Vaccine hope sends stock market soaring
It’s a shot in the dark — but a coronavirus vaccine could be on the way.
An experimental coronavirus vaccine showed promise in very early testing, sending the stock market soaring on hopes it could end the global pandemic much sooner than expected.
Moderna, a biotech firm based in Boston, said Monday its experimental vaccine triggered immune responses in all eight healthy volunteers who took the test. The subjects all wound up with antibodies like those who recover from coronavirus, presumably raising their resistance to the deadly virus.
In the next phase of the study, led by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, researchers will try to determine which dose is best for a definitive experiment that they aim to start in July.
The results have not been published or reviewed by peers and only represent the first of three stages of testing that vaccines and drugs normally undergo.
Wall Street soared on the news that there could be an early end to the shutdowns, layoffs and fear that have gripped the American economy.
The Dow was up almost 1,000 points, or more than 4%, in one of its highest point gains in history. Other indices also surged higher.
Despite the giddy response, some scientists warned that many promising vaccine candidates end up running into problems further down the road.
“There’s just historically, if you look at vaccine development, lots of vaccines that look good out of Phase 1 that don’t turn out to be good products,” Daniel Salmon, director of the Institute for Vaccine Safety at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told The Washington Post.
Moderna is only one of about a dozen companies racing to come up with a vaccine that could save millions of lives — and earn billions in profits.
President Trump has dramatically raised hopes for a vaccine by launching Operation Warp Speed, which he claims will develop a vaccine and produce 300 million doses to protect Americans by the end of the year.
Critics quickly questioned whether Moderna got an inside track because one of its former directors is Moncef Slaoui, whom Trump just named as his vaccine czar.
The report about the successful vaccine sent Moderna stock soaring by up to 34% in premarket trading Monday, temporarily adding at least $3.4 million to Slaoui’s bottom line. Moderna stock was trading up a more modest 20% as the closing bell neared Monday afternoon.
Slaoui initially insisted in a tweet Monday morning that “there was no conflict.”
But Moderna later said in a statement that Slaoui would divest himself of the stock options and donate the proceeds to charity.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren last week slammed the lucrative stock options as a blatant conflict of interest for Slaoui, who will be involved in selecting which vaccine trials get government backing.
Coronavirus has already killed about 90,000 Americans and counting. Some public health experts predict it will unleash a second wave of death and economic misery this fall unless a vaccine can be created.