What happened
The coronavirus might be surging in various parts of the world, but this hasn't made coronavirus stock Novavax (NVAX) a compelling buy lately. Data provided by S&P Global Market Intelligence reveal that the company's shares were down by just under 12% week to date as of Thursday's stock market close.
So what
Novavax has been somewhat of a perennial laggard in what was once a compelling race to bring a coronavirus vaccine to market. As fellow COVID jab developers like Moderna and the partnership of Pfizer and Germany-based biotech BioNTech were winning authorizations for their products from major regulators, Novavax was still getting its act together with formal submissions.
Image source: Getty Images.
These days, Novavax is still on the bubble for all-important Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorization of its NVX-CoV2373 (AKA Nuvaxovid).
Although an FDA advisory committee is set to review the company's submission for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) on June 7, even if successful this will likely be seen as many days late and quite a few dollars short by investors -- the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech shots were both initially green-lighted in late 2020.
Now what
Compounding this, at the end of last week one of the "big four" banks initiated coverage on Novavax stock, and the recommendation wasn't exactly glowing. Bank of America Securities analyst Alec Stranahan slapped the shares with an underperform (read:sell) recommendation at a price target of $35.
The prognosticator feels that broad sector weakness plus "tempered expectations" with COVID and seasonal flu vaccines could drive the already weakened Novavax share price even lower.
