A new variant of mpox (formerly known as monkeypox) has been declared an international public health emergency, with cases now confirmed outside of Africa. This development has prompted a surge in shares of companies involved in vaccine development, such as GeoVax Labs (GOVX).
Yahoo Finance health reporter Anjalee Khemlani joins Market Domination Overtime to break down the details of this emerging health crisis, discussing the companies at the forefront of creating new vaccines.
For more expert insight and the latest market action, click here to watch this full episode of Market Domination Overtime.
This post was written by Angel Smith
Video Transcript
Shares of geo vcs have had quite the run up more than 200% over the past five days.
Companies, one among a group of drug makers names working on treatments for ox viral disease, deemed a public health emergency by the World Health Organization last Wednesday.
And joining us now to discuss is Yahoo Finance’s Angelique Kamlani Ange.
Hey, Josh, thanks.
Yeah, we know that the World Health Organization has now for the second time declared ma a an emergency situation.
They’re keeping an eye on the growth of a new variant that has come out in the past year and is spreading beyond uh the Democratic Republic of Congo where it has been circulating for some time as well as now some new cases that have been confirmed in Sweden.
So that has actually been the reason why we’ve seen the rally for companies like GEO vcs.
We do know that this year alone, the number of cases has outstripped what we saw last year, which is 15,600 cases already this year globally.
And, and so what the World Health Organization is doing is looking at uh you know, kind of getting the ball rolling when it comes to ensuring that these countries have access to the necessary equipment that includes tests as well as vaccines as well as some sort of medications.
Now, we did see that Gevas rally today as well on the back of one of the other companies showing that their smallpox treatment did not translate to better treatment, uh post uh post exposure and that’s from S A technologies.
Meanwhile, GEO itself doesn’t have any vaccine candidates in trials.
It does actually have a freak clinical candidate.
And then we also have Bavarian Nordic.
That’s really the big player in this right now.
Bavarian is the one that already has uh us as well as European Union approved vaccine out there.
It’s a smallpox vaccine that proved efficacious against ox as well.
And so there is a lot of these companies that are really benefiting from the rally here as a result of maybe playing in the smallpox space and hoping for a translation into ox the way Bavarian Nordic did.
So you can also see emergent bios solutions is one of those other ones that’s waiting for approval uh for it’s a potential vaccine.
And so that that’s sort of where things stand right now.
I know it’s a little complicated to follow, but it’s not.
Um I would say that, you know, the way that uh some of the public health officials are looking at this is that it’s not necessarily a new uh outbreak.
It’s just that it’s a new variant and that’s causing some concern because it seems to be spreading just a little bit more efficiently than in the past.
So that’s why you’re seeing some of the moves that you’ve seen in the past week.
Al Thanks so much for breaking it down for us.
Appreciate it.
