The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose over 500 points on Tuesday after Pfizer Inc. announced the company plans to deliver 200 million COVID-19 vaccine doses to the United States by May, instead of an initial timeframe which suggested July as the end date. Also, investors are monitoring big companies to report their quarterly earnings later in the day. The Dow Jones rocketed 1.74% or 524 points at 10:50 am ET while the S&P 500 followed suit, gaining 1.51% at the same time. The Nasdaq 100 rose by 1.37% a minute later.
Pfizer Inc. will be able to supply the U.S. with 200 million Covid-19 vaccine doses by the end of May, two months sooner than previously expected, according to its top executive
Chief Executive Officer Albert Bourla said Tuesday that the drugmaker and its partner, BioNTech SE, will be able to deliver the doses to the U.S. well before an earlier July 31 deadline due to a change in the vaccine’s label that allows health-care providers to extract an additional dose from each vial. The six-dose-per-vial count became effective on Monday and applies to supply contracts going forward, according to a Pfizer representative. In the U.S., Pfizer and BioNTech will deliver 120 million doses in the first quarter, 20 million more than initially promised, Bourla said in an interview with Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait at the Year Ahead Summit, held virtually this year. Bourla added that Pfizer and BioNTech would get more doses to the European Union before the end of the second quarter. The companies’ vaccine regimen requires two doses to provide full protection from symptomatic cases of Covid-19.
As two new stains of the virus spread globally, Pfizer and BioNTech are also developing booster shots that can protect against various mutations.
“Every time a new variant comes up we should be able to test whether or not [our vaccine] is effective,” Bourla said. “Once we discover something that it is not as effective, we will very, very quickly be able to produce a booster dose that will be a small variation to the current vaccine.”