The German government has announced plans to put up to 150 million euros into projects developing drugs to help treat COVID-19. 

Government realistic that people will continue to contract COVID

“We will have to live with the virus,” said Federal Health Minister Jens Spahn at a joint press conference with Federal Research Minister Anja Karliczek. “We are currently vaccinating ourselves back to freedom and normality,” the health minister went on, adding that there will still, unfortunately, always be people who get COVID-19. 

“The Delta variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus clearly shows us that we will unfortunately have to reckon with the fact that people will continue to contract COVID-19 in the future,” Karliczek said. While strongly encouraging people to get vaccinated, she conceded that some people do not want to get the jab, while others will still become infected despite being vaccinated. 

150 million euros to develop COVID drugs

The government therefore believes that more effective drugs are needed to treat COVID patients. “We want to take the horror of the pandemic away in the long term,” said Spahn. “That is why we are promoting the development of new drugs so that we can continue to treat corona patients well in the future.” 

A total of six small and medium-sized biotech companies in Germany will receive a total of up to 150 million euros to support their research, working on a mixture of new medications to treat coronavirus at different stages of infection. 

Karliczek said that there were no guarantees about when the project would come to fruition, and that it all depended on the outcome of clinical trials. “Ideally, some of the projects are planning conditional approval that could possibly become valid in the coming year,” she said.