“Sanofi and GSK will seek regulatory approval for their vaccine against (the) Covid-19” in the United States and in the European Union, the two groups announced in a press release, after trials carried out with thousands of people.
The laboratories, which have not yet made public the studies on which these results are based, reported that this vaccine had been shown to be effective in avoiding any hospitalization linked to Covid-19.
They also reported slightly more than 50% effectiveness against all infections causing symptoms.
This is "comparable to the effectiveness of vaccines already available", underlined Sanofi, in a context where all existing vaccines have lost their effectiveness against contamination over time, in particular since the rise at the end of 2021 of the Omicron variant.
This announcement, which paves the way for an imminent marketing on the condition of a green light from the health authorities, marks the culmination of a long soap opera for Sanofi, which has recorded several setbacks in its anti-Covid vaccine projects. .
The French group has had to twice push back its schedule for this vaccine, which it originally hoped to make available before mid-2021.
He first recorded a delay of six months, because of a problem of dosage, then another because of the difficulties in finding people never contaminated to carry out reliable tests.
Sanofi has also given up on another anti-Covid vaccine project, based on messenger RNA technology like those developed by Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna, already at the heart of vaccination campaigns in many Western countries.
The vaccine on which the French group is now focusing uses a slightly less innovative technology, based on a recombinant protein, like the vaccine from the American Novavax, which will begin to be distributed in France.
Health officials are hopeful that these vaccines will be able to be welcomed by people wary of messenger RNA technology, while insisting that such fears are unfounded.
© 2022 AFP