Europe hosts a teleconference for world leaders and philanthropists Monday, seeking 7.5 billion euros to boost the drive to discover, produce and distribute a vaccine against the new coronavirus.

COVID-19 has killed nearly 250,000 people around the world — more than 140,000 of them in Europe — and Ursula von der Leyen, head of the European Commission and the host of the online donor conference, said a vaccine was the best chance of beating it.