SOURCE: AL JAZEERA

Shares of Mod­er­na ex­tend­ed their ral­ly for a sec­ond trad­ing ses­sion af­ter the drug­mak­er said it had mo­bilised hun­dreds of work­ers on Thurs­day to start work on an Omi­cron jab.

Mod­er­na Inc. is hav­ing its best two-day ral­ly in a year af­ter the com­pa­ny said a new vac­cine to fight the omi­cron strain of the coro­n­avirus could be ready by ear­ly 2022 if re­quired.

The stock soared as much as 14% to the high­est lev­el in two months, af­ter jump­ing 21% dur­ing Fri­day’s glob­al risk-as­set sell­off, to re­claim its place as top per­former on the S&P 500 year-to-date. The com­pa­ny mo­bi­lized hun­dreds of work­ers on Thanks­giv­ing Day last Thurs­day in or­der to start work on omi­cron, Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer Paul Bur­ton said over the week­end.

Mod­er­na’s mR­NA tech­nol­o­gy is ide­al­ly suit­ed to adapt­ing vac­cines to new vari­ants, ac­cord­ing to Piper San­dler an­a­lyst Ed­ward A. Ten­thoff, who has an over­weight rat­ing on the stock.

“Mod­er­na is in a bet­ter po­si­tion to de­vel­op nov­el Covid-19 vac­cines, and now has ca­pac­i­ty to man­u­fac­ture sev­er­al hun­dred mil­lion vac­cine dos­es every month,” Ten­thoff wrote in a note to clients. “SARS-CoV-2 is not go­ing away and will pro­vide years of fu­ture rev­enues.”

Jef­feries an­a­lyst Michael Yee al­so struck an op­ti­mistic tone for Mod­er­na in­vestors, say­ing the lat­est spread should en­cour­age peo­ple to get boost­ed soon­er rather than lat­er, while the biotech fo­cus­es on a new ver­sion for 2022. Mod­er­na “can ad­vance new can­di­dates to clin­i­cal tri­als with­in 60-90 days.”

BioN­Tech SE jumped as much as 7.6% af­ter say­ing it is work­ing to adapt its Covid-19 vac­cine to ad­dress the omi­cron vari­ant and ex­pects to have a new ver­sion ready with­in 100 days if nec­es­sary. The biotech and its Covid vac­cine part­ner Pfiz­er Inc. put plans in­to place months ago. Pfiz­er shares ral­ly 3.2% to a fresh record.

Oth­er com­pa­nies de­vel­op­ing vac­cines and ther­a­pies to com­bat Covid, in­clud­ing No­vavax Inc. and Ada­gio Ther­a­peu­tics Inc., al­so rose. No­vavax climbed as much as 5.1% as an­a­lysts from B Ri­ley tout­ed the need for boost­er shots, while Ada­gio’s share price more than dou­bled in its biggest ral­ly ever on plans to sub­mit its an­ti­body for emer­gency use in mid-2022.

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By Joe Eas­t­on and Bai­ley Lip­schultz-Bloomberg

With as­sis­tance from Philip Sanders and Paul Jarvis.