Stock Watch: Pfizer’s Second-Quarter Pandemic And Base Businesses Diverge

The events that followed 11 September 2001 brought to companies like Human Genome Sciences, Inc. and Acambis PLC (subsequently acquired by GSK plcand Sanofi, respectively), revenues and defensive investment attributes from their products to treat anthrax and smallpox, respectively. Following, thankfully, just 17 anthrax and no smallpox cases, their bioterrorism premiums and investors’ attention waned, even though both companies were left with residual stockpiling contracts. At least the raft of small biotech companies like NanoViricides, Inc. that have recently announced monkeypox product aspirations to huge stock price gains will know what is in store for them.

Press attention and investment bank research have both implied an end to the coronavirus pandemic and, as a result, pandemic premiums have been quick to dissipate from companies that had raced to develop vaccines, diagnostics and treatments for COVID-19