#Covid19 #Hipra #Sanofi #Moderna #Pfizer.. #vaccines #fall
Four new vaccines could appear on the French vaccine scene next fall. From Pfizer to Moderna, passing through the Spanish Hipra and the French Sanofi, all are likely to fight more effectively against the variants of the Omicron family. These have not yet been approved by the health authorities.
It was a promise of months. Last January, the general director of the Pfizer laboratory, Albert Bourla, promised a “new generation” vaccine that would make it possible to fight against the new variants of SARS-CoV-2. The US firm was then given until March to develop its 2.0 vaccine.
Also read:
Covid-19 vaccines: Moderna sues Pfizer/BioNTech for patent infringement
The continuation ? No new vaccine in March and a new promise, that of developing an effective vaccine against all variants of the Omicron family in the fall. Thus, on September 1, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) will finally examine the new “bivalent vaccines” from Pfizer/BioNTech, which continue to use messenger RNA technology. The American firm has already made an urgent request to the American Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to validate and authorize the marketing of its new product. The objective: first deliveries in September in the United States, to ensure that this new vaccine is authorized before the BA.4 and BA.5 variants of the Omicron family, already the majority in almost the entire world, are replaced by other variants, more resistant to vaccines.
Also read:
Covid-19: what if the tuberculosis vaccine also protected against coronavirus?
“Given the continuing evolution of SARS-CoV-2 and its variants, it is very important that vaccines can be quickly adapted to Omicron’s main circulating lines,” said Ugur Sahin, CEO and co-founder of BioNTech. So we had to speed up the paperwork. Thus, in the United States, this new vaccine is likely to be licensed without any verification of clinical results in humans. The practice does not enjoy consensus within the scientific community: some researchers claim that the vaccine could be less effective than expected.
New candidates on the list
Other vaccines, which are still awaiting approval from the health authorities, could also appear in the French vaccine landscape in the fall. This is the case, among others, of Moderna’s “new generation” vaccine, which since July 22 is subject to evaluation by the European Medicines Agency.
Here are the vaccines that are available today and those that are expected in France.
In addition, the European Commission announced last week that it had ordered no less than 250,000 doses of the Spanish Hipra vaccine, which uses so-called “recombinant protein” technology. This still needs to be validated by the European authorities.
Also read:
Cancer: what if RNA vaccines could fight the disease?
The last on the list, the Sanofi group, which developed its vaccine with the British manufacturer GSK, submitted a marketing authorization application to the EMA last March. The French group states that a booster dose would be 72% effective against symptomatic forms with the Omicron variant.