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Great news and the markets are reacting very positively to the news as well which indicates to me this could be the beginning of the end!

ro-_-b 6y ago
I remember that in March somebody posted here an entry saying that mutation of the virus will make vaccinations only useful in the short term. Were these concerns already addressed at this stage? We have seen mutations due to minks recently which could make the vaccinations ineffective. These mutations might have been controlled but similar situations may arise in the next years. For these reasons I am not entirely sure this is the beginning of the end.
- carlmr 6y ago
  Considering Denmark is also one of the richest countries on earth we can neither expect other countries to a) detect such a mutation early and b) handle the issue promptly. So I think it's somewhat likely that we'll see mutations emerge all over the world. Whether this vaccine works depends on how early we get most people vaccinated. It may only be a short term patch, which we will see once it's rolled out, you can't really predict the long term without any measurements.
- aphextron 6y ago
  >I remember that in March somebody posted here an entry saying that mutation of the virus will make vaccinations only useful in the short term. Were these concerns already addressed at this stage? Regardless of whether the mutations are significant enough to affect vaccine efficacy, it won't likely be a problem. These new mRNA vaccines have a development/production time measured in weeks and months, not years. It changes vaccines from a hardware problem to a software problem. Once the underlying delivery technology is proven safe and effective, reacting to new strains will be as swift as patching a codebase. It's hard to overstate what a massive advance in vaccine tech is happening here.
  - aj_g 6y ago
    Fascinating--do you have any links to further reading/watching about this?
    - aphextron 6y ago
      >"Fascinating--do you have any links to further reading/watching about this?" https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243 https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243 The basic idea is that now rather than needing to culture live viruses in chicken eggs, we can literally just encode the RNA for a specific antigen into a synthetic substrate and produce vaccines through a chemical process like any other drug. The RNA is then absorbed into your cells, and your own body creates the proteins which stimulate an immune response.
- Wintamute 6y ago
  Coronaviruses like SARS-COV-2 mutate relatively slowly and minimally compared to others. So mutation isn't expected to be a huge concern, unlike say influenza which mutates relatively rapidly and requires an annual tweak to the vaccines. What's more, any new strains we do see spreading more widely will do so because their mutations confer a competitive advantage. In practice that usually means more drift towards higher infectiousness but less severe symptoms - the same mechanisms that have left us with 4 other endemic but mild common cold coroanviruses. The new SARS-COV-2 vaccines may be a useful tool to get us over this hump where the virus is still novel to a large proportion of the population, but are unlikely to be required indefinitely.
  - bipson 6y ago
    It was said (arguably in the news, so, nobody knows if true) that the mutation found in the mink populations in Denmark has a significantly different response to antibodies, in particular, they are less effective. This is why OP is asking and mentioning the minks in Denmark.
untog 6y ago
The markets seem to wildly yo-yo with every piece of negative and positive news. Case in point: Zoom is currently down 10% but I’ll bet it will have rallied by the end of the day.
- gustavf 6y ago
  I'll take the other side of that bet.
- Zenbit_UX 6y ago
  It's more than zoom, everything that's gone up from the pandemic is dropping: amzn, meli, jmia, se, shop, sq. The markets had them valued at a premium due to their monopolies in the pandemic but retail stocks are now trending up premarket: bbby, etc.
  - untog 6y ago
    My point is that all of this is gut reaction to a headline, not a nuanced analysis of vaccine efficiency, roll out plans etc etc. Things could turn right around again once those details are resolved.
- TomGullen 6y ago
  I don't think it's worth looking at individual stocks in this instance, and I think you're not understanding why Zoom would drop on good vaccine news.
  - untog 6y ago
    I am absolutely understanding why Zoom would drop on good vaccine news. It’s not a complicated connection! My point is that the market overreacts to every piece of good or bad news, then settles down as the full implications become clear. There are still a lot of unanswered questions about the vaccine, how we handle rollout, etc etc etc. That’s not really considered in immediate reactions like this, it’s all gut feeling.
input_sh 6y ago
Except Zoom's, which fell from 514 to 410 in less than an hour. Really puts the nails in coffin of the whole "we're gonna work more remotely after the pandemic" narrative.
- sethammons 6y ago
  Investor speculation doesn’t put nails into anything :)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- randomsearch 6y ago
  Did it? I’m looking at ZOOM and it’s on 500
  - mettamage 6y ago
    https://www.google.com/search?q=zoom+stock+ticker&oq=zoom+stock+ticker&aqs=chrome..69i57.1642j0j7&client=ubuntu&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=zoom+stock+ticker&oq=zoom+st... ^ check the pre-trading price
  - iso1631 6y ago
