CureVac

Coronavirus vaccine maker CureVac has said it hopes its Covid shot will receive European approval in the second quarter.

International experts on Feb. 3 inspected a Chinese laboratory in Wuhan that some U.S. officials had suggested was the source of the coronavirus, as plans were firmed up to distribute vaccines to poorer nations.

Nearly 500 million doses of the coronavirus vaccine could be made available to European Union member-states by the end of the first semester of 2021, according to the bloc's chief executive, Ursula von der Leyen.

Romania's Ministry of Health has recently signed an order for an additional 9 million COVID-19 vaccine doses with the German company CureVac, Health Minister Vlad Voiculescu announced on Wednesday. "The prime minister has already expressed his readiness to allocate the necessary resources to procure all the vaccines that are available.

Those that are self-financing will be guaranteed sufficient doses to protect a certain proportion of their population, depending on how much they buy into it; funded countries will receive enough doses to vaccinate up to 20 per cent of their population in the longer term.

The WHO says the programme represents "a huge success for multilateralism and cooperation."

Germany-based research firm CureVac, which receives EU funding, is likely to develop a coronavirus vaccine in the second half of this year. This was announced today by the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, quoted by the DPA.

The Commission provided financial support to the company for EUR 80 million.

The European the Commission offered up to €80 million of financial support to CureVac, a higly innovative vaccine developer from Tübingen, Germany, to scale up development and production of a vaccine against the Coronavirus in Europe.