Is it true:

I hear that the US stock market has spiked (up), on the news that a US company is near to developing a vaccine against Covid-19. The UK BBC seem hesitant to cover this as yet. Have you heard anything on this? Or is it fake/premature news....

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Northwest · M

I posted about this to SW last week. The US company, is one of at least a half dozen companies, with credible vaccine candidates. The UK has one has well. The reason why these companies moved so fast, is that they had been working on SARS/MERS vaccines, and they had already cleared the preliminaries that usually take years to go through, before you can proceed to human clinical testing.

In this case, the advantage the US company has, is that they got $500M funding, to build the infrastructure, they need, for phases II and III, when typically funding for phase II comes, after you prove that phase I was successful, so they can proceed immediately to phase II and phase III, as they have what they need.

Not sure the UK vaccine candidate has this kind of funding, but another German/US candidate does, and at least a couple of other candidates do as well.

This is a summary, the details are a bit more involved.

Valentine · M

@Northwest Thank you. Really appreciated.