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From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

Today: Scientists are racing to make a vaccine against the coronavirus. Katrin Bennhold on how that race is not just about creating the vaccine, but about which country will own it.

It’s Wednesday, April 1.

So at the end of December, these scientists around the world were basically looking at this outbreak of the strange, mysterious illness in Wuhan, China. And at this time, the media, especially the Western media, isn’t really paying attention to this thing yet.

But scientists are already beginning to puzzle through what this could be.

It seemed like a respiratory thing. It reminded some of them of diseases like MERS or SARS and some of these other things that have come along in recent years. But at this stage, they’re just corresponding with each other on their social media, saying hey, what is this thing?

And that’s how this story begins for one doctor based in Germany.

Lidia Oostvogels.

And Katrin, who is Lidia Oostvogels?

So Lidia works for this German company called CureVac. They work on vaccines as well as cancer treatments, and they do molecular therapies.

Mhm.

And —

At the end of her Christmas holiday, Lidia was seeing these posts, and she was wondering if this was maybe something she and her team could work on.

But at that stage, she couldn’t because she didn’t have the genetic sequencing of this virus. And actually the same was true for scientists around the world, who were wondering the same thing. And so they were all kind of just wondering and waiting. And then on January 10, the sequencing was actually published by these Chinese scientists, who put it on a public page for basically all the world’s scientists to see.

This is kind of when the clock starts ticking. But it’s not a race yet.

At this point, they didn’t actually exactly know what they were racing against, so it was still kind of just a regular process. They draw up a presentation —

She was creating the slides for this presentation, and as she started, there was literally one death. One known death in China.

Eventually, management greenlighted the project. This is in late January. The funding came through.

And that’s when they really got to work.

And what did that work look like in the beginning? What does it mean to create, from scratch, a vaccine?

So remember, basically what you’re trying to achieve with a vaccine is you want to create something that mimics the pathogen, the virus. And you want to inject that into a healthy body, so that that healthy body can read that information, understand what the pathogen looks like and form antibodies to fight it and neutralize it.

Mhm.

Basically, this cute little ball with spikes, right?

It’s the spikes, not actually the ball, that are bad.

So this whole project is about coming up with a vaccine that will enter the body, prompt an immune response, and that response will somehow despike the spikes of the coronavirus.

That’s the idea. We’re now in February. And as they’re working on this —

Coronavirus is beginning to spread across the world, and CureVac puts this vaccine development ahead of any other projects.

So this is now becoming a major priority within this company. This is an urgent project.

Yeah. And they’re not the only ones. You’ve got companies all over the world — in China, in the U.S., across Europe. Everybody is now looking at this as a high priority. So Lidia and her team basically are working on a number of prospective vaccines. They have these different combinations that they’re trying out.

And in early March, they’re beginning to actually inject them into mice to see what the effect is.

And they narrow it down.

Two sort of most promising prospective vaccines. And this is a time when the cases are spiking in Italy. The number of deaths are rising, including in Germany, where the lab is based. And they’re going up in the U.S. as well.

So this is basically now in Lidia’s backyard.

It’s now in her own backyard.

She’s being told by the government to work remotely. She has to sort of direct this team of lab scientists, who are still going into the lab, working carefully and trying to practice social distancing.

It’s logistically incredibly difficult, but it’s also emotionally incredibly straining. She said every time she watches the news, it fills her with dread.

So the sheer strain and the stress of this work, in the circumstances of an actual outbreak in her own country, is intense.

Katrin, you mentioned that Lidia and her team are testing potential vaccines in mice. But how soon do they expect that they would have a final vaccine ready for humans?

So the next very important step will be to actually test this thing in clinical trials, meaning injecting it into actual humans.

Mhm.

And at the moment, they’re sort of hopeful that the human trials can begin in June or July. And that, Lidia says, would put them on track for developing an actual vaccine that can be used for mass consumption early next year. Which kind of sounds far away, but it’s incredibly fast. Normally, vaccines can take a decade, even 15 years to develop. So they’re really speeding up this process.

And how does that timeline stack up against other companies around the world, potential rivals to Lidia?

You’ve got a lot of companies speeding things up around the world. I mean, you’ve got governments trying to remove bureaucratic hurdles and speed up approvement procedures. There’s a Chinese company that is already moving into the clinical trial phase and recruiting for human trials. They’re all moving at an incredible, unbelievable clip. Because now they are in a race against time. And CureVac, they’re considered to be among the leading eight companies to be working on this.

Mhm.

lidia oostvogels

Yeah, it was like, oh, where is this coming from? Yeah, this was really a surprise.

And that’s probably why President Trump approached that company and made a really unusual offer.

We’ll be right back.

So, Katrin, what was this unusual offer from the Trump administration?

Yeah, it was a very unusual offer. So it started a couple weeks ago when I was home on a Sunday with my family. And I checked my social media, just sort of checking what’s going on. And this story was making the rounds about the American president having approached this German vaccine maker. So I called my editors, and we decided to look into it.

