BRUSSELS (AFP) - The president of the European Commission said on Tuesday (March 18) that, after speaking to a German biotech firm, she hopes a vaccine against the novel coronavirus strain will be available this year.
Brussels' top official, Mrs Ursula von der Leyen, held talks with executives from CureVac, a company that has received an offer of €80 million (S$126 million) in EU financial support for its research.
But her prediction is far more confident than that of many health experts, who predict that it will take at least a year and more likely 18 months or more to find, test and get approval for a drug.
"They are working on a promising technology to develop a vaccine against the coronavirus," the former German defence minister said in a online video message shortly before she was to join talks with the 27 EU leaders.
"The European Union is providing them up to €80 million and I hope that with this support we can have a vaccine on the market, perhaps before autumn. This could save lives in Europe and in the rest of the world, too."
On Monday, CureVac denied newspaper reports that US President Donald Trump had offered to pay for exclusive rights to a coronavirus vaccine, and the German government says it has "dealt with" the situation.
After a video conference with EU leaders, Mrs von der Leyen told reporters that "the fact that other countries tried to buy that company shows that they are the front runner in the research".
And she justified her optimism by suggesting that regulatory approval for an eventual vaccine might be expedited.
"As we are under severe crisis, we'll see that we are able to speed up any of the processes that are slow normally and take a lot of time and are very bureaucratic," she said.
There is as yet no vaccine against the novel strain of coronavirus that emerged in China last year and has in recent weeks become a fast-moving pandemic across 145 countries and territories.
Europe is now what the WHO has dubbed the epicentre of the outbreak, and EU officials are scrambling to coordinate ever more draconian measures to isolate carriers from the population at large.
