Flu Vaccine Shares to Slump as H1n1 Gets Contained: Chart Of Day
The CHART OF THE DAY tracks the Bloomberg World Health Care-Products Index and shares of five companies: China-based Hualan and Sinovac, the first licensed by their government to make H1N1 vaccines; Biondvax Pharmaceuticals Ltd., an Israeli company developing a vaccine against all strains of influenza; Rockville, Maryland-based Novavax Inc., which is providing technology for a flu project in Spain; and Australias CSL Ltd., the smallest of five companies with which the U.S. government has advance purchase agreements for a swine-flu vaccine.
Shares of Novavax and Sinovac more than doubled the past three months, with only CSL lagging behind the indexs gain of about 17 percent.
“Vaccines for H1N1 is a hot topic, with a lot of unscientific sentiment, trials and competition,” said Chiang Yi-chien, a fund manager at Prudential Financial in Taipei, who helps run the firms Global Bio-Health Fund. Not all vaccines will succeed and “once H1N1 is contained, shares will be very risky to hold. Even those with government orders, the government will not renew the contracts once the virus is controlled.”
H1N1, also known as swine flu, has become the worlds fastest-moving influenza pandemic, sweeping across 177 countries in the four months since it was first identified, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
U.S. regulators this week approved single-dose shots from several manufacturers, and have about 600 million doses in advance purchase agreements from CSL, GlaxoSmithKline Plc, Novartis AG, AstraZeneca Plc and Sanofi-Aventis SA. China this week approved two more organizations, in addition to Hualan and Sinovac, to produce vaccines, including Beijing Tiantan Biological Products Co.
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