What happened
Popular coronavirus stock BioNTech (BNTX 0.55%) was a hit with investors on Tuesday. They bid the company's share price up by 2.4% on an otherwise downbeat day for the stock market. News from across the Atlantic seemed to lift sentiment on the company's prospects.
So what
Earlier that day, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson mapped out his government's plan to combat the coronavirus pandemic in the country through the fall and winter.
Image source: Getty Images.
An essential component of this strategy is booster shots for people over 50, as folks in that demographic are considered to be more susceptible to the coronavirus. Other measures include the continuation of the government's self-explanatory "Test, Trace, and Isolate" program, and a continuation of mask mandates.
The Prime Minister's office said that an extra 5.4 billion pounds ($7.5 billion) in public funding would be allocated to the country's National Health Service.
The booster shots will be of Comirnaty, the vaccine developed by BioNTech in partnership with pharmaceutical industry giant Pfizer (PFE 0.23%), no matter which jab the recipients originally received. So far, the country has approved the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, and one made by AstraZeneca (AZN 1.03%) in collaboration with Oxford University researchers, as boosters.
Now what
The U.K. government's announcement comes one day after a group of 18 scientists cast doubt on the need for booster shots for the general population in a paper published in influential medical journal The Lancet. The country is clearly lining up on the opposite side of that argument, so now we might expect other nations to follow suit.
