The Valneva vaccine has not yet been approved by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), but the jab was trialled in the UK. Valneva is also being used in the world's first Covid vaccine booster trial. The French pharmaceutical company will deliver their vaccine to the UK first, as the EU and France failed to pre-order doses.

       The Valneva vaccine has already been pre-ordered by the UK Government, with manufacturing taking place in Livingston, Scotland.

       Reports suggest the UK has secured an order for 190 million doses over five years.

       Delivery of the first 60 million of the 100 million doses ordered by the UK Government is scheduled to continue into the first quarter of next year, with the rest also due for delivery in 2022.

       British authorities have options for a further 90 million doses to be delivered between 2023 and 2025 that would bring the total value of the order up to €1.4billion (￡1.2bn).

       READ MORE: EU panic after Nordic nationalists vowed to 'tear bloc apart'

       However, in a blunder for the EU and France, no agreement has been reached with Valneva to deliver vaccine doses to the bloc.

       Discussions started at the beginning of 2020 were aborted, on the grounds that "the French company had not fulfilled the conditions" for marketing in Europe.

       In an interview in April, after Valneva had called off the talks, Chief Executive Officer Thomas Lingelbach said they had gone “in circles” without progress

       Valneva indicates on its site that discussions resumed with the European Commission in January, and are "still ongoing" in July 2021.

       Valneva’s President Franck Grimaud previously said he is ready to consider the production of his vaccine elsewhere than in Scotland, if the discussions are successful with the EU.

       At the beginning of May, a dozen European countries, including France and Germany, indicated that they wanted to order vaccines themselves rather than through the bloc’s procurement system.

       Fabien Semat, national Union Populaire Républicaine (UPR) TV manager, questioned whether “the French vaccine soon to be banned in France?”

       It marks the latest vaccine procurement blow to the EU and France, after all 27 member states agreed to a joint procurement scheme in June last year.

       In January 2021, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) approved the use of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine for all age groups, but a number of EU countries initially refused to recommend its use for people over 65.

       In March, the polling company YouGov suggested that only a third of Germans and 23 percent of French respondents considered it safe.

       The bloc was also slow to agree terms with AstraZeneca, which led expected deliveries in the first quarter of this year to be cut.

       The EU took AstraZeneca to court to force it to deliver more doses of vaccine, but lost after the company blamed production problems and insisted it had "fully complied" with its contract.