Moderna is going down because the EU is putting off delivering more COVID boosters. Pfizer and Novavax are worth keeping an eye on.
Shares of Moderna (NASDAQ: MRNA) were down 2% after the company said it had agreed to change the schedule for delivering more COVID-19 vaccine booster shots to the European Union.
The agreement, which is the first of its kind to be made public, lets the EU Member States that are taking part delay deliveries of vaccine booster doses from Moderna, which are currently scheduled for later in 2022 or even early in 2023.
It’s too early to say if other countries will do the same thing or what effect postponements might have on Moderna’s bottom line, but it’s possible that they could be bad. The company says that it still “expects advanced purchase agreements of about $21 billion for 2022 and continues to believe that COVID market dynamics will lead to slightly higher sales in the second half of 2022 than in the first half.”
The news comes as the number of COVID-19 cases around the world continues to go down. On June 1, “only” 655K new cases were reported around the world. This is compared to the 1.1M daily cases that were reported two months earlier and the nearly 3.7M daily cases that were reported at the height of the COVID surge in January 2022.
So far, there hasn’t been much of a chain reaction in other stocks that depend on the COVID-19 vaccine. Both Novavax (NASDAQ: NVAX) and Pfizer (NYSE: PFE) are still pretty quiet before the market opens.
