Going viral on Wall St | Merkel wannabes | A comedy of errors

Hopping on the Corona bandwagon

This Friday, German biotech company CureVac listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange in an IPO. The shares soared - at the end of the day the company was worth nine Billion Euros.

When CureVac in January announced that they were working on a Covid vaccine, no one took notice. Not that CureVac was unknown, five years earlier a €45M investment by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation made the headlines. But since the failure of a prostate cancer drug in 2017 the company had slumbered. 

Then suddenly in March CureVac was on everyone's lips. Allegedly, Donald Trump had attempted to acquire exclusive rights to the, still to be developed, vaccine for the US. CureVac took time to comment on the rumour. Enough time for the German government to declare that they’d stop any such attempt and for the company’s largest shareholder, Dietmar Hopp, to use a TV-appearance to say that it was “not an option” for him to sell to Trump. When the company finally commented they denied…