Update on Covid-19 Vaccine from B of A

[dan_s]

The words below are from the Bank of America Equity Research Team on November 18, 2020

The path to normalcy. On this day where Pfizer and BioNTech announced the final efficacy results of their phase 3 Covid -19 vaccine trial we highly recommend listening to the replay of a client conference call we hosted today with Rasmus Bech Hansen (CEO) and Matt Linley (scientist) from Airfinity.

Pfizer/BioNTech’s vaccine shows 95% effectiveness, including 94% for 65+ age.
Since safety threshold has also been met they will submit a request for Emergency Use Authorization to the FDA by Friday the latest. Rasmus Hansen expects 2-3 weeks (suggests mid-December approval). Based on this and other vaccines Airfinity then expects that a first wave of countries will achieve herd immunity and get back toward normal including the US by June 2021, Canada July/August 2021 and EU and UK September 2021. Other regions of the world then follow in waves through 2023.

Risks to timeline. First m RNA is a new technology touching the inner workings of bodies, and if we saw a fatality among participants in the Pfizer/BioNTech or Modena trials that could potentially be the end for the vaccines. Good news is that many other vaccine candidates use different technologies to attack the same spike in protein and thus are likely to prove highly effective as well, according to Airfinity.

Also Pfizer already downgraded their outlook for vaccine production for 2020 by half to 50mn while AstraZeneca cut 87% to 4mn.
This shows advantage of having a portfolio of vaccines using different production and distribution. On that note they expect good AstraZeneca results shortly from the non-US part of their phase 3 trial.

Preventing infection
Separately it is important to understand that these phase 3 trials only check for symptomatic Covid-19 cases – not asymptomatic ones. In other words we have learned they are highly effective in preventing disease, not whether they prevent infection. However in a news interview today BioNTech CEO, Dr. Ugur Sahin, said they have indicators that the vaccine prevents infections as well