Asked by a reporter to confirm that the U.S. administration had tried to take over a German company researching vaccines, Mr. Seehofer responded that he had heard about the effort “from several members of the government and it will be discussed tomorrow in the crisis team.”

Another official, who asked not to be identified because he is not authorized to speak to the media, said the company was offered a “large sum” of money.

The privately held biotechnology firm has its headquarters in the southwestern city of Tübingen, Germany. It also has an office in Boston, where many of the nation’s leading biotech firms have operations around the Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology campuses.

According to the German newspaper Die Welt am Sonntag, which first reported the story on Sunday, Mr. Trump offered CureVac roughly $1 billion in exchange for exclusive access to the vaccine. The newspaper quoted an unnamed German government source who said Mr. Trump wanted the resulting vaccine “only for the United States.”

But another German official, reached by The New York Times, said it was unclear whether the administration simply wanted the research work, and for any resulting production to be on American soil.

Mr. Menichella was one of several industry executives invited by the White House to meet Mr. Pence, members of the coronavirus task force and pharmaceutical executives and discuss strategies to quickly develop a vaccine, the company said on its website.

CureVac started research on a number of different vaccines and is now picking the two best prospects for clinical trials, the firm’s website indicates. The company hopes that by June or July it will have an experimental vaccine that could go into trials. Many other companies are also working on vaccines.

The Trump administration has been unusually aggressive in attempting to get American control of companies that deal in technology Mr. Trump views as central to American security.

In February, Attorney General William P. Barr suggested in a speech that the United States should find a way to take over two European telecommunications makers, Ericsson and Nokia, which are the main competitors of Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant that is wiring up nations around the world for 5G, or fifth generation, networks.

Mr. Pence later played down that suggestion. But the idea that the Trump administration was seeking to take control of a major European technological asset sent unsettling ripples across Europe.

And the move to secure the intellectual property of CureVac, whether for exclusive or general use, is bound to inflame that debate.

Die Welt reported that the German government was making counterbids to the company to persuade it to stay. German lawmakers began to issue statements on Sunday.

“The exclusive sale of a possible vaccine to the USA must be prevented by all means,” Karl Lauterbach, a German lawmaker who is also a professor of epidemiology, said on Twitter. “Capitalism has limits.”

Adding to the dismay in Germany was the fact that CureVac works closely with a taxpayer-funded government research organization, the Paul Ehrlich Institute for vaccines and biomedicines.

Peter Altmaier, Germany’s economy minister, praised the company for not being tempted by any American. offer. “It was a great decision,” he said in a television talk show on Sunday night. “Germany is not for sale.”

Mr. Altmaier said the government would “make sure that the necessary help is available” to the company in developing the vaccine. And he warned that if any hostile offer was attempted, Germany would step in.

“When it’s about important infrastructure and national and European interest,” he said, “we will also act if we have to.”

CureVac’s main investor ruled out giving exclusive access to a future vaccine to one country.

“We want to develop a vaccine for the whole world, and not for individual states,” Christof Hettich, chief executive of Dievini Hopp Biotech Holding, told the newspaper Mannheimer Morgen.

German officials sounded unsure about the reassurances that the United States would share a vaccine if it were developed.

A spokesman for the German health ministry said that German government officials were in regular contact with CureVac, confirming a quote in the original Die Welt article.

“The federal government is very interested in vaccines and antiviral agents against the novel coronavirus being developed in Germany and Europe,” the spokesman was quoted as saying in the original article. “In this regard the government is in an intensive exchange with the company CureVac.”

Katrin Bennhold reported from Berlin and David E. Sanger from Washington. Melissa Eddy contributed reporting from Berlin.

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