SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
German company CureVac has received a rather strange offer from the current White House.
On March 3, CureVac's CEO was invited to the White House, for a meeting with President Trump, Vice Pence and several members of the Coronavirus Task Force. Asked for when a vaccine could be ready, he estimated that a potential candidate could be ready within a few months. Apparently, that triggered the members of the meeting so much, that they've now offered to buy the company, at whatever price.
One condition though: production would be exclusively for the United States.
The move is not exactly one to gain popularity, and follows on the heels of the President's worrying statement that "a large number of new clusters in the United States were seeded by travelers from Europe".
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Monday March 16 2020, @03:49PM
That's because with viruses, the number of particles needed to infect varies, as does replication time. COVID-19 evidently needs a lot of particles to infect, and replicates middling-slow.
Parvovirus in dogs can infect with as few as SIX virus particles, and can replicate to a disease state in as little as 48 hours. Rabies, OTOH, takes a pretty good load to infect, and replicates very very slowly (hence an incubation period measured in weeks).
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.