France fumes as Sanofi reserves first shipment of vaccine to US

Paris: The French government cried foul Thursday after pharmaceutical giant Sanofi said it would reserve first shipments of any COVID-19 vaccine for the United States, saying the move would be "unacceptable" in a crisis that has killed nearly 300,000 people worldwide.

The French multinational's chief executive Paul Hudson said Wednesday that the US would get first dibs because its government was helping to fund its vaccine research. "The US government has the right to the largest pre-order because it's invested in taking the risk," Hudson told Bloomberg News.

"That's how it will be because they've invested to try and protect their population, to restart their economy," he said. "I've been campaigning in Europe to say the US will get vaccines first."

His comments drew outrage from officials and health experts, who noted that Paris-headquartered Sanofi has benefited from tens of millions of euros in research credits from the French state in recent years. "For us, it would be unacceptable for there to be privileged access to such and such a country for financial reasons," France's deputy finance minister Agnes Pannier-Runacher told Sud Radio Thursday.

Pannier-Runacher said she had immediately contacted the group after the comments from Hudson, a British citizen who took over as Sanofi's chief last year. "The head of Sanofi's French division confirmed to me that a vaccine would be available in every country and obviously... to the French as well, not least because it has production capacity in France," she said.

France's higher education minister, Frederique Vidal, said Sanofi's plan to give the United States priority access would be "incomprehensible and disgraceful" since a successful vaccine must be "a public good for the world."