The Czech Republic will contribute more than €11.4 million (305 million korunas) to the European fund financing the development and research of a COVID-19 vaccine, according to Minister of Health Adam Vojtěch
Vojtěch stated that the member states of the European Union should contribute €750 million in total (20 billion korunas). Thus, the Czech Republic will contribute about 1.5 percent of the amount to the overall fund.
According to Vojtěch, the fund was used not only to finance the vaccine but also to buy, for example, the drug Remdesivir and respirators.
“Now the fund needs a contribution from individual member states, we were asked to do so by the German presidency,” the minister said.
“This guarantees that we will be part of the purchasing process as we are part of a whole project under the European Commission negotiating with individual vaccine manufacturers. We are preliminarily interested in the AstraZeneca vaccine, that is our first pre-order, and now others will follow as progress develops. Thanks to the fact that we participate in this fund, we have the opportunity to be part of the game and possibly participate in the purchase of other vaccines,“ added Vojtěch.
Last week, the European Commission completed preliminary negotiations on the purchase of coronavirus vaccines under development with a sixth manufacturer. The European Union executive then announced that it was on track to make a deal with the pharmaceutical consortium BioNTech-Pfizer to purchase up to 300 million doses of vaccine.
Based on previous talks, Brussels expects to buy more than a billion doses of the vaccine, which will be available to people in poorer countries in addition to the EU countries.
Already during the summer holidays, the European Commission agreed or concluded at least part of the negotiations with Sanofi-GSK, Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca, CureVac, and Moderna. The Commission hopes for hundreds of millions of doses of tested vaccines from each company.
Title image: Neal Browning receives a shot in the first-stage safety study clinical trial of a potential vaccine for COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, Monday, March 16, 2020, at the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle. Browning is the second patient to receive the shot in the study. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)
