German lawmakers and government officials voiced outrage at reporting Sunday that the Trump administration is seeking to secure exclusive rights to a potential coronavirus vaccine being developed by the German firm CureVac as the pandemic spreads and takes lives across the globe.
The German newspaper Welt am Sonntag, citing an anonymous German government official, reported Sunday that the Trump administration offered CureVac $1 billion to hand the U.S. exclusive rights to a potential COVID-19 vaccine.
Trump wants the vaccine “only for the USA,” the German official said. The New York Times confirmed late Sunday that the Trump administration attempted to persuade CureVac to move its research to the U.S., offering the company what one German official described as a “large sum” of money.
“Germany is not for sale,” economy minister Peter Altmaier declared in response to the bombshell reporting, which White House officials said was overblown.
“International cooperation is important now, not national self-interest,” said conservative lawmaker Erwin Rueddel, a member of the German parliament’s health committee.
This is depraved. The German government confirms that Trump apparently tried to bribe German scientists into giving him exclusive rights to the Covid-19 vaccine they were working on developing. He wanted it “for the US only.” How many new lows will he set for the United States? https://t.co/Qm7vFoArQT
— Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) March 15, 2020
The original story in Die Welt said Trump wanted not only to control any new vaccine but also to make sure that it would only be available on a for-profit basis. https://t.co/1oKnnHphLx
— Joshua Holland 🔥 (@JoshuaHol) March 15, 2020
Led by Chancellor Angela Merkel, German government ministers on Monday are planning to convene a crisis meeting that will include discussion of CureVac, which is headquartered in Tübingen, Germany but also has an office in Boston, Massachusetts.
“Top White House aides were unaware of any communication by or offer from President Trump to CureVac,” the Washington Post reported, citing an anonymous administration official. “The official cautioned, however, that Trump often has private conversations of which his staff is not aware, and therefore the official could not definitively rule out that any such discussion had occurred.”
The Trump administration has faced backlash for refusing to vow that any COVID-19 vaccine will be affordable for all in the U.S. — let alone free, as progressives and public health experts are demanding.
“We would want to ensure that we’d work to make it affordable, but we can’t control that price because we need the private sector to invest,” U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said during a congressional hearing last month.
Reuters reported Sunday that CureVac has “started with a multitude of coronavirus vaccine candidates and was now selecting the two best to go into clinical trials.”
“The privately-held company… hopes to have an experimental vaccine ready by June or July to then seek the go-ahead from regulators for testing on humans,” Reuters noted.
Christof Hettich, chief executive of Dievini Hopp Biotech Holding, CureVac’s main investor, told the German newspaper Mannheimer Morgen on Sunday that it has no plans to allow any nation to purchase exclusive rights to a potential COVID-19 vaccine.
“We want to develop a vaccine for the whole world, and not for individual countries,” said Hettich.
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
After the election, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment. We’re presently working to find 1500 new monthly donors to Truthout before the end of the year.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy