By Dhirendra Tripathi
Investing.com – Shares of companies making Covid vaccines were taking a knock in premarket trading a day after the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the Biden administration’s workplace vaccine-or-test mandate for larger private employers.
Novavax (NASDAQ:NVAX) stock took the biggest hit, losing more than 10%. The company is more than a year behind bringing a vaccine to the market and is yet to seek FDA’s nod for emergency use. It has secured the nod from WHO and in U.K., the E.U., India and in a few more countries.
BioNTech (NASDAQ:BNTX) lost 5% while its partner, Pfizer (NYSE:PFE), fell 1.6%. Moderna (NASDAQ:MRNA) was down 5.4% while Johnson & Johnson (NYSE:JNJ), the least affected since it draws only minuscule revenue from the vaccines, shed 0.6%.
The conditions for businesses with 100 or more employees would have applied to an estimated 84 million workers. The court ruled the administration didn’t have the unilateral power to impose a mandate that employers ensure their workers are vaccinated or tested every week to detect coronavirus.
The ruling comes at a time when omicron, the most contagious of the coronavirus variants, has led to record infections in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world. According to New York Times, an average of more than 803,000 coronavirus cases have been reported each of the last seven days in the U.S., an increase of 133% from two weeks ago.
Corporates, after keeping offices shut for almost two years, are beginning to reopen workplaces while a large number of their workers remain reluctant to get the vaccine.