    https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ZM/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ZM/ Zoom was 500 at close yesterday, in premarket trading it's dropped 13% to 435. Nasdaq open at 1430 GMT
- strombofulous 6y ago
  I don't understand, aren't future events supposed to be already considered in the stock price? It's not like a vaccine was unpredictable
  - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
    Yeah, but investors seem to want to hold on to stocks for as long as possible (dividends? I don't know how that works, as far as I know holding stock for dividends is nowhere near as profitable as speculating)
skhm 6y ago
There is another quite negative reading of this comment and I'm not sure which one you meant :)
coldpie 6y ago
Yeah, setting aside all the politics and silliness, the science going on around this pandemic is remarkable. Going from nearly zero (yes, there was a bunch of research from SARS-Cov-1, MERS, and similar to build off of but nothing like this) to a functioning, tested, and mass manufactured vaccine in a year is absolutely jaw dropping. Even if it takes two years to distribute widely, three years to stomp out a pandemic is blindingly fast and a major credit to modern medical science, and the processes we have built up around it.
- bipson 6y ago
  Although I want to agree, none of the companies started from zero. All these new technologies, the techniques, the principles were in development since years if not decades. Not trying to diminish the accomplishments achieved, great effort nontheless. Just saying nobody started from zero here, that would have been insane and frankly impossible.
  - lbeltrame 6y ago
    > All these new technologies, the techniques, the principles were in development since years if not decades. Yes, I first heard about intramuscular nucleic acid injection around the year 2000. At the time it was naked DNA and not RNA in a lipid nanoparticle suspension, but the principle was the same.
    - bipson 6y ago
      In particular BioNTech from the article was founded 2008. This is their first publicly available "product" - it applies their vision for cancer treatment to specific SARS-nCoV-2 proteins (arguably I don't know if they're working on other ideas as well). They might be working on this particular vaccine since 2020, but AFAIK they have been working on the specific principle the vaccine uses since 2008.
  - usrusr 6y ago
    True, but it's the first time we see those technologies in action. Some (many?) of the vaccine projects for example use paths that have previously been considered, played through in "toy" projects that never made it to production and so on, and now they are suddenly standing in the limelight, going live. For some sub-fields of biotech this must almost be like the mindboggling aviation had from roadshow curiosities to a major war factor in hardly more than a decade.
andrepd 6y ago
The markets? Spare me. What are the markets, a handful of rich in banks and large corporations? They are neither wise nor competent, why should every news story be suffixed by how "the markets" (swt) react?
- mrmonkeyman 6y ago
  Oh sweet summer child.
- jdhzzz 6y ago
  > What are the markets, a handful of rich I'm not yet but hoping to be... > They are neither wise nor competent That's me again, but doesn't preclude my success... However this 1995 paper (1) indicates that the S&P 500 behavior does "Granger Cause" changes in USA GDP. i.e changes in S&P 500 does predict changes in GDP from 1 to 3 quarters out. So that's the one legitimate reason to be encouraged by rising markets. Perhaps the woman who cuts my hair will be able to get off food stamps by spring. 1. https://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?redir=1&article=1071&context=econ_honproj https://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?redir=1&a...
- ploika 6y ago
  Since you asked, also the pension funds of almost everyone you know.
  - chasd00 6y ago
    and 401ks
  - zzbzq 6y ago
    retirement accounts--pensions are legacy technology
    - bluGill 6y ago
      Which is too bad. I'd rather have a pension and be assured of my income for however long I live than have to figure out how much to leave in my account for a future that I might not live to be old enough to enjoy.
cblconfederate 6y ago
the markets? that would be bad news because the markets have had no touch with reality for a long time
- TomGullen 6y ago
  That's the popular view but I don't think they've been as irrational as lots of people think.
  - cblconfederate 6y ago
    more random than irrational
aphextron 6y ago
>Great news and the markets are reacting very positively to the news as well which indicates to me this could be the beginning of the end! I'd argue that has a lot more to do with the election uncertainty being over with. This is incredibly promising news, but probably not enough to account for SP500 jumping 400 points this morning.
- 0xffff2 6y ago
  S&P 500 is only up 90 points right now, and I don't see any evidence it was up 400 at any point today. More generally, The DOW is way up, S&P up moderately, and NASDAQ only up a little bit. That looks like it may well be a result of vaccine news to me, which is less good for the big tech companies that make up the NASDAQ than the broader set of companies tracked by the DOW and S&P. I would expect an election related bump to have pretty equal effects on all three indices.
standardUser 6y ago
I think the data is what indicates this is the beginning of the end. All of the leading Western vaccine candidates showed very strong Phase 2 results. Now, we have the first vaccine showing very strong initial Phase 3 results. This is basically the best case scenario.
bamboozled 6y ago
The markets have been reacting positively for months, what’s new here ?

