Why Europe is staying at the forefront: CureVac, the company that is developing vaccines against Corona viruses, to be offered a further grant of €80 million by European Commission. The first grant, of €2 million back in 2014, enabled the firm to lay the groundwork......
So who says Europe is useless ? When it comes to publishing the first paper on how to diagnose the corona virus in humans, guess who funded the research......
Here is the paper that described the detection of the novel corona virus by classic poymerized chain reaction techniques already on 23 January 2020 - enabling the detection effort to go ahead in European and other countries. This test was designed even before actual virus isolates were available, due to the research capabilities of the institutes involved. To quote from the paper:
"The speed and effectiveness of the present deployment and evaluation effort were enabled by national and European research networks established in response to international health crises in recent years, demonstrating the enormous response capacity that can be released through coordinated action of academic and public laboratories"
Funding: "This work was funded by European Union DG Research through projects Prepare (GA602525), Compare (GA643476), and EVAg (GA653316); by European Union DG SANCO through EVD-LabNet, as well as by the German Ministry of Research through projects RAPID (01KI1723A) and DZIF (301-4-7-01.703)"
Thank you Europe !
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