Shares in vaccine developers jumped on Tuesday after the US reported its first human death from the H5 strain of bird flu.
Moderna’s stock rose 11.6 per cent, Novavax gained 10.8 per cent and CureVac’s shares advanced 5 per cent. Shares in Pfizer, one of the biggest US drugmakers, added nearly 1 per cent.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday confirmed the death of an elderly patient with underlying medical conditions from the H5 strain of bird flu in Louisiana.
The CDC said there had been 66 H5N1 bird flu cases in the US since the start of 2024, although it added that the risk to the general public “remains low”.
“Most importantly, no person-to-person transmission spread has been identified,” the agency said. “As with the case in Louisiana, most H5 bird flu infections are related to animal-to-human exposures.”
Before the death in Louisiana, most of the cases had been mild, with the eye infection conjunctivitis the most common symptom, followed by fever and respiratory symptoms, according to a scientific paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
But epidemiologists have warned these mild symptoms might be because the people infected were mainly young farmworkers, who were less likely to suffer from severe disease.
In July last year, Moderna was awarded $176mn by the US government to develop a bird flu vaccine using its messenger-RNA technology. Novavax and CureVac also have early-stage bird flu vaccines under development.
In May, Pfizer said it was developing a vaccine for a strain of bird flu that was “currently causing significant disease in birds and cows and recent case reports illustrating limited crossover into humans”.
The US government also has a large stockpile of bird flu vaccines, which it has said it could roll out widely within weeks. But Joe Biden’s administration has not yet authorised the rollout of the jabs.
Health officials said they would continue to monitor the bird flu outbreak, the worst of its kind to hit the US. The virus has been spreading through poultry farms, while more than 900 cattle herds have been affected across 16 states.
California, the state worst affected by the outbreaks in cattle, declared a public health emergency in December. The state is distributing millions of items of personal protective equipment to farm workers to minimise exposure, and is working on ways to reduce contamination in raw dairy products.
In the UK, the government has agreed a contract for more than 5mn doses of the flu vaccine with the H5 strain from vaccine maker CSL Seqirus.
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