The Big Question: Can France Catch Up in the Covid Vaccine Race?
A Q&A with economist Margaret Kyle on the country’s failure to develop a vaccine and the obstacles standing in the way of French innovation.
France doesn’t have enough shots.
Photographer: Photo by ALAIN JOCARD/AFP via Getty Images
This is one of a series of interviews by Bloomberg Opinion columnists on how to solve today’s most pressing policy challenges. It has been condensed and edited.
Lionel Laurent: Despite a rich history of scientific breakthroughs, from Louis Pasteur’s rabies vaccine to the discovery of HIV in the 1980s, France is the only permanent member of the UN Security Council not to have its own Covid-19 vaccine. Doses have been administered to just over 3% of the French population, below the European Union average and well behind the U.K. and U.S. You’re a French-American professor of economics in Paris and co-author of a Jan. 2021 report on the French pharmaceutical industry’s struggle to innovate. Is France’s lagging performance in the Covid vaccine race a case of bad luck, or something deeper?