EU authorizes use of Valneva vaccine, which uses inactivated virus

The European Commission has authorized the Covid-19 vaccine from the Franco-Austrian biotech Valneva, following the announcement the day before of the green light from the European Medicines Agency, Valneva said on Friday. VLA2001 is the first vaccine approved in Europe using traditional inactivated virus technology, and can only be used as a primary vaccination in adults aged 18 to 50, the statement said.

Five other vaccines have already been approved in the European Union: messenger RNA vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, those from the Swedish-British laboratory AstraZeneca and its American competitor Johnson & Johnson, which use a vector viral, and the Novavax vaccine, based on so-called protein subunit technology.

European order cancelled?

VLA2001 is also the first vaccine against Covid-19 to receive a standard type authorization, and not a conditional marketing authorization, as was the case for the five previous vaccines in the face of the emergency of the pandemic. . Valneva could therefore in theory begin to deliver the European Union, with which it signed an initial agreement at the end of 2021 for 60 million doses by 2023.

However, there are doubts about the maintenance of this order, since in May the EU announced that it was considering terminating it, in a context of significant global production. Last Friday, the biotech called for more orders from European countries in order to be able to maintain this contract. Valneva’s serum had already been approved in the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates and the Kingdom of Bahrain, the only country where it is currently marketed.