Afternoon all.
There are plenty of reasons to be gloomy at the moment. In life, things are very different and many people are isolating to do their part in removing COVID-19 transmission opportunities, and in investing nearly everything is down in value.
If you’re a copier of mine on eToro then please do not panic through this. I’d already built some cash up before this when markets were hitting records and even though this is turning into something I never thought it would, we currently have a portfolio with no leverage at all and I’ve been using ETF’s to deploy capital and avoid single stock risks through these very uncertain times.
Over the last 24 hours things have really ramped up on the fear side and it’s easy to get drawn into that state of mind. So to force myself out of state of mind, I decided to write this article and go looking for only positive stories on how we are going to come through this sooner rather than later.
It is always darkest just before the Day dawneth
Thomas Fuller ~ A Pisgah-Sight Of Palestine And The Confines Thereof
First on my list news from the WHO just yesterday, reporting that 20 vaccines for COVID-19 are currently in development.
“The acceleration of this process is really truly dramatic in terms of what we’re able to do, building on work that started with SARS, that started with MERS and now is being used for COVID-19 ,” Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, the technical lead for WHO’s emergencies program, said at a press conference at the organization’s headquarters in Geneva on Friday.
The main criticism of vaccine development is that a final, clinical use, version is at least a year away and whilst this is true and fair, the way we view something that has a cure compared to something that does not is very very different. We have a head start on this because COVID-19 belongs to the Coranavirus family, and there are already candidate vaccines for SARS and MERS which can be used as the basis for the accelerated that is now taking place on a global scale.
In fact, the first human trial already started last week, with volunteers receiving shots so that data can start being collected on effectiveness and dose response. Details here.
Next on my list is also medical, but this time the angle is therapies to treat the disease in patients confirmed to be infected. Success here is likely to be much immediate than a vaccine as current indications are that some drugs that already have approval for use in other health conditions could be effective. This means that certain parts of the testing/approval test have already been successfully navigated.
I wrote about one of these the other day, which was developed by a subsidiary of Fujifilm in Japan.
A trial is underway in China with 340 patients and some positive observations are being reported. “It has a high degree of safety and is clearly effective in treatment,” Zhang told reporters on Tuesday. The drug is called Favipiravir/Avigan and it was developed as a Flu treatment so new approvals would be required before it could become an official treatment for COVID-19. Japan are also conducting trials with the drug and it will be interesting to see these findings published and scrutinised by the experts.
Two other drugs I heard about were mentioned by President Trump during his daily press conference on Thursday. He caused quite a stir with his optimism and I think he was partially responsible for the recovery in markets that day. The two drugs are Remdesivir and Chloroquine.
Remdesivir is an antiviral which the FDA has allowed to be used in clinical trials to test its effectiveness against COVID-19 under a compassionate use rule, which basically says doctors can use new or unapproved drugs in cases where there are no other treatment options. President Trump stated it “has been approved or very close to approved” by the FDA.
Chloroquine seems to be a more established drug which is used to fight Malaria. Bayer announced Thursday it has donated 3 million tablets of Resochin, a chloroquine tablet, to the government response and is working with them to get authorization for emergency use. President Trump was very positive, saying ” We are going to be able to make that drug available almost immediately. That’s where the FDA has been so great. They’ve gone through the approval process. It’s been approved. And they did it, they took it down for many, many months to immediate. We are going to be able to make that drug available by prescription or states”.
FDA Commissioner Steven Hahn seemed to walk-back some of President Trump’s optimism, suggesting the FDA wanted to look at more data regarding chloroquine through the use of a large-scale clinical trial to answers more questions regarding how effective it is in patients battling with COVID-19. So I think Trump got a bit ahead of himself but it’s clear that several drugs are be evaluated and some positive data is encouraging further study in this regard.
Stepping away from the health aspect for a moment, I’ve just seen this headline ” US stimulus plan to top $2 trillion” and while it doesn’t help cure the disease, we do need to give thought to living through this pandemic and also what economies will look like on the other side of the ‘curve’.
USA, EU, UK, Canada, Australia, China and Japan have all announced stimulus measures.
There are always big questions asked about how effective stimulus will be and how well it will be directed, a big fear being that the wealthy end up with most of the benefits but there can be no doubt that this is a boost to the situation that will provide some forms of support and compensation to those in need of it.
It also presents an interesting situation for a few months time when things hopefully are returning to normal, and most of this stimulus money will be working its way through the global economic system and should boost activity and help GDP data bounce quickly. This is one of the reasons I’ve been reluctant to join the chorus of voices calling this as bad as the Great Depression back in the 30’s.
Live article, updating and adding as I find positive stories today.
