” these negotiations.
It will now focus “on bilateral discussions” - with EU and non-EU countries - to supply its candidate vaccine (VLA2001), which recently showed positive results in its Phase 1/2 clinical trial.
“We’ve committed significant time and effort to try to meet the needs of the central European Commission procurement process. Despite our recent clinical data, we have not made meaningful progress and have not yet secured a supply agreement”, Valneva CEO Thomas Lingelbach said in a statement.
VLA2001 is expected to enter its Phase 3 clinical trial by the end of this month and Valneva aims to make market authorisation submissions in the autumn of 2021. In fact, 100 million doses have already been ordered by the UK government.
The company’s decision to fall back on a country-by-country negotiation comes at a time when the Commission now seems to want to give priority to mRNA vaccines (see EUROPE 12698/1), which do not include the inactivated VLA2001 vaccine.
“This does not mean that we would not consider other contracts with other companies using other technologies”, a spokesperson for the EU institution insisted last week. (Original version in French by Agathe Cherki)