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Vaccine Day – Why Pfizer’s stock price didn’t shock us as much as COVID-19

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This year has been a tough year for the economy. The Covid-19 pandemic struck and led to lockdowns in many countries worldwide to stop the virus’s spread. Many industries were affected, stock prices, small businesses and the travel industry to name but a few. That is, until Pfizer seemed to have some sort of plan.

Over 17 million cases of Covid-19 were reported in the United States, with more than 300,000 deaths. The Guardian reports that more than 40 million people lost their jobs in the United States due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

There were some positive outcomes due to COVID-19, with increased online shopping and online interactions with Amazon and Zoom stocks boosting their stock prices and Elon Musk’s network skyrocketing, just like his Space X rocket.

If there is anything the world needs right now to defeat the pandemic, it is to restart the economy. Covid-19 has harmed many investors, and some of them may have rightly thought that the Vaccine would bring us all hope, along with a rather rapid ascent in the share price of the Pharma company with the winning formula.

Pfizer, the company that brought us Viagra, is one of the companies that was working on a Covid-19 vaccine to help defeat the virus. 

On the 9th November, Pfizer, a US company who partnered with German company – BioNTech, to produce a Covid-19 vaccine, BNT162b2. It has been proven by the company to be 90% effective based on the phase 3 trials conducted by the company, announced their vaccine to the markets.  The result looks promising because the FDA-approved efficacy for Covid-19 vaccines is 50%. The vaccine is already being distributed in the United States. The company intends to manufacture around 50 million doses this year and 1.3 billion doses by the end of 2021. It does require two doses per person.

“It is a great day for science. It is a great day for humanity when you realize your vaccine has 90% effectiveness. That’s overwhelming,” claimed the CEO of Pfizer in an interview with CNBC’s Meg Tirrell on “Squawk Box.” “You understand that the hopes of billions of people and millions of businesses and hundreds of governments that were felt on our shoulders. Now… I think we can see the light at the end of the tunnel.”

The United States population responded well to the news of the vaccine and Pfizer’s stock price went up by 8%, at least, until some red flags came up:

First, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, who described the vaccine as safe, hasn’t actually taken a vaccine shot himself yet.

Second, Tiffany Dover, a head nurse at Chattanooga hospital in Tennessee who received the Pfizer vaccine on live TV, feinted a few minutes later.

Sceptics are questioning how safe the vaccine is, suggesting that the vaccine should have been tested for a little longer before giving it to the public. With the world desperately needing a solution, though, the vaccine was rushed.

It is unclear if it was the vaccine that caused Tiffany to collapse. However, there is a campaign amongst the American public against the Covid-19 vaccine that has been developing over the past few weeks. And now it appears unlikely that all Americans will take the vaccine with open arms.

The economic collapse was at its peak in March this year as the Dow Jones industrial average dropped by more than 3,000 points in a single day, West Texas Intermediate (WTI), the benchmark for US oil, fell to as low as minus US$ 37.63 for the first time in history in April. Nearly every country across the world, including the UK, was affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The US government made a lot of plans to revive the economy, which included printing more money to pay relief funds to citizens and then trying to relax the lockdown rules. This worked as there was an improvement in the economy in the third quarter of 2020.  But many experts believe the only way government can revive the economy is for the world to get a permanent solution to the Covid-19 problem, as experts see the excessive printing of money as a temporary solution to a longstanding problem.

The baton of the economy will be passed from Donald Trump to President-Elect Joe Biden. He will desperately need to re-open the economy to start his presidency well in his first week as the 46th president of the United States. It is likely that congress will allocate more funds to vaccine research next year.

Biden told CNBC: “Congress will need to act again in January. As we inherit this economic crisis, Vice President-elect Harris and I are working on the plan we will put forward for the next Congress to move fast and control the pandemic, revive the economy, and build back better than before. And, we hope to see the same kind of spirit of bipartisan cooperation as we see today,” 

It is unclear if the plan to get a reliable vaccine will work as soon as we need it to. And Pfizer will have a job convincing the American public that the vaccine is safe for use, and that Nurse Tiffany collapsed as a result of underlying health problems and not the vaccine shot administered to her.

Investors’ fingers are still crossed, and it’s unlikely that there will be a significant move in the stock market in the coming weeks. But there is always Bitcoin

Author: Joel Oluwatobi

#COVID #DowJones #Pfizer #NurseTiffany #VaccineDay #Economy

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