France starts this week to participate in the industrial puzzle which must, in a few months, make Europe autonomous in vaccines against Covid-19. The European Commissioner for the Internal Market, Frenchman Thierry Breton, visited the Corden Pharma factory on Sunday April 4, which employs 200 people in Chenôve (Côte-d’Or). It alone illustrates the globalized mechanics that reign in this sector.
What we produce in Chenôve are “Lipid precursors”
, one component among several hundred others. They are then shipped to another subsidiary in Colorado, which produces another type of lipid, the two are then incorporated by the American laboratory Moderna in its messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine, produced in Massachusetts and Switzerland.
On Wednesday April 7, the Delpharm plant in Saint-Rémy-sur-Avre (Eure-et-Loir) will begin bottling another mRNA vaccine, on behalf of BioNTech, the German partner of the American Pfizer.
Then, in April, the plant owned by the Swedish group Recipharm in Monts (Indre-et-Loire) will do the same with the Moderna vaccine, which it will receive frozen.
At the end of May, another mRNA vaccine produced by the German laboratory Curevac, must in turn be bottled in France in two factories in Fareva, in Pau (Pyrénées-Atlantiques) and Val-de-Reuil (Eure).
Sanofi and Valneva: later
Sanofi, French number 1 in the pharmaceutical industry and fifth in the world, will start packaging the Janssen vaccine in September in its factory in Marcy-L’Etoile (Rhône), one of the group’s twelve in France. The product of this subsidiary of the world number 1, the American Johnson & Johnson, is one of the five approved by Brussels, along with those of Moderna, AstraZeneca, CureVac and Pfizer-BioNTech (for which Sanofi will also be bottled at its factory in Frankfurt),
French factories will thus contribute to the marketing of 250 million doses, on behalf of the whole of the European Union and of the States to which exports are authorized. This without counting the two vaccines on which Sanofi is still working. Although one of the world leaders in vaccines, the French giant will not release the first of them until the end of the year, at “Recombinant protein”
, developed with the British GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). The second, mRNA, a technology in which Sanofi initially did not believe, was developed with the American laboratory Translate Bio and will not be available before 2022.
The vaccine developed by the Nantes laboratory Valneva should be developed sooner. But the first 60 million doses will go to the United Kingdom which, unlike Brussels, took the risk of financing it to the tune of 470 million euros, while its phase 2 results (out of three) will only be known. in April. Valneva, which already has a factory in Scotland, will build a second nearby.
However, Thierry Breton ensures that, thanks to the 53 production sites of the European Union, “its 450 million inhabitants will all be vaccinated by July 14 ». This despite the air gap caused only by AstraZeneca delivery faults
, accused of having unduly privileged the United Kingdom. With production capacity which will reach 3 billion doses per year
, compared to 1.2 billion today, Europe will be the world’s largest vaccine producer
.
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