Markets around the world have rallied in response to news that a coronavirus vaccine from U.S. pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and German biotech firm BioNTech was 90% effective in preventing Covid-19 among those without evidence of prior infection.
Suni Harford, president of UBS Asset Management, told CNBC on Monday that 2021 was always going to be a pivotal year amid uncertainty over the international resurgence of the virus and the prospects for fiscal stimulus stateside, but following the latest vaccine news, “this changes everything.”
“Long-term the markets had been up, some challenging how high the markets had gone with Covid still looming, but the market had adopted a two or three-year out perspective,” Harford told CNBC’s Joumanna Bercetche.
“The vaccine and this good news now, and the ability to see it actually being rolled out into 2021, I think accelerates all of that and puts 2021 in a very different light, and a more positive one.”
Vaccine rollout by mid-2021
The 90% efficacy finding for the vaccine produced by Pfizer and BioNTech far outstripped expectations of a 60-70% reading among analysts and compared to around a 40-60% efficacy rate for seasonal flu vaccines, according to Tara Raveendran, head of life sciences research at Shore Capital.
The Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine is an mRNA vaccine, which is typically quite unstable and needs to be transported in specialized shipping containers at temperatures below -70% centigrade, before being stored in a refrigerator for up to five days, Pfizer has explained.
“We know that Pfizer has said they can produce enough vaccine to vaccinate 25 million people by the end of 2020 and scaling that to 1.3 billion doses, so half of that (number of vaccines would be available to people) because it’s a two-dose vaccine in 2021,” she explained.
“So we are really looking at mid-year before we can consider any sort of large scale rollout of vaccinations.”
Reference: CNBC
Thai
Eng