Vaccine Stocks Pfizer & Moderna: New Bosses, New Deals?

DInvestors continue to prefer the large pharmaceutical stocks, which are considered to be defensive. Sanofi in particular has repeatedly reached new all-time highs in the past few days. Thanks to new cancer data (see Investor Info), BioNTech can still hold its own quite well.

Both Pfizer and Moderna changed their chief financial officer. David Denton comes to Pfizer from home improvement chain Lowes, but more interesting is his role in the $60 billion acquisition of US health insurance company Aetna by pharmacy and drugstore group CVS in 2017. Pfizer’s M&A and integration Skills by Denton in his presentation is generally interpreted as an indication of the pharmaceutical giant’s planned takeover and cooperation activities. Pfizer will probably have a good $20 billion in cash by the end of 2022 thanks to lush vaccine revenues.

Moderna brings in Jorge Gomez from dental technology manufacturer Dentsply Sirona. The biotech company is also awash with money, which shareholders want to see well spent. Also on Monday, Moderna started early clinical trials of two flu vaccine candidates. They use the antigens suggested by the WHO, but in different doses and mixing ratios.

Notice of Conflicts of Interest:
The majority owner of the sole shareholder of Finanzen Verlag GmbH, Mr. Bernd Frtsch, has taken direct and indirect positions on the following financial instruments mentioned in the publication or related derivatives that can benefit from any price development resulting from the publication: BioNTech, Curevac, GlaxoSmithKline , Novavax, Pfizer, Valneva.

INVESTOR INFO

The analysis firm Airfinity has reduced its sales estimate for non-Chinese Covid vaccines for 2022 from nine to six billion doses worldwide. It’s just fitting that BioNTech presented the first data on a brand new treatment at the US cancer conference AACR. The researchers from Mainz tested a CAR-T cell therapy on solid tumors, where this technology has not worked well so far. BioNTech combines the therapy with an mRNA vaccine that repeatedly stimulates the T cells. The tumors shrank or disappeared in six of the 16 patients. That’s encouraging. BioNTech has over a dozen cancer therapies in clinical trials.

Things have been a little better since mid-March, but overall the Nasdaq Biotechnology Index is still struggling. The turnaround in interest rates does not offer an optimal environment for growth companies: They need capital, which is more difficult or more expensive to obtain due to rising interest rates. Some badly financed biotech companies are already feeling the effects and are having to economize. However, the index, which tracks almost 400 companies listed on the US technology exchange Nasdaq, is dominated by the big names in the industry, which are less affected by these problems. The courageous use the favorable entry level.

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