While the wrangling over the relative safety of new, virally vectored Covid vaccines from J&J and AstraZeneca appears to be unending, analysts aren’t waiting around to see how the market will play out for the leaders.
As far as Bernstein’s Ronny Gal is concerned, the fight for market share in the developed world is over, and Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna are the big winners, divvying up $38 billion in mega-blockbuster money.
Given the manufacturing clout that Pfizer has, Gal is assigning the lion’s share of that windfall to Pfizer, which he expects to record $24 billion in 2021 sales. Moderna will earn a mighty — though second place — $14 billion, Gal expects.
J&J, which today reported a modest $100 million in revenue from their vaccine — sidelined by safety concerns — is going to get iced out of the main market in the US/EU/Japan. AstraZeneca is also getting pushed aside by Pfizer and Moderna, Gal expects, as mRNA vaccines dominate the field.
We revise our model to assume no JNJ or AZN doses will be delivered in the US beyond the 100M pre-purchased JNJ doses. Incremental doses (and booster doses in the fall and winter) will come from the mRNA manufacturers (with possibly some from NVAXl). It seems EU will follow a similar pattern as many countries discontinued use of AZN vaccines and now purchased ~600M combined PFE and MRNA doses, and few AdVec doses will be ‘needed’ to vaccinate the population by YE21.
Let’s keep in mind here that J&J was forced to take a knee after a handful of cases of blood clotting, a tiny risk in the world of therapeutics when compared to the potential benefit it offers in terms of ending the pandemic. But with governments raising red flags in front of billions of people, while the mRNA vaccines continue to lengthen their lead, the risk/benefit algorithm that has long decided the winners and losers in this game has been thrown out the window. And even if NIAID director Anthony Fauci is right and J&J gets a green light to jump back in at the end of the week, no one is likely to forget those red flags.
One big question I have is how the major players will yet decide to line up for future pandemics. Will GSK, Merck and Sanofi do something definitive to gain a place in the mRNA field, or risk handing over the entire market to the mRNA leaders as they continue to ramp up manufacturing? Right now they seem virtually dormant in this setting.
Still vying to get into the game are new vaccines from Novavax and CureVac. And with more traditional jabs under a cloud, they may yet have a chance to make their mark as the rest of the world seeks a way out of the pandemic.
Just not in the biggest drug market of them all.
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