And what did you find?

So we learned that one day in early March, there’s this meeting at the White House.

The White House basically invites two dozen companies to a roundtable discussion about the prospects of developing a vaccine against Covid-19, the coronavirus.

And these companies were all American, all except one.

CureVac.

So Lidia’s company.

Right.

And we don’t know the exact sequence of events, but two weeks after this meeting —

— this German newspaper reports that Trump offered the company $1 billion to relocate to the United States.

Wow.

It quotes an unnamed German government official, who said he worries that Trump wants exclusive access to a future vaccine. That he basically wants to secure access to this vaccine for Americans first.

So in Germany, you can imagine this obviously sets up a stir. And you basically have people scrambling to get the narrative right. You have American officials saying that the reports were, quote, “overblown.”

Then the company rejects the claim outright, although its majority shareholder pretty much confirms that an approach had been made. So no one really knows what exactly happened, except that the C.E.O. of the company, an American, who had run it for two years, leaves the company.

Hm.

And he’s replaced by a German just a few days after that meeting.

And then, two days later, this Chinese company offers $133 million to another leading German company also working on a vaccine.

And, Katrin, what is your understanding of the logic from both China and the United States? What are they trying to accomplish?

So behind this race is a pretty harsh but pretty simple reality. And it’s one that Lidia herself talked about. Any new vaccine that is effective against the coronavirus is certain to be in short supply initially.

Hm.

So those who develop it first will try to ensure that their own people are first in line for it.

So whoever controls the company nationally controls that early distribution of the vaccine, whether that’s Germany or China or the United States.

Exactly. And people actually remember —

— the swine flu.

When the swine flu came along in 2009 and an Australian company was the first to bring a single-dose vaccine to market, it was obliged at the time by its own government to service the Australian market first before honoring export orders to the United States and other countries.

That really rattled the United States. It kind of spurred this outrage.

You had congressional hearings. Everyone wanted to know why there was this shortfall.

And, you know, swine flu is not on the same scale as this coronavirus. So this could potentially be a lot more serious. And all of a sudden, that’s the urgency that we see unfolding. And that’s the urgency that has now led to this kind of nationalist, patriotic instinct to come out in several countries.

Mhm.

You’d think, Michael, that everybody would benefit if we would just work together and made sure that this vaccine was produced and then dispersed kind of to the people who need it most first, and so on. The problem is that there is going to be a shortage. And so there is a certain amount of rationality in trying to get your hands on it first by governments who represent their own people. Even more so as we find ourselves in this historic moment where nationalism, populism have been on the rise, and where the trust level between governments are pretty low.

So in that sense, the fight over this vaccine is a bit of a proxy for a larger question, right? Which is, will this become a nationalist moment — this pandemic — despite the fact that it’s also an incredibly global moment and a reminder of our connectedness?

Exactly. And it’s actually good to come back to the scientists for a moment, because the scientists have a very clear answer to all of this. They think this is about global cooperation. They think this is a global problem that needs a global solution. And even though they all work for companies that, you know, in normal times are in competition with one another, they are adamant that they want to work together. It all started, in fact, if you go back to January 10, with the publication of the genetic sequencing of this virus. That was a Chinese scientist that posted this genetic code online for every scientist in the world to see. And that’s when scientists across the world started working toward a common goal, in their view.

lidia oostvogels

I can, again, I can understand that individual governments are thinking first about their population, because that is their job. But, I mean, my job is to make a vaccine that can protect people worldwide. I mean, I’m not making a vaccine that can only protect Europeans or Americans. So my job is to get a good vaccine out.

So why would I first want to vaccinate somebody in my country, who anyway is a very low risk, versus somebody in another country who is perhaps protecting and trying to cure other people with a risk of his life? So make the decisions based on medical need and common sense and not on political agenda.

katrin bennhold

Lidia, thank you so very much. You’ve already done so much important work, and I wish you guys the best of luck. And stay healthy!

lidia oostvogels

Yeah, you, too. Stay at home, and don’t meet too many people, and stay in good shape. So that we are all ready to be vaccinated when the vaccine is ready and can go back to normal life and the normal world.

On Wednesday, The Times reported that the global scientific community has overwhelmingly rejected the U.S. and Chinese government characterization of coronavirus research as a biotech arms race. Never before, those researchers say, have so many experts in so many countries focused simultaneously on a single scientific quest with so much urgency, exchanging information as it becomes available and launching clinical trials that rely on laboratories and hospitals from around the world.

We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today.

During a briefing on Tuesday from the White House, President Trump issued his most dire warning yet about the pandemic, telling Americans that it would ravage the country for the next few weeks.

The president then turned over the podium to public health officials, who revealed estimates of the U.S. death toll from the coronavirus with and without attempts to keep Americans at home based on multiple academic studies.

On Tuesday, several more states and cities ordered residents to remain in their homes, including Washington, D.C., Virginia and Maryland.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.