Vaccination in the UK, weak ADPs and wise Musk's fear

3 dic 2020

The main news yesterday were traditionally related to the pandemic and vaccines. And no less traditionally they were rather ambiguous. On the one hand, the UK is the first in the world to approve the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine. Vaccinations will begin next week after the country receives 800,000 doses from Pfizer's manufacturing center in Belgium. The country has ordered enough doses of the vaccine to immunize 20 million of its 67 million population.

As a reminder, the US FDA is due to meet on December 10 to discuss whether to recommend an emergency authorization for the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine, and the European Medicines Agency said it could grant an emergency vaccine approval by December 29.
Currently, 22.5 million doses of Pfizer vaccine and 18 million doses of Moderna vaccine will be produced in December 2020.

But this pot of honey was not without tar. The pandemic in the world does not even think to fade away. More than 200K new cases of infection were recorded in the United States yesterday, the number of hospitalizations is breaking records and the medical system is on the verge of collapse.

Yesterday's ADP data came out much worse than forecasted (307K against the forecasted 410K) and confirmed fears that the US economic recovery has slowed sharply after a new outbreak of the pandemic. Considering that the main US labor market data will be published tomorrow, the reason for pessimism is more than serious. It is highly likely that today's jobless claims data will confirm these concerns.

From local news, it is worth noting Musk's half-panic letter to his employees, in which he warned that Tesla shares would be instantly crushed, like a soufflé under a sledgehammer, if they did not find ways to reduce costs. Essentially, Musk affirmed that Tesla's profitability was and remains an illusion that requires more and more efforts to maintain over time. Why is Musk panicking right now? If you look at what happens to Nikola shares (they lost about 50% in the last week) or Nio (in just three days, the scale of losses reached 30%), it becomes clear why it is now, because Tesla, by and large, is next in line.