money AstraZeneca gets $1B for Oxford vaccine development
Yahoo Finance’s Alexis Christoforous, Brian Sozzi, and Anjalee Khemlani discuss the latest coronavirus news.
Video Transcript
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: We have reached a morbid milestone in the fight against COVID-19. There are now over 5 million confirmed cases of coronavirus around the world. That has resulted in over 328,000 deaths. Anjalee Khemlani is joining us now for more. And this is certainly a grim milestone, Anjalee. And I'm wondering if the spread of the virus across the world is showing any signs of abating at this point.
ANJALEE KHEMLANI: Yeah, Alexis, unfortunately the answer to that is no. We have seen, when you pick it apart, really, you've seen some trends. But it's very different in every place, similar to how we saw it was so different in various states. And that trend continues as well. While we know the major hotspots that we saw before, like New York and the West Coast have been on the decline, we have still seen some states that are actually seeing increases in hospitalization right now, like Georgia, Alabama, Wisconsin, among others.
Meanwhile in the world, just like the US was a hotspot before, following Asia, following Europe, we're now seeing a trend into South America and other areas. So unfortunately the answer is no. We know the World Health Organization said yesterday that they saw the largest increase of cases in 24 hours then and that this virus is, to quote, "going to be with us for a long time." So that is currently the situation.
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Now I know the US just made a pretty big investment in a vaccine together with the company AstraZeneca. What can you tell us about that?
ANJALEE KHEMLANI: Right, so what they've done is invested $1 billion in AstraZeneca to help produce the vaccine that Oxford University is working on. And that's a pretty significant step because all the other companies, including the US-based ones that are actually developing the vaccines, they have invested far less in those. So I think that speaks a little bit to the significance of, you know, Oxford being a little bit further ahead along.
If you compare, and we know we talked about Moderna the other day and their being, you know, further along in the US. But overall it's China and then Oxford that are really in the lead here. Interesting note about AstraZeneca. They actually have a stake in Moderna. It's about a 7%, 8% stake. So that's going to be really interesting to see whether or not that results in, you know, any partnership there in any way. So that's, you know, what we're looking at right now.
ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: All right, thanks a lot for that roundup, Anjalee Khemlani.
