Vaccine maker stocks jump after US bird flu kills

Shares of vaccine developers jumped Tuesday after the United States reported its first human death from the H5 strain of bird flu.

Shares of Modernas rose 11.6 percent, Novavax rose 10.8 percent and CureVacs rose 5 percent. Shares of Pfizer, one of the largest U.S. drugmakers, rose nearly 1 percent.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday confirmed the death of an elderly patient with underlying medical conditions from the H5 strain of avian flu in Louisiana.

The CDC said there have been 66 cases of H5N1 avian flu in the United States since the start of 2024, while adding that the risk to the general public remains low.

Most importantly, no person-to-person transmission has been identified, the agency said. As in the case of Louisiana, most H5 avian influenza infections are linked to animal-human exposures.

Before the death in Louisiana, most cases were mild, with ocular conjunctivitis being the most common symptom, followed by fever and respiratory symptoms, according to a scientific article published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

But epidemiologists cautioned that these mild symptoms could be because those infected were mainly young farmworkers, who were less likely to suffer severe illness.

In July last year, Moderna received $176 million from the US government to develop a bird flu vaccine using its messenger RNA technology. Novavax and CureVac also have early-stage avian flu vaccines in development.

In May, Pfizer said it was developing a vaccine against a strain of avian flu that currently causes significant illness in birds and cows and recent case reports illustrate limited transmission in humans.

The US government also has a large stockpile of avian flu vaccines, which it has announced it can deploy on a large scale within a few weeks. But Joe Biden's administration has not yet authorized the vaccine rollout.

Health officials said they would continue to monitor the avian flu outbreak, the worst of its kind to hit the United States. The virus has spread to poultry farms, while more than 900 cattle herds have been affected in 16 states.

California, the state hardest hit by outbreaks in cattle, declared a public health emergency in December. The state is distributing millions of pieces of personal protective equipment to farmworkers to minimize exposure and is working on ways to reduce contamination of raw dairy products.

In the UK, the government has agreed a contract for more than 5 million doses of flu vaccine with the H5 strain from vaccine maker CSL Seqirus.

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