Vaccine Stocks Fall In 2022, Except One

Back in September, President Biden stated on 60 Minutes that, “We still have a problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over.” So I thought it would be interesting to see how the vaccine companies’ stocks are performing this year now that the pandemic is over. In Australia, there are four approved vaccines according to the Department of Health, so we’ll mainly look at these stocks, but I’ll also look at the international vaccine companies later in this video.

Let’s start with the go-to vaccine company, the American pharmaceutical multinational Pfizer. Although it’s made a bit of a resurgence in the last month or two, partially due to their new bivalent vaccines, overall in 2022, they’ve performed fairly poorly at -12.64% for the year-to-date. Their vaccine partner, German biotechnology company BioNTech, have performed considerably worse in 2022 with a fall of 29.43%.

American competitor Moderna, which only has a single commercial product, the Spikevax vaccine, had also performed rather poorly this year at -26.33%.

Another American competitor, Novavax, with their protein-based vaccine, Nuvaxovid, have not performed well at all this year at -88.22%, by far the worst of the bunch. I’m glad I didn’t invest in them (not that I directly invested in any vaccine stocks, apart from ones that are include in ETFs of course). Noting that millions of doses of Novavax has been thrown way in Australia in recent months. People just didn’t want to take it.

But perhaps the surprise performer, British-Swedish pharmaceutical giant, AstraZeneca, has performed really well this year with an increase of 30.55%. Hang on, what’s going on there? Many of you might remember that the AstraZeneca vaccine had some issues, which I’m not allowed to speak about apparently, even though every news agency in the world is allowed to. But despite that, their stocks are soaring. Well, I have a theory on that. Because their vaccine suffered a PR nightmare early on, they basically moved on to other endeavours such as fighting cancer. They certainly backed the right horse on that one.

Anyway, they were the four vaccines used in Australia, but I’ll quickly summarise some of the internationally-used vaccine companies.

Janssen Biotech owned by American consumer healthcare giant, Johnson & Johnson, is doing okay at positive 2.65%. Despite them having some issues with their vaccines, they’ve still done reasonably well. Noting that Johnson & Johnson sell a whole bunch of other products, not just vaccines.

Chinese pharmaceutical company, Sinovac Biotech, used to be listed on the Nasdaq, but the exchange halted their trading in February 2019 due to a proxy fight, that is, when a corporation’s stockholders develop opposition to some aspect of the corporate governance.

Chinese state-owned enterprise Sinopharm have done okay this year at 6.21%. They make lots of other medical supplies as well, so I assume the permanent ongoing lockdowns in China are probably good for their business.

Indian biotechnology company, Bharat Biotech, which created Covaxin, is a privately held company, and therefore its shares are not listed on any stock exchanges.

Anyway, that’s the current state of play of vaccine stocks around the world. Thanks for watching.

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