Following President-elect Donald Trump’s nomination of well-known vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services, vaccine manufacturers’ stock plummeted Thursday.
As rumors circulated regarding Trump’s anticipated selection, the equities plummeted in the last hour of trade. Shares of Novavax dropped more than 7%, Pfizer’s stock finished more than 2% down, and Moderna’s stock closed more than 5% worse on Thursday.
The German pharmaceutical company BioNTech, which collaborated with Pfizer to create a Covid vaccine, had its shares finish more than 6% down. The British pharmaceutical company GSK, which produces flu injections and a number of other vaccinations, ended the day around 2% down.
Following Trump’s confirmation of his choice in a post on his platform Truth Social, shares of those firms fell even further during extended session.
According to health policy experts, Kennedy might use a second Trump administration to intensify his anti-vaccine rhetoric, discouraging more Americans from getting routine vaccinations and Covid doses, which have avoided crippling diseases and saved millions of lives for decades.
The declining Covid vaccination rates in the United States have hurt Pfizer, Moderna, and Novavax’s profitability over the past two years, and they are still getting over the setback.
Kennedy has a long history of being skeptical of vaccines. He has long made untrue and deceptive claims regarding the safety of vaccinations, such as asserting that they are connected to autism in spite of several studies conducted over the years that refute this relationship.
Kennedy founded the nation’s most well-funded anti-vaccine group, Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit.
