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Talk about starting out a new week with a renewed sense of optimism! Market indexes in Monday’s pre-market trading are practically off the charts: the Dow +1600 points, the Nasdaq +140 points and the S&P 500 +160. The catalyst here was the surprisingly good news from Pfizer (PFE - Free Report) , that its vaccine candidate being developed with German biotech company BioNTech (BNTX - Free Report) for immunization against the Covid-19 coronavirus.
That this drug would pass a certain level of efficacy is not the surprise; Pfizer and BioNTech had been among the front-runners in the race the Trump Administration called “Operation Warp Speed” to discover and test a vaccine, along with the AstraZeneca (AZN - Free Report) and Oxford University partnership and a candidate being developed by Moderna (MRNA - Free Report) . But today’s news is that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine proved 90% effective in its study of 44K subjects of a wide variety of ages and races. The companies also report no serious safety concerns for the vaccine.
This 90% efficacy rate is the real headline-grabber here. A typical influenza vaccine in a typical years can be expected to bring 40-60% effectiveness. A 90% rate is up there with the chicken pox It is a two-dose vaccine, where protection from Covid-19 begins 28 days after the first injection. The investment world awaits more details, such as how long the immunity lasts. There is also all manner of expedition and delivery in the supply chain, which “60 Minutes” profiled just last night — it’s a big task with an enormous amount of moving parts. But this does not take away from the fact that there is now genuine light at the end of this pandemic tunnel.
Accordingly, stocks are up everywhere, especially in long-challenged industries like cruise ships — Carnival is +37% at this hour — commercial airlines — American (AAL - Free Report) +28% — and hotels — Marriott (MAR - Free Report) +18%. Even crude oil has rocketed higher, with WTI +10% and Brent +9%. The flip-side here are the selling-off of stocks favored by the “stay at home” initiatives of the pandemic: Zoom Video (ZM - Free Report) has tumbled 13% at this hour, Peloton is -14% currently.
A Covid vaccine takes the lid off most everything market-related. That said, we’re still looking at a period of months before it would be widely available. Dr Scott Gottlieb said this morning he expects the coronavirus to have another dormant period next summer, and that wide supply of the vaccine ought to be widely available by the cold and flu months of the fall of 2021 — 10 months from now.
This is such big news, it effectively eclipses all other news events over the weekend, including the resolution to the presidential election. This was called Saturday morning for former Vice President Joe Biden (D - Delaware), making President Trump the first sitting president not to win re-election for 28 years. The U.S. remains starkly divided at this point, but so far we still assume a peaceful transition of power will occur on January 20, 2021.
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Positive News on COVID-19 Vaccine
Talk about starting out a new week with a renewed sense of optimism! Market indexes in Monday’s pre-market trading are practically off the charts: the Dow +1600 points, the Nasdaq +140 points and the S&P 500 +160. The catalyst here was the surprisingly good news from Pfizer (PFE - Free Report) , that its vaccine candidate being developed with German biotech company BioNTech (BNTX - Free Report) for immunization against the Covid-19 coronavirus.
That this drug would pass a certain level of efficacy is not the surprise; Pfizer and BioNTech had been among the front-runners in the race the Trump Administration called “Operation Warp Speed” to discover and test a vaccine, along with the AstraZeneca (AZN - Free Report) and Oxford University partnership and a candidate being developed by Moderna (MRNA - Free Report) . But today’s news is that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine proved 90% effective in its study of 44K subjects of a wide variety of ages and races. The companies also report no serious safety concerns for the vaccine.
This 90% efficacy rate is the real headline-grabber here. A typical influenza vaccine in a typical years can be expected to bring 40-60% effectiveness. A 90% rate is up there with the chicken pox It is a two-dose vaccine, where protection from Covid-19 begins 28 days after the first injection. The investment world awaits more details, such as how long the immunity lasts. There is also all manner of expedition and delivery in the supply chain, which “60 Minutes” profiled just last night — it’s a big task with an enormous amount of moving parts. But this does not take away from the fact that there is now genuine light at the end of this pandemic tunnel.
Accordingly, stocks are up everywhere, especially in long-challenged industries like cruise ships — Carnival is +37% at this hour — commercial airlines — American (AAL - Free Report) +28% — and hotels — Marriott (MAR - Free Report) +18%. Even crude oil has rocketed higher, with WTI +10% and Brent +9%. The flip-side here are the selling-off of stocks favored by the “stay at home” initiatives of the pandemic: Zoom Video (ZM - Free Report) has tumbled 13% at this hour, Peloton is -14% currently.
A Covid vaccine takes the lid off most everything market-related. That said, we’re still looking at a period of months before it would be widely available. Dr Scott Gottlieb said this morning he expects the coronavirus to have another dormant period next summer, and that wide supply of the vaccine ought to be widely available by the cold and flu months of the fall of 2021 — 10 months from now.
This is such big news, it effectively eclipses all other news events over the weekend, including the resolution to the presidential election. This was called Saturday morning for former Vice President Joe Biden (D - Delaware), making President Trump the first sitting president not to win re-election for 28 years. The U.S. remains starkly divided at this point, but so far we still assume a peaceful transition of power will occur on January 20, 2021.