This has been a huge month for news, and Wall Street and has been taking in every drop of it. On election night, we learned that five states had legalized marijuana in some capacity, and found out less than a week later that Democratic Party challenger Joe Biden would become the next President of the United States, as Wall Street had been modeling for months.
But it was the jaw-dropping coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccine announcements from Pfizer and Moderna over the past two weeks that’ve really shaken the tree and sent the broader market roaring higher.
It began with Pfizer and development partner BioNTech ,which reported wildly successful interim analysis results for their COVID-19 vaccine BNT162b2 on Nov. 9. The study, which has enrolled more than 43,000 participants, produced a vaccine efficacy (VE) that was greater than 90%. With most researchers expecting a VE of closer to 50% to 60%, which is typically what we see in influenza vaccines, this blew expectations out of the water.
This was followed a week later by Moderna announcing that its interim analysis for mRNA-1273 in the COVE study yielded a VE of 94.5%. Moderna’s study involves more than 30,000 U.S. participants, and it’s working with McKesson as its vaccine distributor.
These analyses suggest that there may well be a light at the end of the tunnel for the COVID-19 pandemic, and it rightly has Wall Street excited. In the first 10 trading sessions of November, the S&P 500 has gained 10.9%, which marks its best start to a month since 1987.
