Paris :
France’s Pasteur Institute announced on Monday it is abandoning its main COVID-19 vaccine project after clinical trial tests did not meet expectations.
The decision was made in coordination with its industrial partner, U.S. pharmaceutical company Merck, the statement said. The project was attempting to develop a COVID-19 vaccine based on an existing measles vaccine.
Pasteur’s statement stressed that first human trials showed “the vaccine candidate was well tolerated, but induced immune responses were inferior to those observed amid people who had recovered naturally and to those observed with approved COVID-19 vaccines.” The French institute said it will keep working on two other vaccine projects using different methods.
The announcement comes after France’s biggest pharmaceutical company Sanofi said last month that its potential vaccine, developed with its British partner GlaxoSmithKline, won’t be ready until late 2021 because the shot’s effectiveness in older people needed to be improved.
AstraZeneca to deliver more vaccines to its 27 nations and stick to initial promises, especially since it has invested in enhancing production capacity. EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen held urgent talks with AstraZeneca’s chief Monday. EU nations are also meeting with AstraZeneca to push to ramp up production and meet contractual targets. The European Medicines Agency is scheduled to review the Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine on Friday and its approval is hotly anticipated. Leaders across the EU are under heavy pressure for the bloc’s slow rollout of its vaccination plan, especially when compared to Israel or Britain.
