Is Johnson & Johnson an Underdog in the Coronavirus Vaccine Race?
The past month has been critical in the quest for a COVID-19 vaccine. Pfizer and its partner BioNTech earned emergency use authorization (EUA) Dec. 11 from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for their candidate, BNT162b2. Moderna followed soon after with an EUA for its vaccine, mRNA-1273, on Dec. 18. At this writing, thousands of healthcare workers are already receiving doses of these vaccines.
That said, many other companies in the COVID-19 vaccine race have yet to receive regulatory approval for their candidates. One of them is Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ), the single largest healthcare company in the world by market cap. Johnson & Johnson is probably not used to being considered an underdog. But does that title fit the drugmaker in this race? Let's dig into the company's coronavirus-related efforts and find out.
Johnson & Johnson's candidate is called Ad26.COV2.S, and it's an adenoviral vector vaccine. It works by introducing a gene from the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which causes COVID-19, into the recipient's cells using another virus (an adenovirus), thereby instructing those cells to make the SARS-CoV-2 virus protein.
Source Fool.com
