His words set fire to the powder. The world director general of the French pharmaceutical group said Wednesday that the Americans would be served first if successful in the quest for a vaccine against Covid. This is the result of an agreement with the federal administration. "Equal access for all to the vaccine is not negotiable," responded Prime Minister Édouard Philippe. The president of Sanofi France, Olivier Bogillot, explains.
Can you say that the French will not be penalized compared to the Americans?
OLIVIER BOGILLOT. I want to reassure the French and the Europeans. If we have the capacity to put the vaccine into production all over the world, we will do it. Our goal is to make it accessible to everyone. The French will not be penalized in the delivery of vaccines.
But your CEO, Paul Hudson, says that due to an agreement signed with the US administration, it will be delivered first. Do you understand that this is shocking in France?
I understand that some are shocked. But there was a misunderstanding in the interpretation of Paul Hudson's words. This does not mean that other countries will not be delivered, on the contrary. The DG was right to sound the alarm. He simply recalled that the United States is very well organized and has moved ahead. They have an efficient structure called Barda (Editor's note: the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority is a department of the United States Department of Health) , which has been working with Sanofi and other laboratories since January. They provided us with hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to produce Covid vaccine in the United States. But we are not the only industrialist in this case, one of our competitors, Moderna, with Johnson & Johnson, received much more, of the order of $ 500 million.
Where are you with the French and European authorities?
We have asked for aid from the European Union since January too, but their response is much less coordinated. It drags on. President Emmanuel Macron is very active, we have good relations with the French government and that of Germany, but for the moment this is not enough to unblock the situation.
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Concretely, if you don't have this European aid, you cannot produce the vaccine in Europe?
Our goal is to do it, but it will be more complicated. We need the support of Europe of the same order as that which America brought us, that is to say several hundred million euros. Because vaccinating the European population also requires many other costs, such as producing a lot of syringes. We are also asking for regulatory easing in the EU, to shorten the registration procedures for the new vaccine, and we do not yet have clear answers, unlike what is happening in the USA. But we do hope that things end up moving forward.
But Sanofi already benefits from French state aid, in the form of the research tax credit ...
Yes, the research tax credit is a great tool, but it only saves us a hundred million euros a year. Here we are talking about investments of more than 1 billion, for the Covid vaccine, because it will be necessary to produce several hundred million doses. That is why there is urgency.
What is the status of Sanofi's Covid vaccine research?
Clinical trials should start at the end of 2020. We hope that a vaccine will be available to the public in 2022. Even if it is produced initially in our American factories, it can very quickly be manufactured in our French factories, notably on our Marcy sites. -l'Etoile in the Lyon region and in Val-de-Reuil in Eure.