London, Europe Brief News – A Covid-19 vaccine developed by the French pharmaceutical company Valneva has been given regulatory approval by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency.
As a total, Britain has approved the use of six jabs in the country.
As the Covid pandemic swept the world, scientists began developing vaccines against it, with the Pfizer/BioNTech jab being the first in the UK to be authorised for emergency use by the MHRA in 2020.
Since then the MHRA has approved the Moderna, Oxford/AstraZeneca, Janssen and Novavax vaccines, although, according to NHS England, Janssen and Novavax are not currently available.
The UK’s independent medicines regulator was the first in the world to approve the Valneva product, the MHRA said. Unlike the other approved Covid jabs, the Valneva vaccine is an inactivated whole-virus vaccine, which means the live virus was grown in a laboratory, rendered unable to infect cells, then administered to people to trigger an immune response.
The UK was due to receive 100 million doses of the jab, but the government cancelled the deal in September due to a “breach of obligations”.
The French company strenuously denied the government’s accusation.
The MHRA said this approach was already being used for flu and polio vaccines and experts have previously suggested that Covid jabs based on the whole virus may result in a broader immune response than those that involve only the spike protein, and may work better against new variants.
Results released by Valneva in October suggested the vaccine could be as effective as the Oxford jab. In addition, it is stable when stored in a standard refrigerator, which could make it easier to distribute than some other Covid jabs.
