The Trump Administration may have offered a German biopharmaceutical firm working on a vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, the virus behind the COVID-19 pandemic, a large sum of money for the exclusive right to the vaccine, the Guardian reports.
The German newspaper Welt am Sonntag reports the Trump Administration offered $1 billion to the firm CureVac to secure the use of the vaccine for the US only, it says, adding that this report has provoked outrage in Germany. "German researchers are taking a leading role in developing medication and vaccines as part of global cooperation networks," Heiko Maas, the foreign minister, told Funke Mediengruppe, according to the Guardian. "We cannot allow a situation where others want to exclusively acquire the results of their research."
A German official tells the New York Times, though, that it was unclear whether the US only wanted the research and any resulting vaccine production work to take place in the US. In addition to its Tübingen headquarters, CureVac has offices in Boston, it notes.
According to the Guardian, CureVac investors said Sunday night that they would not sell the vaccine to one state.