ro-_-b 6y ago

I remember that in March somebody posted here an entry saying that mutation of the virus will make vaccinations only useful in the short term. Were these concerns already addressed at this stage? We have seen mutations due to minks recently which could make the vaccinations ineffective. These mutations might have been controlled but similar situations may arise in the next years. For these reasons I am not entirely sure this is the beginning of the end.

carlmr 6y ago
Considering Denmark is also one of the richest countries on earth we can neither expect other countries to a) detect such a mutation early and b) handle the issue promptly. So I think it's somewhat likely that we'll see mutations emerge all over the world. Whether this vaccine works depends on how early we get most people vaccinated. It may only be a short term patch, which we will see once it's rolled out, you can't really predict the long term without any measurements.
aphextron 6y ago
>I remember that in March somebody posted here an entry saying that mutation of the virus will make vaccinations only useful in the short term. Were these concerns already addressed at this stage? Regardless of whether the mutations are significant enough to affect vaccine efficacy, it won't likely be a problem. These new mRNA vaccines have a development/production time measured in weeks and months, not years. It changes vaccines from a hardware problem to a software problem. Once the underlying delivery technology is proven safe and effective, reacting to new strains will be as swift as patching a codebase. It's hard to overstate what a massive advance in vaccine tech is happening here.
- aj_g 6y ago
  Fascinating--do you have any links to further reading/watching about this?
  - aphextron 6y ago
    >"Fascinating--do you have any links to further reading/watching about this?" https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243 https://www.nature.com/articles/nrd.2017.243 The basic idea is that now rather than needing to culture live viruses in chicken eggs, we can literally just encode the RNA for a specific antigen into a synthetic substrate and produce vaccines through a chemical process like any other drug. The RNA is then absorbed into your cells, and your own body creates the proteins which stimulate an immune response.
Wintamute 6y ago
Coronaviruses like SARS-COV-2 mutate relatively slowly and minimally compared to others. So mutation isn't expected to be a huge concern, unlike say influenza which mutates relatively rapidly and requires an annual tweak to the vaccines. What's more, any new strains we do see spreading more widely will do so because their mutations confer a competitive advantage. In practice that usually means more drift towards higher infectiousness but less severe symptoms - the same mechanisms that have left us with 4 other endemic but mild common cold coroanviruses. The new SARS-COV-2 vaccines may be a useful tool to get us over this hump where the virus is still novel to a large proportion of the population, but are unlikely to be required indefinitely.
- bipson 6y ago
  It was said (arguably in the news, so, nobody knows if true) that the mutation found in the mink populations in Denmark has a significantly different response to antibodies, in particular, they are less effective. This is why OP is asking and mentioning the minks in Denmark.

untog 6y ago

The markets seem to wildly yo-yo with every piece of negative and positive news. Case in point: Zoom is currently down 10% but I’ll bet it will have rallied by the end of the day.

gustavf 6y ago
I'll take the other side of that bet.
Zenbit_UX 6y ago
It's more than zoom, everything that's gone up from the pandemic is dropping: amzn, meli, jmia, se, shop, sq. The markets had them valued at a premium due to their monopolies in the pandemic but retail stocks are now trending up premarket: bbby, etc.
- untog 6y ago
  My point is that all of this is gut reaction to a headline, not a nuanced analysis of vaccine efficiency, roll out plans etc etc. Things could turn right around again once those details are resolved.
TomGullen 6y ago
I don't think it's worth looking at individual stocks in this instance, and I think you're not understanding why Zoom would drop on good vaccine news.
- untog 6y ago
  I am absolutely understanding why Zoom would drop on good vaccine news. It’s not a complicated connection! My point is that the market overreacts to every piece of good or bad news, then settles down as the full implications become clear. There are still a lot of unanswered questions about the vaccine, how we handle rollout, etc etc etc. That’s not really considered in immediate reactions like this, it’s all gut feeling.

input_sh 6y ago

Except Zoom's, which fell from 514 to 410 in less than an hour. Really puts the nails in coffin of the whole "we're gonna work more remotely after the pandemic" narrative.

