More than 100 vaccines for COVID-19 are currently undergoing clinical or preclinical trials across the globe. One of the firms leading the way is Sanofi, which had produced a vaccine for the original SARS virus (SARS-CoV), identified in 2003. This vaccine, which never made it to market, is now being repurposed to treat COVID-19, according to the firm.
Market Rivals Turn Into Partners
Sanofi made headlines on 18 February by announcing a joint partnership with the US Department of Health to work on creating a safe and effective vaccine against COVID-19.
Two months later, in a joint press release Sanofi and global pharmaceutical giant GSK announced that they would begin cooperating on vaccine development, with a view to completing the project by the end of 2021.
"By combining our scientific expertise, technologies, and capabilities, we believe that we can help accelerate the global effort to develop a vaccine to protect as many people as possible from COVID-19", GSK CEO Emma Walmsley said in the press release.
GSK's spokesperson in Belgium, Elisabeth Van Damme, revealed to Sputnik the challenges of producing the required number of doses to protect the world's population.
"To give you an indication of production, all our units producing vaccines in the world, in the USA and Europe, are now producing about two million doses of vaccines (all sorts of vaccines together) per day. In other words, 14 million doses a week. But it is the total production, of all vaccines. Sanofi must produce about the same number. It will be quite a challenge to ramp up production, once a vaccine is developed and reach that level of two million per day for the single COVID-19 vaccine", Van Damme said.
Consequently, other firms will also have to get their vaccines produced and tested in a timely manner to meet the massive global demand, the GSK spokesperson said.
"There will be other vaccines, developed by other laboratories, but if we make the exercise for Europe, with a single producer, at the tempo of two million does per day, it would take nearly a year to deliver the vaccines needed for the European population of 738 million people (including Russia but not Turkey)", Van Damme said.
Dispute Develops Over Deliveries
Heads turned once again on Wednesday, when Sanofi CEO Paul Hudson said in an interview with Bloomberg that the US would be the first in line to receive any vaccine, given that it had provided the initial funding.
These comments were met with severe backlash in France, not least from Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, who hit back at the firm on Thursday.
"As indicated by @EmmanuelMacron, a vaccine against COVID-19 should be a public measure for the globe. Equal access for everyone to the vaccine is non-negotiable. I just reminded Serge Weinberg, who is the chair of Sanofi, this large and deeply French company. He gave me all the necessary assurances regarding the French distribution of a potential Sanofi vaccine", the prime minister wrote on Twitter.
Je viens de le rappeler à Serge Weinberg qui préside @Sanofi, cette grande entreprise profondément française. Il m’a donné toutes les assurances nécessaires quant à la distribution en France d’un éventuel vaccin Sanofi.
— Edouard Philippe (@EPhilippePM) May 14, 2020
One day later, the French broadcaster BFMTV, which cited presidential sources, said that Emmanuel Macron himself has scheduled a meeting with Sanofi's leadership next week to discuss the matter.
Other Sanofi officials have already backtracked from Hudson's comments. The pharmaceutical firm's French president Olivier Bogillot has made numerous appearances on French television in recent days, stating that while the US will not be prioritised, they respected Washington's investment of 300 million euros ($324 million) to fund the research.
Despite this and the fact that Sanofi is only 37.3 percent owned by French shareholders, officials in Paris have continued to put pressure on the firm.
"The question today is not who will benefit first from the vaccine, the question is who will find the vaccine first … I think it was an awkward turn of phrase [from Hudson] taken out of context, and I was rather reassured by the phone call I had with the boss of Sanofi this morning", Olivier Veran, France's health minister, said on Friday.
"Sanofi is of French origin but its financial shareholders are today mainly located in the United States. So, it is perfectly normal, according to the law, that the company will give priority to the United States, and France will only be served second. This is especially true since the US Department of Health has paid for this research", Lebreton told Sputnik.
According to the lawmaker, the latest developments are indicative of Macron's support for splitting up large French companies and allowing foreign ownership.
"Macron pretends that he is discovering this grim reality when he is, in fact, one of those who accepted and organised this ‘de-francisation’ of large French companies! The list of French state companies that fell into foreign hands under his tenure as Minister of the Economy and Industry is very long", Lebreton remarked.
Concerns Across the Bloc
Italian lawmakers in Brussels also shared the concerns of their French counterpart and told Sputnik that a lack of clarity remains over when vaccines will be made available and how they will be distributed.
"Besides the fact that we do not know who will produce the vaccine and when it will be available, which will cause a great cacophony once again in Europe, with the European Commission once again being unprepared, there are other issues … Once we have a vaccine, will you force everyone to take it? Many in the population will refuse. What will do you then? The other question is geopolitical. Whoever will receive it first could use it as a political weapon, and if so, what will be the reaction from Europe?", Pietro Fiocchi, a member of the European Parliament from the party Fratelli d’Italia, told Sputnik.
According to Five Star Movement MEP Piernicola Pedicini, the importance of a vaccine at this time is perhaps overstated, and more work needs to be done to develop effective treatments for those that have already contracted the disease.
"Vaccines are a good health solution as a prevention policy, applied to healthy people, but it is not for now and not for the people who are sick and dying. We have emergency cases now and treatments exist, but the EU is not funding them! Therapies such as hyperimmune plasma transfusion have proven efficient. In Pavia and Mantua hospitals this treatment cures 100 percent of the sick", Pedicini told Sputnik.
The Five Star lawmaker added that it is not in pharmaceutical companies' interests to develop an already-existing treatment that does not require the use of drugs or vaccines.
"Unfortunately this runs into the obstacle and resistance of the pharmaceutical industry which evidently has no economic return in this therapeutic solution. It's a scandal, we have the solution at hand. We can cure people who are going to die. We can save our economy with this solution but we must absolutely avoid a situation where pharmaceutical companies are running the show and only promote costly solutions", he added.
GSK, Sanofi Working Nonstop
The vaccine that Sanofi and GSK are working on, with the hope of delivering next year, has two active elements. The first of these elements is the antigen, on which Sanofi is working and which is similar to antigens that have already been developed for other coronaviruses.
The other active element, the adjuvant, is being prepared by GSK in Belgium. The adjuvant makes it possible for pharmaceutical firms to use a smaller quantity of antigen, which in turn makes it possible to increase the number of vaccines produced.
According to GSK's spokesperson in Belgium, Elisabeth Van Damme, the pharmaceutical giant is also working on other projects to produce a vaccine across the world.
"GSK has signed other agreements, with other laboratories that are working nonstop on vaccine production, in Europe, the USA, and Australia, so that our adjuvant can also be used with others. Sanofi is our sixth contract in this field. The first was with an Australian university laboratory that works with other pharmaceutical companies. There will probably be several vaccines made available in the same period of time across the globe", she said.
During such an epidemiological crisis, historical rivalries between pharmaceutical firms have been thrown out of the window, the spokesperson stated.
"For this pandemic, we are not really thinking about our competing companies. We are all focused on the same common goal and we are cooperating to be able to produce hundreds of millions of vaccine doses as early as possible next year", Van Damme concluded.
Europe is patiently waiting for a vaccine so life can get back to normal after almost three months of disruption amid the COVID-19 pandemic. European lawmakers have pushed for a vaccine to be ready by the start of 2021, although many pharmaceutical firms have said that at least 12 months of clinical tests will be required to assess the immediate and medium-term impacts of any vaccine.
Whatever the case, the number of cases and deaths in Europe continues to increase, and while many countries are claiming to already be past the peak of their outbreaks, health challenges still remain.
