On Jan. 14, 2020, Valneva announced that the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) had exercised an option to purchase 80,000 additional doses of its Japanese encephalitis (JE) vaccine IXIARO. The total value of the contract was $70 million.

IXIARO is the only JE vaccine approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and was developed through a cooperative research and development agreement with the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.