Germany grants BioNTech, CureVac $745 million to speed up COVID-19 vaccine work

Germany awarded $745 million (577.79 million pounds) in funding to biotech firms BioNTech and CureVac on Tuesday to speed up work on COVID-19 vaccines and expand German production capacity. In a warning against political pressure to rush the process, Research Minister Anja Karliczek stressed that safety should remain the utmost priority to ensure vaccines will be accepted by the broader population. “Even when the world is waiting for a vaccine - we won’t take risky short-cuts here,” she told a news conference in Berlin. Concerns have grown that safety and efficacy standards might slip in the race to find a vaccine against the virus which has so far infected more than 29 million people and claimed over 926,000 lives globally.