Morning Notes — Partial Recovery

Government entities, Pharma and Health Care providers all cite a 2-week timeline to analyze the new variant.  Friday’s outsized move was helped by thin holiday liquidity and today’s buy-the-dip reaction is fairly typical.  While there’s a lot we don’t know, we can say the overall state of readiness and ability to address this variant today has dramatically improved from last year and even this summer. If necessary, a new booster to cover the variant could be on the market by Q1’22. And while we await more details on vaccine efficacy vs. the new variant, it’s hard to ignore the massive increase in global vaccination rates, availability of therapeutics, readiness of health systems and extremely high efficacy results from interim antiviral trials in severe patients. The antivirals should work against any mutation since they don’t target the spike protein, but rather inhibit its ability to replicate. Protease inhibitors like these are generally considered safe, so any change from further studies are more likely to be about efficacy.