Coronavirus Latest: Thursday, October 22

Moderna announced that it filled up its capacity for volunteers for its vaccine trial, hitting a 30,000 mark. This comes as cases continue to rise with the CDC announcing it is seeing ‘increasing cases in 75% of the country.’ Yahoo Finance’s Anjalee Khemlani joins The Final Round to discuss the latest on the coronavirus.

Video Transcript

MYLES UDLAND: To everything going on with the coronavirus case, counts here in the US continuing to surge, hospitalizations on the rise. Deaths, unfortunately, also on the rise. Anjalee Khemlani joins us now with the latest on everything going on, on the COVID front, Anjalee.

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: Thanks, Myles. Yep, as you mentioned, we are watching those concerning numbers rise across the country as expected by health experts and hoping that states take some efforts, or at least, in cities, as we've been seeing, taking more restrictive efforts to help curb the trend so that we're not seeing a repeat of earlier this year.

Meanwhile, looking in the vaccine space, we know that we've been waiting to hear more good news about possibly restarting some of the trials that have been paused, as well as anticipated interim data that's coming out next month.

Moderna, to that end, announced that it has finally enrolled all of the participants it anticipates in its trials for-- and that's a 30,000 number for dosing for the second time. That's something that we have to wait for.

Meanwhile, also, today, we know that we saw the long-awaited vaccine advisory committee to the FDA. And a number of hurdles came out of that, that both the regulatory authority, as well as other health agencies, are really faced with when it comes to this race for a vaccine. Whether or not one gets authorized, the rules to even get authorization are also still a little bit murky.

So it's leaving the path unclear for some of these drug companies, including the largest, like Johnson & Johnson and Pfizer, which have written letters out of concern that they still don't have a clear path for this emergency use authorization.

So that meeting is still ongoing, and I'm waiting to hear a little bit more. But I can say it's definitely been an interesting day when it comes to sort of all the concerns that we've heard about a vaccine coming up-- coming into the fore.

MYLES UDLAND: Yeah, and I think, Anjalee, another reminder of the market is mostly focused just on creating a vaccine. But as we've discussed many times, actually implementing the vaccine, getting it to the right people, having people trust that it's going to work, all of these things are now-- that process is now beginning, and it's not going to be an easy one or one that is quickly resolved.

And it's probably really the majority of the story, I guess, when it comes to resolving the pandemic. In many ways, creating a vaccine was the easy part. Actually getting it out to the people is the more difficult part. All right, Anjalee, thanks for that update.

All right, coming up on the other side of this break, we're going to have our Call of the Day, Goldman's latest on a company we love here at "The Final Round." Bet you wouldn't guess it. We'll tell you what it is in just two minutes.