The Covid-19 vaccine developed by pharmaceutical company Sanofi will likely be administered to Americans first before the rest of the world.

If and when the French pharmaceutical giant can successfully deliver one, the United States government will get first dibs even ahead of France, the CEO of the company explained.

CEO Paul Hudson told Bloomberg that’s because the U.S. was first in line to fund Sanofi’s vaccine research.

“The U.S. government has the right to the largest pre-order because it’s invested in taking the risk,” Hudson said.

The U.S. expanded a vaccine partnership with the company in February, and it would expect “that if we’ve helped you manufacture the doses at risk, we expect to get the doses first”, Hudson added.

While funding from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority puts the U.S. first in line, the country may be only days or weeks ahead of everyone else.

BARDA has so far given US$30 million for Sanofi’s programme.

Other countries also trying

China has also mobilised efforts to develop a vaccine.

“So those two powerhouse economies will be vaccinated first, which is why it became so important to try to create a debate in Europe to say, ‘Don’t let Europe be left behind’,” Hudson said.

He also warned that Europe risks falling behind unless it steps up efforts to seek protection against a pandemic that’s killed more than 290,000 people worldwide.

French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel spearheaded a US$8 billion fund drive to support equitable distribution.

But a pecking order has been established based on national support for research.

Supplies of an experimental shot from the University of Oxford will be prioritised for the U.K. before other parts of the world.

This was confirmed by Pascal Soriot, CEO of AstraZeneca Plc, which will make the vaccine.

Unable to meet global demand

Many vaccine projects aim to deliver shots in 2021, with some targeting limited availability for health-care workers and other vulnerable groups as early as this fall.

Sanofi has two Covid-19 vaccine projects under way.

The one that’s being funded by BARDA builds on past development work involving the SARS epidemic and technology it already employs in one of its flu vaccines.

Sanofi also has a separate coronavirus vaccine candidate under development with Translate Bio Inc., which uses so-called messenger RNA technology to prompt the body to make a key protein from the virus, sparking an immune response.

Even if both vaccines prove successful, Sanofi likely can’t meet global demand alone.

More than 100 other candidates are being developed in nations from the U.S. to Germany to China.

Some experimental vaccines have already begun human testing.

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