sethammons 6y ago
Investor speculation doesn’t put nails into anything :)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
randomsearch 6y ago
Did it? I’m looking at ZOOM and it’s on 500
- mettamage 6y ago
  https://www.google.com/search?q=zoom+stock+ticker&oq=zoom+stock+ticker&aqs=chrome..69i57.1642j0j7&client=ubuntu&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8 https://www.google.com/search?q=zoom+stock+ticker&oq=zoom+st... ^ check the pre-trading price
- iso1631 6y ago
  https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ZM/ https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ZM/ Zoom was 500 at close yesterday, in premarket trading it's dropped 13% to 435. Nasdaq open at 1430 GMT
strombofulous 6y ago
I don't understand, aren't future events supposed to be already considered in the stock price? It's not like a vaccine was unpredictable
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  Yeah, but investors seem to want to hold on to stocks for as long as possible (dividends? I don't know how that works, as far as I know holding stock for dividends is nowhere near as profitable as speculating)

skhm 6y ago

There is another quite negative reading of this comment and I'm not sure which one you meant :)

coldpie 6y ago

Yeah, setting aside all the politics and silliness, the science going on around this pandemic is remarkable. Going from nearly zero (yes, there was a bunch of research from SARS-Cov-1, MERS, and similar to build off of but nothing like this) to a functioning, tested, and mass manufactured vaccine in a year is absolutely jaw dropping. Even if it takes two years to distribute widely, three years to stomp out a pandemic is blindingly fast and a major credit to modern medical science, and the processes we have built up around it.

bipson 6y ago
Although I want to agree, none of the companies started from zero. All these new technologies, the techniques, the principles were in development since years if not decades. Not trying to diminish the accomplishments achieved, great effort nontheless. Just saying nobody started from zero here, that would have been insane and frankly impossible.
- lbeltrame 6y ago
  > All these new technologies, the techniques, the principles were in development since years if not decades. Yes, I first heard about intramuscular nucleic acid injection around the year 2000. At the time it was naked DNA and not RNA in a lipid nanoparticle suspension, but the principle was the same.
  - bipson 6y ago
    In particular BioNTech from the article was founded 2008. This is their first publicly available "product" - it applies their vision for cancer treatment to specific SARS-nCoV-2 proteins (arguably I don't know if they're working on other ideas as well). They might be working on this particular vaccine since 2020, but AFAIK they have been working on the specific principle the vaccine uses since 2008.
- usrusr 6y ago
  True, but it's the first time we see those technologies in action. Some (many?) of the vaccine projects for example use paths that have previously been considered, played through in "toy" projects that never made it to production and so on, and now they are suddenly standing in the limelight, going live. For some sub-fields of biotech this must almost be like the mindboggling aviation had from roadshow curiosities to a major war factor in hardly more than a decade.

andrepd 6y ago

The markets? Spare me. What are the markets, a handful of rich in banks and large corporations? They are neither wise nor competent, why should every news story be suffixed by how "the markets" (swt) react?

mrmonkeyman 6y ago
Oh sweet summer child.
jdhzzz 6y ago
> What are the markets, a handful of rich I'm not yet but hoping to be... > They are neither wise nor competent That's me again, but doesn't preclude my success... However this 1995 paper (1) indicates that the S&P 500 behavior does "Granger Cause" changes in USA GDP. i.e changes in S&P 500 does predict changes in GDP from 1 to 3 quarters out. So that's the one legitimate reason to be encouraged by rising markets. Perhaps the woman who cuts my hair will be able to get off food stamps by spring. 1. https://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?redir=1&article=1071&context=econ_honproj https://digitalcommons.iwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?redir=1&a...
ploika 6y ago
Since you asked, also the pension funds of almost everyone you know.
- chasd00 6y ago
  and 401ks
- zzbzq 6y ago
  retirement accounts--pensions are legacy technology
  - bluGill 6y ago
    Which is too bad. I'd rather have a pension and be assured of my income for however long I live than have to figure out how much to leave in my account for a future that I might not live to be old enough to enjoy.

cblconfederate 6y ago

the markets? that would be bad news because the markets have had no touch with reality for a long time

TomGullen 6y ago
That's the popular view but I don't think they've been as irrational as lots of people think.
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  more random than irrational

aphextron 6y ago

>Great news and the markets are reacting very positively to the news as well which indicates to me this could be the beginning of the end! I'd argue that has a lot more to do with the election uncertainty being over with. This is incredibly promising news, but probably not enough to account for SP500 jumping 400 points this morning.

0xffff2 6y ago
S&P 500 is only up 90 points right now, and I don't see any evidence it was up 400 at any point today. More generally, The DOW is way up, S&P up moderately, and NASDAQ only up a little bit. That looks like it may well be a result of vaccine news to me, which is less good for the big tech companies that make up the NASDAQ than the broader set of companies tracked by the DOW and S&P. I would expect an election related bump to have pretty equal effects on all three indices.

standardUser 6y ago

I think the data is what indicates this is the beginning of the end. All of the leading Western vaccine candidates showed very strong Phase 2 results. Now, we have the first vaccine showing very strong initial Phase 3 results. This is basically the best case scenario.

bamboozled 6y ago

The markets have been reacting positively for months, what’s new here ?