Patient visitors in the queue in front of the Hamburg Kaifu-Bad
Photo: Jonas Klüter / dpaThe world has been looking for a vaccine for half a year. During this time, large parts of public life were shut down. I admit: I like to consume sport passively and had a dry spell at the height of the corona pandemic. There were no more football broadcasts and no tennis either. Champions League, US Open, the Olympic Games in Tokyo, the European Football Championship: everything canceled. And since broadcasts started again, the games are without spectators. But games without an audience are just not the same.
Ronaldo, Messi, Federer, Serena Williams - they were no longer the big stars. During this time, people's attention was focused on other heroes: the researchers and scientists who were working under high pressure in the laboratories to research the virus and work on a vaccine. The best-known team in Germany was temporarily no longer Bayern Munich, but the Robert Koch Institute.
When the Curevac company began developing a vaccine, Donald Trump allegedly wanted to buy the company to give Americans access to a vaccine (and himself reelection). Presumably he had heard that the Germans are not only world-class in football, but also in medical research. Our Minister of Economic Affairs Altmaier said at the time that Germany was not for sale. Since those days, a new competition has replaced the big tennis and soccer tournaments: the race for a vaccine or an antidote.
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