Yahoo Finance Coronavirus latest: Wednesday, May 27
On Wednesday, Novavax announced that it would be acquiring Praha Vaccines as a way to expand its coronavirus vaccine manufacturing capacity. Yahoo Finance’s Anjalee Khemlani joins The Final Round to break down the latest news about the coronavirus.
Video transcript
MYLES UDLAND: All right. Let's turn now to what's going on with the coronavirus on this Wednesday afternoon, want to bring in Anjalee Khemlani for the latest on that. And Anjalee, I guess right now we're really thinking about the role a vaccine might play. Yesterday we talked about Merck's skepticism on that. Now we have a former FDA official saying that a vaccine is really a 2021 event, which I think has been realistic on an aggressive timeline from the beginning, but certainly something that the market has started to maybe look at as a 2020 kind of outcome here.
ANJALEE KHEMLANI: Definitely, Myles. I think that there's a discrepancy in what the event actually means. If you're talking about-- so we know, going back to the former FDA official saying that, we also heard that Dr. Anthony Fauci reiterated something possible before the end of the year. And I think this is a matter of what does that actually mean? What does the finish line mean? What does the success of a vaccine mean?
Does it mean enough proof and approval to maybe give to frontline health workers and emergency personnel, et cetera versus a widespread market availability? And if you're talking about the latter, you have a majority of experts really leaning on the 2021 event and 2021 and timeline as well. And I think that's what a lot of people are expecting and anticipating.
Quite honestly, don't think a lot of people are very hopeful that there's going to be widespread availability. And manufacturing also plays a role. We know that we've heard a lot about the manufacturing of these vaccines and what that will take to really have global availability because everybody needs a vaccine right now. It's one of those things, where we've never had to meet such a huge market demand before.
So a lot of things play into that. On the manufacturing part, we know that Novavax was also talking about, you know, its success in moving forward with their vaccine trials. And that company also, interestingly enough, very small biotech company-- earlier this year, a market cap at, like, $300 million and now more than $2.4 billion. And this company is now expanding even more to meet that demand.
Most smaller biotechs have done partnerships, like we've seen with Moderna and Lonza Group in-- in the Switzerland. But now we have Novavax acquiring a manufacturing plant from one of the largest vaccine players in the world, which is the Serum Institute in India, which is partnering with Oxford to produce their vaccine, so lots of web trails there. But basically, you know, going out and actually acquiring a-- a manufacturing plant. So it's pretty interesting to see how each company is really, you know, pushing for this production and what that will mean, eventually, for the time line.
MYLES UDLAND: All right, Anjalee Khemlani with the latest on the vaccine potential timelines. And there are many of them, of course, out there. We'll talk to you in the next hour.
