Vaccines tend to get a bad reputation among biotech investors. Which makes it easy to forget that Pfizer’s top-selling product, with $5.8 billion in annual sales, is a vaccine: Prevnar 13.
Now Prevnar may be seeing a boost because of worries about the novel coronavirus, according to Umer Raffat, an analyst at Evercore ISI, an investment bank.
Prevnar 13 is used mostly in children, Raffat writes, but less than $1 billion of its sales come from its use in older adults. Regardless of age, the vaccine prevents pneumonia and other infections caused by 13 different strains of the pneumococcus bacteria. Pneumovax, a Merck product, is also used for preventing pneumonia in adults.
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actually Pneumovax absolutely IS used in adults, so I suspect the bump in Pneumovax and Prevnar 13 is likely adult driven.
I highly recommend anyone at elevated risk of COVID-19 get immunized. My first choice is Prevnar 13 as it covers more of the pneumococcus strains likely to cause pneumonia these days. (no I don’t work for or with Pfizer)