Do you have any actual evidence for this? BioNTech has about 1k employees strong and got about 375 million Euros. Even if everyone would exclusively work on the vaccine for the whole time, which obviously didn't happen, that amounts to over 700k€ per seat for half a year. In an industry that isn't exactly capital intensive, i.e. the biggest part of expenses will be salaries.
Please read your own articles before posting. Your article it states clearly what the funding was for:
> The goal of the initiative is the expansion of vaccine development and manufacturing capabilities in Germany, as well as the expansion of the number of participants in late-stage clinical trials.
The program is funding clinical trials 1 to 3, having bigger cohorts for trials 2 and 3, and scaling up production while trials are still in progress. In short: Everything that makes vaccine development expensive. Finding the actual vaccine candidates is the cheap part.
Going from zero to preclinical is about 1/3 of the costs of going from preclinical to phase 2. Phase 3 is not part of this study, neither is parallel production.
That is a study of existing vaccines based on existing practices (which result in astrazeneca's 70% effective vaccine)
BioNTech is a different vaccine type, hence effectiveness and fact that both moderna and pfizer license it.
The fact that Germany subsidised the last stages to speed it up doesnt mean technology should be public access. That's for the government and company to negotiate.
