Sanofi came last in the race to produce a vaccine against Covid-19 when on Thursday November 10th its product was the seventh to be approved for use by the European Commission. Yet the French group has come first in one contest - lobbying. Over the last two years it has outspent all its pharmaceutical rivals in its bid to exert influence on French and European public authorities.
According to calculations by Mediapart, which compared the money spent by each of the vaccine makers, Sanofi's total lobbying budget over that two year period was five million euros. In 2020 the group spent 1,125,000 euros trying to influence political decisions in France. And it spent even more in the following year, in particular on the lengthy and laborious process of ensuring that all went smoothly with the authorities once the initial agreements were in place. In the register of lobbyists run by the body that oversees transparency in French public life, the Haute Autorité pour la Transparence de la Vie Publique (HATVP), the 2021 figure was recorded as 1,375,000 euros.
And according to the European Commission's transparency register, the French multinational set aside exactly the same sum over the two year period to influence decisions made in Brussels.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Second to sign up, last to deliver
The tone was set right from the start. In the spring of 2020 Sanofi's chief executive officer Paul Hudson caused a stir when he announced that the group would reserve the first doses of any vaccine produced in the United States for the Americans. The game of bluff worked. The French group was the second pharmaceutical to whom the European Union turned, signing a contract with Sanofi on September 18th 2020, even before it reached agreement with Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna.
At the time US group Johnson & Johnson was also ahead of the eventual two main winners in contracts for vaccines against Covid-19. And the American firm was the second biggest spender on lobbying among vaccine producers too, just ahead of Pfizer. But the J&J product did at least arrive in time for the initial rounds of vaccination; which was not the case with Sanofi's own vaccine.
Nor is the French product, which is based on traditional technology, set to persuade the less than 7% of the population who - according to figures from the public health body Santé Publique France and the public health insurance authorities - have not yet got vaccinated. Indeed, in order to be eligible for the Sanofi vaccine, you need to be an adult and to have first been vaccinated with the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, AstraZeneca or Johnson & Johnson products.
But Sanofi was resourceful in being able, after many delays, to repurpose injections that had originally been intended as first vaccinations into booster shots. In all, France has bought 20 million doses of Sanofi's vaccines, more than a quarter of the entire European order from the group, at an estimated cost of nine euros a unit. The total bill for the French state thus stands at around 180 million euros, meaning that Sanofi's upfront lobbying investment of five million euros across all its products became profitable at a single stroke.
But does France actually need the Sanofi doses? As of October 5th France already had a stockpile of 38 million classic vaccines – based on the original strain of the virus – according to Mediapart's calculations using figures from the Ministry of Health. However, their expiry day is approaching and there's a risk they will have to be thrown away. In addition, the French state is also awaiting delivery by the end of the year of 38 million additional doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines which are adapted to the Omicron variant – unlike Sanofi's.
The French group chose to base its vaccine on the Beta variant of Covid which made a brief appearance in the spring of 2020. “Clinical trials have shown its ability to protect against the variants in circulation, including Omicron,” the group said. And the European Medicines Agency considers that “a booster dose of VidPrevtyn Beta [editor's note, the name of Sanofi's vaccine] is expected to be at least as effective as Comirnaty [editor's note, Pfizer's vaccine] at restoring protection against COVID-19”.
We don't have the same lobbying resources, we're a small company.
Another French pharmaceutical company – more precisely a Franco-Austrian one – Valneva obtained authorisation to market its vaccine in June 2022, even before Sanofi. However, its order from Europe was very nearly cancelled. Having become cautious after repeated delays in the past, the European Commission had stipulated that its pre-purchase contract with Valneva could be suspended if the company did not obtain the go-ahead from the medicines authorities within six months of its signature.
The Commission's initial deal with Sanofi, meanwhile, allowed for an end to the contract if the vaccine had not been approved within two years of signing, which meant a deadline of September 18th 2022. But the huge pharmaceutical group had protected its position even further and got an agreement included that it could still deliver its product within six months of the deadline expiring, as revealed in a redacted version of the contract. After a string of setbacks this was ultimately to rescue the situation for the company. Sanofi's persistence paid off: according to Mediapart's information, the EU paid it an advance of more than 300 million euros.
When asked how it could explain this apparent double standards in the treatment of different companies, the European Commission said that “in the course of negotiations with other companies the Commission was able to learn from its experience and introduce new contractual clauses in the contracts, such as the one about being conditional on obtaining authorisation”.
In the end the European order for Valneva's vaccine was reduced to the smallest share with just 1,250,000 doses bought and none by France itself. France already had a lot of stock and the Ministry of Health also explained that “the Valneva vaccine is authorised for use as a first vaccine for the age group 18-50, that narrows the field”.
“As the CEO of a French company I was very disappointed that France didn't order our vaccine. I was expecting a small order at least,” said Thomas Lingelbach, the chief executive officer of Valneva, who has just announced that the firm is to reduce its workforce by nearly a quarter. When asked how he would explain the difference between the way his firm and 'Big Pharma' groups such as Sanofi were treated, the Valneva boss said: “We don't have the same lobbying resources, we're a small company.”
Indeed, the European transparency register shows that Valneva spent between 100,000 and 200,000 euros on lobbying at a European level while the company does not even feature in the French lobbyist register at all. The company, which is based in the suburbs of Nantes in western France, managed to obtain just one meeting with a member of the European Commission. That was with the French commissioner Thierry Breton in March 2021. Sanofi has meanwhile had 26 meetings with the highest decision makers in the Commission since 2014, including five during the key year of 2020 when it called the EU's bluff.
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter
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