So much of future planning hinges on to which degree Covid-19 is quelled.
Market participants are not just looking at ways to best invest through the Covid wave,
they've steadily been shifting their focus to the possible solution.
Which company will be the first to market a successful treatment for Covid-19?
With scientists working around the clock to try to come up with a vaccine, many are questioning
whether the gains seen in pharmaceutical companies will continue, especially given how long the
average vaccine usually takes to be developed and taken to market.
Take a look at Pfizer, data shows the optimism RMI for Pfizer being considerably higher than
pre-Covid levels, despite the stock still being below year highs.
The U.S. has now also agreed to pay Pfizer two billion dollars for 100 million doses
of vaccine by the end of the year, with the possibility of upping that volume by an additional
500 million, even though there's no approved treatment yet for Covid-19.
This is part of the U.S. administration's plan of buying vaccines before they're approved,
so that they can be swiftly distributed should a treatment be deemed safe.
I spoke to David Craig, the CEO of Refinitiv, and asked him to share his thoughts on what
the 'data on the data' of vaccines tells us at the moment.
There's really only one game in town right now in terms of return to normality and a
revival in the global economy, and that's finding a vaccine for COVID-19.
And the kinds of data market professionals are consuming right now, reflects this with
an increasing focus on vaccines.
And it's really progress in this area, not the progress of the disease itself, that is
now capturing the market eye.
Hits on news tag disease are down almost 80 percent since the second week of March, but
retrievals for news tag vaccines is up over 100 percent.
And that's partly an acknowledgment that the disease can't be stopped from going completely
global, and neither can it be stopped by all the lockdown's, and is partly a reflection
of some really interesting news flow on vaccines recently.
We now have about 10 vaccines in human trials, and with some showing some very promising
results, and I think there are something like 200 in all that are at some stage of development.
And I think in some ways we're heading towards a moment of maybe 'peak hope' right now because
we're learning about progress on multiple fronts.
And at the same time, we're not yet at a stage where many of these could fall by the wayside.
And the reality is that most will, that's just the nature of vaccine development, particularly
for a disease as complex as this.
I think it was the Wellcome Trust who said that even those vaccines in human trials only
have a 10 to 20 percent chance of success individually.
So for both governments and private investors, it's a question of which one to back, or ones
to back.
And for those in the market, it's a question of which one will arrive and when.
And our usage data shows that as far as the market's concerned, the field is wide open
and we're seeing very high usage of data across a wide range of pharmaceutical companies.
[00:01:40] So what does this mean for global markets?
In the short term I think there's clearly a high correlation in the vaccine news flow
and sentiment, and the fortunes of markets.
Credit spreads are reducing, home sales in the US are coming back strongly, and the S&P
and particularly the Nasdaq continue their march upwards.
And there's, it seems, an optimistic buoyancy in the market, perhaps too optimistic, and
I think in an extraordinary way, the niche esoteric world of drug trials is playing a
pivotal role in that.
[00:03:40] So as you just heard David mention, there are around 10 vaccines at the moment
in human trials.
From a science perspective it would be natural to expect the majority of these not to amount
to anything.
Clinical trials for drugs often have high failure rates.
But data shows the more than doubling in 'daily buzz', which is roughly a measure of number
of references around biotech companies in particular, with respect to pre-Covid levels.
Axios's is Sam Baker and Alison Snyder in their piece 'One Big Thing Vaccine Reality
Check', they quote an infectious diseases expert at Johns Hopkins University, Amesh
Adalja, who makes the point that; "Right now, we just need something to mitigate the damage
that the virus causes."
In other words, even if you get infected, you would avoid hospitalization or dying.
The data on the data definitely suggests optimism and interest continuing in pharma and biotech
even with the lofty share price gains already seen.