President Trump has reportedly "offered large sums" for exclusive US access to a coronavirus vaccine.
The news was broken by German media, per the Guardian, who revealed that the president offered a German medical company large sums of money for exclusive US access to a vaccine. Now, the German government is trying to fight off what it has perceived as an aggressive takeover, the newspaper Die Welt reports while citing government circles.
Trump cries 'Oh F***, I got a pen mark' moments before his coronavirus address:According to Die Welt, an anonymous source revealed that the president was doing everything he could to obtain access to the vaccine for the US, "but for the US only".
In response, the German government was offering incentives for the vaccine to stay within their country.
German health minister, Jens Spahn, said any possibility of the Trump administration taking over the CureVac company was "off the table", and that CureVac was only willing to create the vaccine for "for the whole world, not for individual countries."
This man reveals his symptoms of the coronavirus:In a bid to verify the accuracy of the Die Welt article's claims, the German health ministry was approached by the Guardian. They only confirmed the accuracy of the quotes given by its spokesperson.
The spokesperson quoted in the Die Welt article said: "The federal government is very interested in vaccines and antiviral agents against the novel coronavirus being developed in Germany and Europe. In this regard, the government is in an intensive exchange with the company CureVac."
The German health ministry did not take the opportunity to correct any potential inaccuracies in Die Welt's article.
The news comes as the World Health Organisation's most recent situation report revealed that there have been a total of 153,517 confirmed cases of COVID-19 globally, and 5,735 deaths.
Earlier, we reported that the first human trials of a potential vaccine are due to begin today.