Sanofi questions market for COVID vaccines after pandemic

Sanofi offered a surprisingly low projection of the future need for COVID vaccines, saying boosters will be required only once every three to five years.

By 2024, the COVID vaccine market will likely peak at around 500 million doses a year, and people’s immunity will be more durable and the virus will evolve, he said. Thomas triumph, head of the French pharmaceuticals vaccine unit, at an investor event on Wednesday.

“It is very difficult to predict what will happen in a couple of years“Triomphe said. “I suspect it will be very low. But again it’s a crystal ball game”.

Typically a leader in vaccines, Sanofi lagged behind first-generation COVID vaccines using novel messenger RNA technology. The product of Pfizer Inc. and its partner BioNTech SE It has been particularly in demand, and Pfizer recently projected $ 36 billion in sales for this year.

In the future, vaccine manufacturers will need to develop mRNA vaccines that are as well tolerated as more established products, especially if technology is to advance flu vaccines, the company said.

Sanofi also sees little benefit in developing a combination vaccine for COVID and influenza, in part because people will need boosters from COVID less often than annual flu shots, Triomphe said.

Sanofi hopes to release the results of the last phase of the trial of its own vaccine against COVID, which is based on recombinant protein technology used in its flu vaccines, by the end of this year. It will also publish data on its effectiveness as a universal booster, and the first results of that research are “very encouraging”Said the CEO, Paul Hudson, on Wednesday.

Sanofi is associated with GlaxoSmithKline Plc for that product, and the latter provides an adjuvant designed to enhance the immune response. The companies have commitments from European Union countries for 75 million doses, along with a partnership with the US government, which helped pay for development, Triomphe said.