Yahoo Finance’s Alexis Christoforous, Brian Sozzi, and Anjalee Khemlani break down the latest coronavirus news.

Video Transcript

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOUROS: The UK has suffered roughly 40,000 coronavirus-related deaths. That is the second highest only to the US. But that number may actually be much higher. The Office for National Statistics says there is likely an excessive number of people who died in England and Wales from COVID-19 who were not originally diagnosed.

Here are the latest numbers on the virus now. According to Johns Hopkins, there are over 6.65 million worldwide cases of people who are infected with the virus, which has killed over 391,000 people. In the US, there are over 1.87 million confirmed cases, which has resulted in 108,000 deaths.

Anjalee Khemlani is joining us now for the latest developments on the virus. Anjalee, good morning to you. I see AstraZeneca signing two big deals here to try and get a vaccine out. What can you tell us about those deals?

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: That's right, Alexis. Well we know that AstraZeneca has been working with Oxford University to help develop their vaccine and scale it up for distribution worldwide. And they made moves yesterday to kind of seal that. We know that they entered a $750 million deal to produce that with Gavi, which is the world vaccine alliance, as well as another agreement with the Serum Institute of India, which they'd already been in talks with. So we were really expecting that.

The Gavi is for 300 million doses. Meanwhile the Serum Institute will be 400 million doses. And this puts a focus on really the distribution to lower-income countries. And so that's really important as we've been having these discussions about where the vaccines will go once they're produced.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOUROS: I'm also looking at another biopharma company, Novavax today. Stock is up better than 10% here in the premarket. What's the news out there, Anjalee?

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: Yeah, so late yesterday we got news that the Department of Defense has signed a contract with Novavax to help distribute their vaccine candidate, which we know is going through the trials right now and is one of those companies that we're keeping an eye on that has a lot of promise in their potential. And so that is a up to $60 million contract for 10 million doses of production.

And we've been hearing a lot about, you know, the military getting more involved with scaling up for these vaccine candidates. We know that for Operation Warp Speed, for example, the federal government is backing five other companies. And so this adds basically a sixth, though through a different pathway. So it's going to be interesting to see how many more do get involved and where the military is looking to back for scaling up.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOUROS: All right, Anjalee Khemlani, thanks for that.