Sanofi and the US Department of Health and Human Services announced in February that they had partnered up to advance a novel coronavirus vaccine.

Olivier Bogillot, Sanofi’s chief in France, rowed back Hudson’s comments on Thursday morning, telling BFMTV the US would not be prioritised and that the company has “always been committed in these unprecedented circumstances to make our vaccine accessible to everyone”.

But, he also said, that “it is true that we have started working with the US government”.

“The US government mobilised itself very quickly” by giving the company “several hundred millions of euros” to help the company accelerate the search for a vaccine against the deadly pandemic.

He added that the company is currently in talks with the EU as well as individual member states including France and Germany “to speed things up”.

“You know developing a vaccine takes 10 years. The challenge here is that we have 18 to 24 months. It requires us to go very fast on two fronts: investments must be made because we need to produce millions of doses very quickly, and regulatory support. We must be able to pass the regulatory stages in order to make this vaccine available very quickly,” he also said.
Sanofi is one of the world’s top vaccine manufacturers, supplying one billion doses to combat various infectious diseases annually.

In an unusual move, it joined forces with rival GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) last month to ramp up development and production of a COVID-19 vaccine.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), over 120 vaccines against COVID-19 have been proposed around the world. Six are currently in clinical evaluation and about 70 are in pre-clinical evaluation

Related.Coronavirus vaccine: Pharma giants GSK and Sanofi team up to find COVID-19 solution