Quote:
Originally Posted by papa smurf
French company has announced it will give Britain priority access to its vaccine rather than France.
A French start-up has received an order from the UK for 40 million doses of its vaccine this week – with London to now be given priority access to the jabs over Paris and the rest of the EU. The vaccine is expected to be in the UK by June this year but may not be available in France until 2022. President and Chief Business Officer of biotech company Valneva, Franck Grimaud, has estimated that the first vaccines will be delivered to the UK as soon as medical trials are complete, which he believes will be as early as June 2021.
However, vaccines are only likely to be available to the EU by approximately the beginning of 2022, even though the company is based in Saint-Herblain, Pays de la Loire, France.
The Council President of the Pays de la Loire region has angrily blamed French President Emmanuel Macron for a missed opportunity to provide the vaccine to local people.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world...lneva-jabs-spt |
I've been reading a bit about this and it's fascinating.
We didn't just place an order for 40 million vaccines, we placed an order for 40 million MORE vaccines from this company. Altogether it makes this vaccine, from a hitherto smaller company, our joint biggest vaccine alongside the Oxford one.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-55887264
One of the successes of our vaccine rollout so far hasn't just been that we got orders in quickly and in large numbers but that the ones we ordered provided to be successful. Now that could have just been luck, we were always likely to back the Oxford one for example, and Pfizer are a huge company.
But the fact we've invested so much money in a small French company based in Nantes of all places suggests someone was paying close attention to the various candidates. If this vaccine is effective, and the order of an additional 40 million along with production ramping up in Scotland suggests they think it is, then we've got more than enough vaccines to cover everyone in the U.K more than once.
I would be very interested to see how the U.K identified this company in particular and why they placed more orders for their vaccine than any other apart from the Oxford one.