US offered 'large sum' to German company for access to coronavirus vaccine research

President Donald Trump holds up a piece of paper concerning Google, as he speaks during a briefing about the coronavirus in the James Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House. Photo / AP

The Trump administration attempted to persuade a German firm developing a possible vaccine for coronavirus to move its research work to the United States, German officials said, raising fears in Berlin that President Trump was trying to assure that any inoculation would be available first, and perhaps exclusively, in the United States.

The offer arose from a March 2 meeting at the White House that included the chief executive of the German firm CureVac, Daniel Menichella. President Trump briefly attended the meeting and Vice President Mike Pence, who heads the White House coronavirus task force, was also there.

"We are very confident that we will be able to develop a potent vaccine candidate within a few months," Mr. Menichella said in a statement on the day of the meeting.

But four days ago, CureVac announced that Mr. Menichella, an American, was leaving the biotechnology company, which he had headed for two years.

The announcement gave no reason for his sudden departure and said one of the firm's founders, Ingmar Hoerr, would succeed him. It thanked Mr. Menichella for a variety of accomplishments, including "the recent start of our coronavirus vaccine programme."

On Sunday, the company issued a statement in Germany describing its vaccine work. "CureVac refrains from commenting on current media speculations and clearly rejects claims about the sale of the company or its technology," it said.

White House officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment. But two senior American officials said that some of the German news accounts first reporting the story were overblown, particularly with regard to any effort by the United States to secure exclusive access to a vaccine.

The Trump administration has spoken with more than 25 companies that say they can help with a vaccine, one of the American officials said, and is open to speaking with others. Any solution, he said, would be shared with the world.

Nevertheless, Germany's interior minister, Horst Seehofer, said that Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has a famously testy relationship with Trump, will lead a crisis meeting with ministers Monday that will include discussion of a German defense strategy for the firm.

The coronavirus is no longer merely a health crisis but "a question of national security," Seehofer said Sunday. It is up to the government, he said, to ensure not only security of its borders and its food supply, but also "our medical products and our medicines."

A researcher moves a vial in a lab in the search for a Covid-19 cure. Photo / AP

Asked by a reporter to confirm that the US administration had tried to take over a German company researching vaccines, Seehofer responded that he had heard about the effort "from several members of the government and it will be discussed tomorrow in the crisis team."

Another official, who asked not to be identified because he is not authorised to speak to the media, said the company was offered a "large sum" of money.

The privately held biotechnology firm has its headquarters in the southwestern city of Tübingen, Germany. It also has an office in Boston, where many of the nation's leading biotech firms have operations around the Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology campuses.

According to the German newspaper Die Welt am Sonntag, which first reported the story Sunday, Trump offered CureVac roughly $1 billion in exchange for exclusive access to the vaccine. The newspaper quoted an unnamed German government source who said Trump wanted the resulting vaccine "only for the United States."

But another German official, reached by The New York Times, said it was unclear whether the administration simply wanted the research work, and for any resulting production to be on U.S. soil.

Menichella was one of several industry executives invited by the White House to meet Pence, members of the coronavirus task force and pharmaceutical executives and discuss strategies to quickly develop a vaccine, the company said on its website.

CureVac started research on a number of vaccines and is now picking the two best prospects for clinical trials, the firm's website indicates. The company hopes that by June or July it will have an experimental vaccine that could go into trials. Many other companies are also working on vaccines.

Written by: Katrin Bennhold and David E. Sanger
© 2020 THE NEW YORK TIMES