French drug maker Valneva has not met the EU’s conditions to reach a deal to supply a Covid-19 vaccine to the bloc, the EU Commission said. The company has signaled it would switch to bilateral talks with member states instead.
“When companies want their vaccines to be integrated in our vaccines portfolio, a certain set of conditions has to be respected,” an EU Commission spokesperson told a news conference on Thursday.
The terms include a “solid protection in the areas of liability safety, effectiveness of the vaccine and also solid rules and arrangements for the delivery of the vaccines,” according to the spokesperson. Despite the lengthy negotiation process, the company has failed to find common ground with the bloc.
While the EU, apparently, still remains open for further talks, Valneva has already signaled it would rather discontinue them. On Wednesday, the company said it had switched to bilateral talks with the governments of an unspecified number of EU member-states after failing to secure a deal with the bloc as a whole.
“We’ve committed significant time and effort to try to meet the needs of the central EC procurement process. Despite our recent clinical data, we have not made meaningful progress and have not yet secured a supply agreement. We are therefore now focusing our efforts on those European Union member states, and interested parties outside the EU, who would like to include our inactivated approach within their vaccination strategy,” the drug maker’s CEO Thomas Lingelbach said in a statement.
The drug maker and the EU concluded exploratory talks back in January, agreeing in principle on a delivery of a 60 million doses batch of the vaccine. Thirty million of said batch would be optional for the bloc to purchase.
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