The Good News

Pfizer was one of the few stocks in positive territory on the day. Shares of the pharmaceutical giant ended up 0.7%, despite a seeming setback late Friday when a Food and Drug Administration advisory committee rejected the Biden administration's plan for rolling out the company's Covid-19 booster shot. 

While the ruling could limit the use of Pfizer's vaccine, investors took a different view. One Wall Street analyst saw the FDA recommendation as "great news" for Pfizer, Barron's Josh Nathan-Kazis reports today. 

Despite rejecting President Biden's booster-for-all-plan, the committee said that senior citizens, healthcare workers, and others at increased risk for Covid exposure should still get the booster shot. SVB Leerink analyst Geoffrey Porges sees that caveat as a general, long-term endorsement of boosters. Here's more from Josh: 

Porges wrote that the advisory committee had implicitly endorsed boosting vaccine. “The [committee] members argued forcefully that health-care workers, who are on the front lines of Covid exposure risk, should also be recommended for boosting,” he wrote. “This signals to other public-health officials, physicians, and consumers that experts believe boosting is worthwhile and is already justified in individuals who face elevated Covid risk for any reason.”

He expects the FDA to approve boosters for all ages, and for a key Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory committee to recommend them, within the next one to three months.

Porges is more bullish on Pfizer's Covid-19 opportunity than most analysts. He estimates the company's vaccine revenue at $39.5 billion this year, Josh notes, versus an average Wall Street estimate of $32.8 billion. 

Separately, Pfizer and its vaccine partner BioNTech said today that a low-dose regimen of its vaccine had proven safe and well tolerated in children ages 5 to 11, producing "robust neutralizing antibody responses." The companies said they would be sending the data to global regulatory bodies "before the start of the winter season." Josh has more on that news, as well.