New York: Wall Street’s main indexes rose as travel stocks surged on the launch of a nationwide Covid-19 vaccine campaign, while Alexion Pharmaceuticals jumped on a $39 billion buyout offer from AstraZeneca in one of the year’s biggest deals.
Shipments of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine fanned out to distribution points across the United States on Sunday, with injections beginning from Monday.
The inoculations are seen as pivotal toward ultimately halting the Covid-19 pandemic, which has claimed more than a million lives around the world and brought economic activity to a halt.
Travel and leisure stocks are the worst hit by restrictions on movement due to the virus outbreak, and have reacted positively to any vaccine-related news.
US stocks had rallied through the past few weeks, with the S&P 500 touching a series of record highs as markets bet on the swift approval and roll-out of a vaccine.
But uncertainty over more fiscal stimulus had stifled gains, after the Senate last week approved a one-week extension of federal funding to avoid a government shutdown and to provide more time for negotiations on coronavirus relief and an overarching spending bill.
