Corona vaccine betting: Biotech stock rises 3800 percent

The development of vaccines against the Corana virus is making progress. The stocks of some biotech and pharmaceutical companies are therefore going through the roof on the stock exchanges.

The stock market bets on a corona vaccine take on a remarkable dimension. For example, the shares of the US biotech company Novavax have risen from just under $ 4 to around $ 157 since the beginning of the year – an increase of around 3800 percent.

Novavax 164.68

The reason for the recent surge: According to the company, an experimental vaccine has shown encouraging results in initial tests. In the first phase of the clinical tests, all subjects had developed antibodies against the Sars-CoV-2 pathogen, it said. The participants between the ages of 18 and 59 seem to have no side effects. The company said that two volunteers had more antibodies after vaccination than those who had recovered from Covid 19.

The results of the tests conducted in Australia have not yet been reviewed and published by independent researchers. The first clinical tests with a few volunteers mainly test the tolerability of a vaccine. The effectiveness must then be found in much larger studies. It is not yet clear whether and for how long the antibodies can actually protect the test subjects from infection with the corona virus.

Novavax had received $ 1.6 billion in vaccine development from the U.S. government in early July. This is intended to finance the implementation of a large clinical trial with up to 30,000 participants and the production of 100 million doses of the vaccine.

.