European Medicines Agency approves Valneva vaccine for 18-50 year olds

A new weapon in the fight against Covid-19. The European Medicines Agency (EMA) approved the coronavirus vaccine from the Franco-Austrian laboratory Valneva for people aged 18 to 50 on Thursday, June 23. It thus becomes the sixth anti-Covid vaccine recommended for adults in the European Union, and has yet to obtain its marketing authorization.

The vaccine Valneva is an inactivated virus vaccinethe historical method of designing a vaccine. These vaccines contain “the disease-carrying virus or bacteria, or one very similar to it”details the World Health Organization (WHO), the dangerous elements being inactivated or killed “using chemicals, heat or radiation”. The virus thus becomes unable to cause disease. This is one of the arguments put forward by the laboratory, which believes that this technology could convince people who have not yet been vaccinated.

Valneva has come a long way: the British government had ordered 100 million doses from it before terminating its contract in September 2021, causing the company’s share price to fall on the stock market. In May, the EU announced that it was considering doing the same given the amount of vaccines already available worldwide, despite an agreement for 60 million doses by 2023. In response, Valneva proposed a plan to assuage the fears of the European Commission, before calling on European countries to order even more vaccines to be able to maintain this contract, on Friday.

This vaccine is therefore added to the five already approved within the EU: messenger RNA vaccines from the American groups Pfizer and Moderna, those with viral vectors from the Swedish-British laboratory AstraZeneca and its American competitor Johnson & Johnson, and the Novavax vaccine, with recombinant protein.