Russia To Roll Out COVID-19 Vaccine For Use By September 2020

It looks like the World will probably see its first COVID-19 vaccine being made available for public use in 2020 afterall. Russia is moving at a lightning fast pace to roll out its own locally developed vaccine based on a human adenovirus (a common cold virus) fused with the spike protein of COVID-19 virus to stimulate an immune response in our bodies. This is similar to the vaccine being developed by China's CanSino Biologics. 

I have no doubt that there will be more and more success stories of vaccine being approved for use to combat COVID-19 this year and also early 2020. The only question will be how effective will be the new vaccines. Not all vaccine will be the same in terms of efficacy. For example, the CanSino vaccine using the adenovirus has results that suggest that it will not work well in people with pre-existing immunity to the adenovirus. Russia also seems to be rushing to come out with its own vaccine for mass production and public use without more extensive clinical testing. The good news here is that even if a vaccine fails to prevent COVID-19 infection but proves able to reduce the severity of the coronavirus devastating effect, it will still be deemed to be a partial success as it makes the virus less fatal. 

The stock market seems to have priced in part of the effect of new vaccines being made available within the next 6 months based on the see-saw up and down effect when news of Moderna releasing more details on its clinical trial was made available to the public against the concern of rapidly increasing COVID-19 record daily cases (with some countries undergoing partial lockdown again due to emerging second wave of COVID-19). If US, China or UK come out with confirmed phase 3 clinical trial results of their respective vaccines, I reckon that there would be a mini-rally in the stock-markets with many investors being convinced to take up more stakes in equity markets instead of sitting at the sideline.