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Shares in vaccine developers jumped on Tuesday after the US reported its first human death from the H5 strain of bird flu.
Moderna’s stock rose 13 per cent, Novavax gained nearly 15 per cent and CureVac’s shares advanced 10 per cent. Shares in Pfizer, one of the biggest US drugmakers, added 2 per cent, while GSK added 1 per cent.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday confirmed the death of an elderly patient with underlying medical conditions from the H5 strain of bird flu in Louisiana.
The CDC said there had been 66 H5N1 bird flu cases in the US since 2024, though it added that the risk to the general public “remains low”.
“Most importantly, no person-to-person transmission spread has been identified,” the agency said. “As with the case in Louisiana, most H5 bird flu infections are related to animal-to-human exposures.”
In July last year, Moderna was awarded $176mn by the US government to develop a bird flu vaccine using its messenger-RNA technology. Novavax and CureVac also have early-stage bird flu vaccines under development.
In May, Pfizer said it was developing a vaccine for a strain of bird flu that was “currently causing significant disease in birds and cows and recent case reports illustrating limited crossover into humans”.
The US government also has a large stockpile of bird flu vaccines, which it has said it could roll out widely within weeks. But the Biden administration has not yet authorised the rollout of the jabs.
Health officials said they will continue to closely monitor the bird flu outbreak, the worst of its kind to hit the US. The virus has been spreading through poultry farms, while more than 900 cattle herds have been affected across 16 states.
California, the state worst affected by the outbreaks in cattle, declared a public health emergency in December.
