Germans Reject Trump's Offer To Poach Vaccine Company, Hoard Coronavirus Vaccines Like Purell

In a storage locker in Tennessee. Probably.

The POSOTUS — that's POS of the US — has done it again! In the midst of a global pandemic, that sumbitch is out there trying to hoard vaccines for Americans. Because screw Italy and China, amirite?

 Reuters was the first American news outlet to confirm a report in German newspaper  Welt am Sonntag  that Trump tried without success to poach a European vaccine company to give Americans exclusive access to a possible coronavirus vaccine.

Welt am Sonntag quoted an unidentified German government source as saying Trump was trying to secure the scientists' work exclusively, and would do anything to get a vaccine for the United States, "but only for the United States."

CureVac, a biotech firm in Tübingen, Germany, plans to have an experimental coronavirus vaccine ready for human trials by June or July. And if they're making a cure, well shouldn't Americans be able to buy it all up and make sure everyone else has to kiss our ass and pay through the nose for it? Isn't that what Manifest Destiny and American Exceptionalism are for ?

According to Germany's  Die Welt  in English, Trump offered huge amounts of cash to CureVac's then-CEO Daniel Menichella during a March 2 meeting at the White House. Just nine days later, the company announced Menichella was being replaced by the company's founder, Ingmar Hoerr. No reason was given for the change, but after Menichella's meeting with Trump, the German government entered into furious negotiations to keep CureVac in Europe and out of the clutches of that orange menace.

"We want to develop a vaccine for the whole world and not individual countries," the chief executive of dievini Hopp Bio Tech Holding, Christof Hettich, told the Mannheimer Morgen newspaper, echoing a similar statement in the company's press statement.

German Health Minister Jens Spahn told German public television that a takeover was not on the cards and that the ministry "has been in good talks with the company for the last two weeks."

Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said the matter would be discussed in the government's newly created crisis committee on Monday, while Economy Minister Peter Altmaier told German public TV that "Germany is nor for sale."

"We confirm the report in the Welt am Sonntag ," a spokeswoman for the German Health Ministry told Reuters. And yet, current ambassador to Germany cum (acting) National Security Advisor Ric Grenell decried it as fake news.

"Not true. The Welt story was wrong. But Business Insider, Reuters and others went with it anyway despite not having their own sources. Now everyone is back peddling," he tweeted angrily.

Then the  Washington Post  asked German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer, who said on the record that he'd "heard from several other members of government today that is the case." At which point, a second member of the American press had confirmed the story with its own sources, so Grenell hastily retracted his— just kidding .

Meanwhile our federally funded facilities are in no shape to make a vaccine available quickly. And our attempt to buy one off the shelf was botched by our psychotic leader, who appears to have explicitly stated that one of the perks of American ownership is making bank while watching the rest of the world die in a global pandemic. So ...

STAY THE FUCK INSIDE IF YOU POSSIBLY CAN.

[ Reuters / Die Welt / WaPo ]

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