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Thursday Markets Fall Off After Pfizer Cuts Vaccine Dose Target

Thursday Markets Fall Off After Pfizer Cuts Vaccine Dose Target

All indexes fell this Thursday afternoon after news that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine had received a cut in its expected roll-out numbers.

All indexes fell this Thursday afternoon after news that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine had received a cut in its expected roll-out numbers. 

Credit | Deutsche Welle

Thursday’s market rally ended pretty abruptly on the news that Pfizer plans on only delivering half the vaccine doses they were planning on, at least by the end of the year. Due to poor raw materials and supply chain woes, the company believe they only have the chance to deliver 50 million COVID-19 doses by the end of 2020, compared to 100 million originally planned.

Luckily, Pfizer still plans on shipping more than 1 billion COVID vaccine doses in 2021, helping to partially offset the danger this lack of vaccine can cause.

Pfizer stock, as well as the rest of the market, dipped near the end of the trading day following this news, pushing Pfizer stock down more than $0.71 (or -1.74%), and pushing the major indexes down around .5% from their day highs.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average and the NASDAQ Composite barely eked out a daily gain, with a 0.29% and 0.23% jump, respectively. The S&P 500 didn’t suffer as well, but didn’t drop hard however, with a minor 0.06% loss.

Limited COVID-19 vaccine rollouts

As said earlier, Pfizer and BioNTech believes the companies will only be able to produce 50 million doses by the end of the year, compard to their previous estimates of 100 million doses. The companies are still planning on over 1 billion doses being available by the end of next year, however.

The UK actually just approved the Pfizer vaccine this week, making it the only country to do so. Vaccinations are expected to start next week, about the same time that the FDA starts reviewing the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

After the lower market closure, Moderna announced that their vaccine was still on target to deliver over 20 million doses by year end. They also plan on over 1 billion doses through next year, but with a more conservative low of 500 million.

Overall, Moderna and the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines are the most optimistic for the world and markets, even with other competing vaccines being possibly more advantageous. Moderna believes they’ll fit their original plans for vaccine dose rollouts, even while Pfizer struggles with material issues.

Even with these holdups on vaccines, most of the stocks that you would expect to be hurt from this news, were not. 

Travel stocks were up higher, with cruise stocks up more than 12% in intraday trading. Stay-at-home stocks such as Peloton were also up, whereas usually one group or the other is up. Other industries were either flat or declined, with no real pointing as to where the vaccine issues affected the indexes.

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Market futures

Even following these issues with vaccine distribution and raw materials, the market’s already starting to recover from this little drop, with market futures up around 0.2% at 9:00 PM ET. While this isn’t necessarily indicative of what’ll happen tomorrow it’s a good sign for some gains on Friday, topping off a busy week for the markets.

A few stocks are showing some massive gains in the after market, including PagerDuty, up ~17% as of 9:00, while others, such as Ollie’s (the bargain outlet), are down, currently at -9%.

Other stocks are flat, with average changes of around 0.2%, both ways (positive and negative) currently, with not much outlook to tomorrow being available.

Even though it’s not guaranteed, it feels like there’s a likely chance for a blowout Friday, as most investors have adopted the idea that any drop requires a massive dip investment. Fridays this year in general, have also been very yin or yang, with large gains or drops very apparent.

With the slight lead in futures, there’s a chance for some gains for tomorrow, but there’s no guarantee, and I make no promises.