Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news
- Latest: FTSE 100 closes at highest since early June
- European markets close at eight-month peak
- On Wall Street, Dow nudged fresh record highs on vaccine hopes
- Moderna: Covid-19 vaccine almost 95% effective in trials
Earlier:
One more thing to flag up….Britain has now secured a deal for an initial five million doses of Moderna’s new vaccine, my colleagues Jessica Elgot and Ian Sample report:
The deal done on Monday will mean vaccines could be delivered to the UK from spring 2021 if approved by the medicines regulator and increases the total number of doses secured by the UK to 355m.
At a Downing Street press conference, the health secretary, Matt Hancock, said the preliminary results were “excellent news”, adding: “Although I stress that this is preliminary, the safety data is limited and their production facilities are not yet at scale.” Hancock said the government had secured an “initial agreement” for 5m doses.
Related: UK buys 5m doses of Moderna Covid vaccine
The Moderna vaccine was always one of the front runners, why wasn’t it part of the UK stockpile from the very start?
Health Secretary @MattHancock tells @SkyNewsThomas that the govt’s approach is to have a “good spread of the vaccines”.
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