The head of the Gavi Vaccine Alliance said confidence in an eventual COVID-19 vaccine would be boosted if political leaders were seen getting immunised, saying he was "quite disturbed" by highly-politicised campaigns against vaccination. AFP/Thibault Savary
The French government rounded on homegrown pharmaceutical giant Sanofi on Thursday after its CEO said a potential Covid-19 vaccine would go to the United States first.
The announcement by Sanofi’s CEO unleashed a torrent of indignation over equitable access to protection against a disease that has killed nearly 300,000 people worldwide.
President Emmanuel Macron’s office said it would hold talks with Sanofi executives at the Elysee Palace early next week, insisting that any vaccine must be considered “a global public good, which is not submitted to market forces.”
Sanofi’s chief executive Paul Hudson announced late on Wednesday that people in the United States would have priority because their government was helping to fund the company’s quest for a coronavirus vaccine.
“The US government has the right to the largest pre-order because it’s invested in taking the risk,” Hudson, a British citizen who took over as CEO last year, told Bloomberg News.
“That’s how it will be because they’ve invested to try and protect their population, to restart their economy,” he said. “I’ve been campaigning in Europe to say the US will get vaccines first.”
His comments drew outrage from officials and health experts, who pointed to the tens of millions of euros Sanofi has received in research credits from the French state.
“Equal access to this vaccine for all is not negotiable,” Prime Minister Edouard Philippe said on Twitter.
“For us, it would be unacceptable for there to be privileged access to such and such a country for financial reasons,” deputy finance minister Agnes Pannier-Runacher told Sud Radio.
NGOs accused Sanofi of trying to blackmail France and fuelling a race among major powers for an immunising shot at the expense of poorer nations.
“This shows the need to urgently set global rules on these future treatments that will guarantee that tests and treatments will not be patented, and be distributed fairly to all countries,” said Oxfam France, which called Sanofi’s plan “quite simply scandalous”.
Critics noted that Hudson’s veiled threat came just weeks after Sanofi announced a dividend payout of nearly four billion euros ($4.3 billion) despite net profit slumping 35 percent last year to 2.8 billion euros.
Some 140 former and current world leaders and health experts on Thursday called on officials to ensure that a coronavirus vaccine be made available “for all people, in all countries, free of charge.”
“Now is not the time to allow the interests of the wealthiest corporations and governments to be placed before the universal need to save lives,” said the signatories of an open letter ahead of the World Health Organization’s annual meeting next week.
Sanofi’s chief in France, Olivier Bogillot, tried to play down his boss’s comments, saying “the goal is to have this vaccine available to the US as well as France and Europe at the same time.”
But that would only be possible “if Europeans work as quickly as the Americans,” Bogillot told BFM television, saying the US government had pledged to spend “several hundreds of millions of euros.”
“The Americans have been effective in this period. The EU must be just as effective in helping us make this vaccine available quickly,” he said.
In April, Sanofi joined forces with Britain’s GlaxoSmithKline to work on a coronavirus vaccine, though trials have not yet started and the shot would be available toward the end of next year at the earliest.
Their project is funded in part by the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) of the US Department of Health and Human Services.
It is one of dozens of vaccine projects underway to combat the Covid-19 outbreak.
This month, the European Union spearheaded a global effort to raise about $8 billion for research on coronavirus vaccines, treatment and testing, but Washington has pointedly refused to participate.
US President Donald Trump has threatened to slash funding for the WHO, which he accused of acting too late on the Covid-19 outbreak.
Trump also said this month: “We are very confident that we’re going to have a vaccine… by the end of the year,” a prediction that few health experts consider likely.
For more news your way, download The Citizen’s app for iOS and Android.
Download our app and read this and other great stories on the move. Available for Android and iOS.
