Coronavirus: Wall Street gets carried away after first vaccine trials

The New York Stock Exchange ended up sharply on Monday May 18, buoyed by encouraging preliminary results from clinical trials on a vaccine against the coronavirus. REUTERS / Dado Ruvic

Text by: RFI Follow

The hope of a vaccine against the coronavirus caused Monday May 18 euphoria on the world stock markets. After the first encouraging results of therapeutic trials of an experimental vaccine against Covid-19 conducted by the American start-up Moderna Therapeutics, Wall Street soared up, followed by the CAC 40 and the DAX who took more than 5%. But analysts warn of this runaway.

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The start-up Moderna Therapeutics, specialized in biotechnology, is headed by a French Stéphane Bancel, engineer in biomolecular chemistry. It develops innovative therapeutic applications.

The principle of his experimental Covid-19 vaccine called mrna_1273 consists in inoculating only a fragment of the DNA of the virus, whose potential to trigger an immune response is high. According to the laboratory, the results of its phase 1 trials on 45 volunteers are positive. The patients developed the same antibodies as those who contracted and fought the virus.

Following these encouraging results, Moderna Therapeutics must launch phase 2 of its clinical trials very quickly, this time on 600 people. As for phase 3, which must demonstrate the real effectiveness of the vaccine, it is scheduled for early July.

Monday, May 18, these results were enough to ignite the markets, and the value of the share of Moderna increased by 30% at the opening of the American Stock Exchange. Yet Moderna is far from unanimous within the scientific community. The Wall Street Journal points out that the laboratory has no drugs on the market yet. As for scientists, they recall that it takes around 18 months to develop a vaccine.

Read alsoCoronavirus: the vaccine race is in full swing

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