French drugmaker says U.S. would get vaccine first, and Paris is outraged.

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The Sanofi headquarters in Paris in March.Credit...Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A government official in France said on Thursday that it would be unacceptable for the French drug giant Sanofi to give the United States early access to any Covid-19 vaccine it develops, after comments by the company’s chief executive suggested that America would be first in line because it helped finance the research.

“For us, it would be unacceptable if another country had privileged access under a financial pretext,” Agnès Pannier-Runacher, the junior economy minister, told Sud Radio.

Paul Hudson, Sanofi’s chief executive, told Bloomberg News on Wednesday that “the U.S. government has the right to the largest pre-order because it’s invested in taking the risk.”

Sanofi has received $30 million from an office of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Mr. Hudson said, adding that Europe needed to step up its vaccine investments.

“I’ve been campaigning in Europe to say the U.S. will get vaccines first,” he said. “That’s how it will be, because they’ve invested to try and protect their population, to restart their economy.”

Sanofi later said in a statement that it was “committed in these unprecedented circumstances to make our vaccine accessible to everyone.” It noted that it has manufacturing plants around the world, and that while production of a potential vaccine in America would mainly go to the U.S. market, “the rest of the manufacturing capacity will cover Europe and the rest of the world.”

The issue is a delicate one for President Emmanuel Macron, who has said repeatedly that France and the rest of Europe need to develop their “economic sovereignty” to depend less on the United States and China for strategic technological and medical goods.

Prime Minister Édouard Philippe said on Thursday that any Covid-19 vaccine would be a “global public good.”

“Equal access to the vaccine for all is nonnegotiable,” Mr. Philippe said on Twitter, calling Sanofi a “great” and “profoundly French” company. Mr. Philippe said he had spoken with Serge Weinberg, the chair of Sanofi’s board of directors, who gave him “all the necessary assurances as to the distribution of a potential Sanofi vaccine in France.”

Dozens of current and former world leaders signed an open letter on Thursday urging the World Health Assembly, the W.H.O.’s policymaking body, to ensure that any coronavirus vaccine is not patented and is shared among all nations.