The past few months I couldn't help but notice a sizable gap in the valuation of Moderna (MRNA) and Novavax (NVAX), two players in the race to bring a COVID-19 vaccine to market. In November, the gap has made sense slightly more so, with MRNA producing positive data showing the company has an effective COVID-19 vaccine.

Despite the valuation gap making slightly more sense now that MRNA has the golden ticket of a proven-effective COVID-19 vaccine (mRNA-1273), with NVAX only having a yet-to-be-proven COVID-19 vaccine, NVAX isn't out of the race. The success of two RNA vaccines, Pfizer (PFE) and BioNTech SE's (BNTX) BNT162b2 is also a RNA vaccine, is encouraging for vaccine developers. Perhaps more encouraging is the success of a second type of vaccine, AstraZeneca (AZN) and Oxford's AZD1222, suggesting that there may be many ways to skin a cat when it comes to developing a COVID-19 vaccine. I'm willing to bet a protein-based vaccine (NVX-CoV2373) also has a good chance of succeeding, especially given the data seen so far with NVAX's NVX-CoV2373.

READ FULL ARTICLE HERE