Moderna loses more than $7 billion after FDA blows over teen Covid shots

The Food and Drug Administration wants more time to weigh international analyzes of the risks of myocarditis, a rare heart inflammation, that cannot be completed before the end of the year, Moderna said in a statement on Sunday. The stock fell 5.1% to $327.79 at 12 p.m. in New York.

“The delay shouldn’t be a surprise,” Morgan Stanley analyst Matthew Harrison wrote in a note to clients, “and should push back filing times for emergency clearance even among the company’s younger children.” It also places Moderna’s distribution of shots well behind Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE that were authorized in May to children under 12.

The stock fell 10% in October — the worst month for the company since March — after the success of Merck & Co.’s Covid-19 pill took a toll on vaccine stock enthusiasm. Still, Moderna has more than tripled this year and is the S&P 500’s best performer of the year by a long shot since its historic inclusion in the benchmark gauge.

Expert investors still view Moderna as overvalued that the Covid-19 crisis is slowing, Jared Holz, a strategist at Oppenheimer, said in an interview. The size of the potential market for booster shots over the next year and beyond also remains up for debate.

“Modernity has been validated in a significant way, but the impact of just the Covid-19 vaccine as an upside driver is waning lately. Health care investors would like to see the pipeline beyond the coronavirus,” Holz said.

This story has been published without modification in text from a wire agency feed. Only the title has been changed.