Coronavirus vaccine no game changer for ECB forecasts, Lagarde says

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - An effective coronavirus vaccine will not fundamentally change European Central Bank economic projections, as a medical solution was already factored into forecasts, ECB President Christine Lagarde told a Bloomberg event on Tuesday.

Lagarde added that, while vaccine deployment may be somewhat quicker than earlier thought, the economy was also taking a bigger hit from the second wave of the pandemic than expected.

"I'm not sure that is going to be a major game changer for our forecasts, simply because what we had anticipated in our baseline was that at some stage in the first half of 2021 there would be a vaccine and that it would be rolled out in the course of 2021," she said.

(Reporting by Balazs Koranyi and Francesco Canepa; Editing by Alex Richardson)