German Health Ministry to invest €6.2bn in vaccines

With the request to the national budget committee, which will decide on it tomorrow, Germany more than doubles the amount of money to be invested into vaccine procurement from so far €2.6bn to €6.35bn. The 635.1 million vaccine doses would be sufficient to vaccinate every German citizen 8 times. Prior to the request, Finance Minister Olaf Scholz (SPD) had made clear that the vaccine procurement "will not fail because of money".

It emerges from the communication, that Germany intends to procure the doses through the EU distribution mechanism but also through "national agreements with individual vaccine manufacturers.". According to euractiv.com, Germany has already ordered 30 million doses of Biontech’s/Pfizer’s RNA vaccine BNT162b2 independently from the EU procurement mechanism, an incident, which is under investigation by the Portuguese EU presidency.

According to Martha Temido, the successor of German EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen in the EU Council Presidency, various EU members have made contracts for COVID-19 vaccines "after the joint negotiations at EU level."  She left open whether she would pursue infringement proceedings. She will only ensure that agreements reached at EU level were respected, she said.

Just after the reporting on euractiv.com, the Ministry of Health wrote after a request of a liberal-democrat member of the German Parliament that there has been only a memorandum of understanding but no binding contract with Biontech/Pfizer.

Another fact not emerging from the communication is whether the new money is for 2nd or 3rd generation vaccines aimed to be effective against mutants of SARS-CoV-2 that more or less persist against the current vaccines that are all directed against the viral spike protein. According to virologists, a vaccine that is directed against more than one viral target protein would limit the occurrence of escape mutants. Currently, almost all COVID-19 vaccine candidates are so-called subunit vaccines that are directed against one or two viral protein targets. According to the WHO vaccine dashboard there is only one attenuated live vaccine that targets all viral antigens – COVI-VAC, a single-dose, intranasal, live-attenuated vaccine against COVID-19.