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Shares of Moderna (NASDAQ:MRNA) are trading 2% lower Thursday morning as the company announced it had agreed to amend the delivery schedule of additional COVID-19 vaccine booster shots to the European Union.
The agreement, the first public announcement of its kind, is allowing participating EU Member States to postpone deliveries of Moderna’s vaccine booster doses currently scheduled for later in 2022 or even early 2023.
It’s too early to tell whether other countries will follow suit, and what effect such postponements may have on Moderna’s bottom line, although negative financial implications can’t be ruled out. The company, on its end, continues “to expect advanced purchase agreements of approximately $21 billion for 2022 and continues to believe that COVID market dynamics will result in sales slightly higher in the second half of 2022 than in the first half.”
The news comes as global COVID-19 case counts continue to decline – on June 1st there were “only” 655K new cases reported globally. This compares to ~1.1M daily cases reported 2 months prior, and nearly 3.7M daily cases at the height of the January 2022 COVID surge.
So far there’s no noticeable chain reaction in other COVID-19 vaccine-dependent stocks – both Novavax (NASDAQ:NVAX) and Pfizer (NYSE:PFE) remain relatively quiet pre-market.
