Dj Ibd: Novavax Clears Key Benchmark, Hitting 90-Plus Rs Rating

By Peter Loftus

Shares of vaccine makers including Moderna, Novavax and CureVac rose Tuesday after U.S. health officials confirmed the first American death caused by the H5N1 bird flu.

Moderna and Novavax shares rose more than 10%, while CureVac increased 5%.

The companies are developing experimental vaccines against pandemic influenza, including the avian H5N1 strain that has infected more than 60 people in the U.S. in the past year, mostly from animal-to-human exposures.

Moderna's efforts are part of a $176 million federal contract it received last year.

The death in Louisiana could spur more federal funding for the vaccines' development, or purchase orders if the vaccines succeed in testing and are authorized by regulators. A vaccine could be given to at-risk people such as farm workers, hunters or bird hobbyists.

This item is part of a Wall Street Journal live coverage event. The full stream can be found by searching P/WSJL (WSJ Live Coverage).

Shortly after President-elect Donald J. Trump nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the biotech market — specifically those involving vaccines — responded negatively. It wasn’t really surprising. Without getting into the political weeds, Kennedy has long espoused unconventional views of science and medicine that threaten to disrupt business as usual.

To be sure, Kennedy proponents may argue that such disruption is exactly the point: the idea is that for too long, big pharma and big food companies have, for lack of a better word, “poisoned” the American people in the name of the almighty dollar. Specifically, RFK pinned the prevalence of chronic disease and childhood illness on food and drug industries.

Following Trump’s nomination of Kennedy, several top enterprises such as Pfizer saw their shares erode. However, one of the few notable exceptions was Novavax . One of the rags-to-riches tales during the onslaught of COVID-19, Novavax was on the verge of collapse prior to the public health crisis. Cynically, though, the SARS-CoV-2 virus brought NVAX stock back into the game.

Of course, the recovery story was relatively short-lived. With other companies delivering their solutions to the clinical finish line first, NVAX stock flirted once again with irrelevancy. Ironically, though, Novavax’s key disadvantage at the time — the deployment of a protein subunit vaccine as opposed to the innovative but controversial messenger RNA — could be its saving grace moving forward.

Essentially, what it comes down to is that Novavax delivers science that Trump’s conservative base trusts. Should another health crisis erupt, Novavax would presumably be in a much better position compared to big pharma giants that are on RFK’s naughty list.

NVAX Stock Is on the Move

On Monday, NVAX stock shot up over 10% in the open market, ultimately closing at $9.76 a pop. Even better, the momentum carried over into the afterhours session, which concluded at $10.35, slightly over 6% higher from the close. Not shockingly, NVAX also ranked as one of the highlights of Barchart’s unusual stock options volume screener.

When the dust settled, total volume hit 46,874 contracts versus an open interest reading of 295,951 contracts. This tally represented a 308.84% lift against the trailing one-month average volume. Further, call volume stood at 36,450 contracts versus put volume of 10,424, yielding a put/call volume ratio of 0.29.

To be fair, Monday’s options flow — which focuses exclusively on big block transactions likely placed by institutional investors — revealed net trade sentiment of $160,100 below parity, thus favoring the bears. This pessimistic sentiment was driven mostly by purchased $10 puts expiring Jan. 16, 2026.

While it’s not the most encouraging datapoint, it’s interesting that major investors are effectively buying protection at $10. This acquisition may indicate that this psychologically and technically critical milestone may be the new baseline of support moving forward. If so, the options flow data could be a counterintuitive bullish signal.

Whatever the case, the fundamentals of a politically supportive backdrop for Novavax’s traditional approach to vaccines could easily boost NVAX stock under Trump’s second administration. With that in mind, the biotech specialist deserves to be on speculators’ radar.

Multiple Ways to Wager on Novavax

Should you anticipate that NVAX stock will rise under Trump 2.0, you have a few compelling ideas at your disposal. All of them involve bull call spreads, which are multi-leg transactions: the trader buys a call option and simultaneously sells a call at a higher strike price for the same expiration date. The idea is to use the credit received from the short call to partially offset the debit paid for the long call.