2 Top Healthcare Stocks That Could Be Bought Out in 2022
The healthcare sector has been a serious disappointment for investors in 2021. After a banner year in 2020 thanks to the advent of several highly lucrative COVID-19 vaccines and therapies, the closely watched SPDR S&P Biotech ETF (NYSEMKT: XBI) has now fallen by a staggering 11.5% so far this year. The SPDR S&P Biotech ETF, by contrast, gained a whopping 48% in 2020. Even more impressively, this diverse biotech ETF was on a nearly decade-long bull run, where it rose by an eye-popping 570%, before this year's double-digit pullback.
A multitude of reasons underlie this significant downward trend in healthcare stocks this year. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued more than a few complete response letters (i.e., a rejection) in 2021, some of which were surprising to say the least. A healthy cadre of headline-grabbing new technologies from biotech pioneers such as Allogene Therapeutics, Bluebird Bio, CRISPR Therapeutics (NASDAQ: CRSP), Sarepta Therapeutics, among many others, have failed to live up to expectations and/or exhibited worrying safety signals. Some newly approved drugs, such as Biogen's (NASDAQ: BIIB) Alzheimer's disease medication Aduhelm, have vastly underperformed Wall Street's sales expectations thus far. And last but not least, a fair number of high-value investors are probably locking in profits following the industry's enormous upswing in 2020.
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Source Fool.com
