Sanofi to manufacture Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine in the US

Sanofi has entered an agreement to manufacture up to 200 million doses of Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine in the US.

Leveraging its manufacturing infrastructure at the Ridgefield site, Sanofi will be responsible for the fill-and-finish sterile manufacturing services and supply packaging of the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine in the country from September.

Moderna chief technical operations and quality officer Juan Andres said: “We welcome the opportunity to work with Sanofi on fill/finish manufacturing for the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine in the US.

“This additional production will help us continue to scale up our manufacturing capacity in the US.”

In January, Sanofi had agreed to provide support to BioNTech for producing 125 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for the EU.

Sanofi CEO Paul Hudson said: “We are one of the few pharmaceutical companies to leverage many industrial partnerships to improve global supply and access to Covid-19 vaccines, while also continuing to develop our two Covid-19 vaccine programmes.”

Meanwhile, the US will begin to share up to 60 million doses of the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine with other countries soon.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that there could be ten million doses cleared for export ‘in coming weeks.’ About 50 million more doses are currently being manufactured.

In another development, Gilead Sciences said that it will provide India at least 450,000 vials of its antiviral drug remdesivir and aid in increasing the drug production as the country is hit by a surge in Covid-19 cases.

Approved in India for restricted emergency use, remdesivir is indicated for treating severe Covid-19.

Seven Indian firms have licensed remdesivir from Gilead. All these firms were increasing up their batch sizes and adding new manufacturing facilities and local contract manufacturers.