Stocks of makers of COVID vaccines, Moderna MRNA, Pfizer PFE, Novavax NVAX and BioNTech BNTX rose on Friday on reports of a new bat coronavirus being discovered in China.
Some scientists at Wuhan Institute of Virology, China said they had discovered a new coronavirus called HKU5-Cov-2 in bats that has the potential to be transferred to humans. Per reports, the virus belongs to the same family of coronaviruses as SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused the deadly COVD-19 pandemic.
The virus has shown the potential to enter human cells by binding to a protein called ACE2 that is found in humans and other mammals.
The HKU5-Cov-2 also shares similarities with the viruses that cause Middle East Respiratory Syndrome or MERS causing similar symptoms like fever, cough, fatigue, sneezing and breathlessness. However, the HKU5-Cov-2 virus has not been found in humans yet.
Pfizer and partner BioNTech and Moderna gave the world the first mRNA-based vaccines to combat COVID-19 in the second half of 2021. However, with the end of the pandemic, sales of their COVID vaccines have waned due to lack of demand. The companies have, time and again, updated their COVID vaccines, but this has not helped sales improve much. Novavax’s protein-based vaccine was launched much later in August 2022.
On Friday, while Moderna rose 5.3%, Pfizer was up 1.5%. Novavax rose 0.9% and BioNTech rose 1.8%. The stocks rose in anticipation that the new virus in China could trigger another pandemic in the future, which, in turn, can result in demand for new vaccines to combat the virus, either through new formulations or updates to existing vaccines.
However, though the virus has shown the potential to infect humans, the risk of HKU5-Cov-2 causing a pandemic like COVID-19 is low as the HKU5-CoV-2 virus has significantly lower efficiency in binding to human ACE2 compared to SARS-CoV-2. This means that the chances of widespread human transmission are low.
MRNA, NVAX and PFE have a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) each, while BioNTech has a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.
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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).
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