Merck donates two million FFP2 masks

Mer­ck, a sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny, is donat­ing a total of two mil­lion FFP2 masks in Ger­many, France and the Unit­ed States, among oth­ers. The com­pa­ny is cov­er­ing the costs of pur­chas­ing and trans­port­ing the pro­tec­tive equip­ment. The dona­tion is main­ly intend­ed to sup­port health­care work­ers; the rel­e­vant author­i­ties and orga­ni­za­tions will han­dle the dis­tri­b­u­tion of the masks.

“Dur­ing these unprece­dent­ed times, we are grate­ful for the ded­i­ca­tion and great work of all those on the Covid-19 front lines. To help pro­tect more than 30,000 health­care pro­fes­sion­als, we are donat­ing up to a month’s sup­ply of the much need­ed FFP2 masks. At Mer­ck, we are focused on advanc­ing human progress and con­tin­ue to pro­vide our resources and full ded­i­ca­tion to over­come the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Belén Gar­i­jo, Mem­ber of the Exec­u­tive Board and CEO Health­care of Merck

More­over, Mer­ck is sup­port­ing the glob­al fight against Covid-19 through a wide range of actions. For exam­ple, the com­pa­ny is coop­er­at­ing with oth­er phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal and life sci­ence com­pa­nies as well as the Bill & Melin­da Gates Foun­da­tion to devel­op, man­u­fac­ture and pro­vide vac­cines, diag­nos­tics and treat­ment options for Covid-19. Mer­ck is sup­port­ing the Jen­ner Insti­tute in reach­ing an ini­tial mile­stone for the indus­tri­al pro­duc­tion of a poten­tial Covid-19 vac­cine. In addi­tion, Mer­ck has set up its own pro­duc­tion capac­i­ties for dis­in­fec­tant at its sites in Darm­stadt and Wies­baden, Ger­many, as well as Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Nor­wood, US, amongst others.

In 2019, the com­pa­ny award­ed the Future Insight Prize, a research grant worth up to € 1 mil­lion, for superb sci­en­tif­ic achieve­ments in the field of pan­dem­ic pre­pared­ness to Par­dis Sabeti from Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty and the Broad Insti­tute as well as to James Crowe from Van­der­bilt Uni­ver­si­ty Med­ical Cen­ter. Like many sci­en­tists world­wide, they are cur­rent­ly work­ing hard to iden­ti­fy diag­nos­tics and ther­a­peu­tic options for Covid-19 infections.