Welcome to Thoughts on the market. I'm Matthew Harrison Equity Research

analyst covering biotechnology. And I'm Ricky Golwasser Equity Research

Analysts covering health care services and technology. And on this special edition of the podcast we'll be talking about the

road to COVID-19 vaccination and what's ahead in the next few months. It's Monday

December 14th at 8.30 a.m. in New York.

Matthew, before we dive in the timelines and logistics of vaccine,

we have two narratives going on right now.

One is positive news on the vaccine front,

and the other is alarming numbers of new cases in the U.S. with daily death tolls at record highs.

Maybe we could start with an update on the trajectory of COVID-19 in the next few months.

Are we going to see these numbers continue until vaccinations are

underway or will we see a plateau at some point?

Yeah, Ricky, I think unfortunately we should expect to see numbers continue to rise.

As we've looked at the data, right?

We're expecting somewhere around 240,000 cases

by the end of the year, and we would expect to see that

to continue to rise through the first few months of vaccination.

We don't expect to see a plateau until sometime in March.

And then assuming that the vaccine is deployed effectively, we would expect to see cases start to

really fall at that point and then sometime in the early to mid-summer to start to see numbers go down to a very low level.

So on Friday the FDA gave emergency approval to a Pfizer vaccine.

Now that we are starting the vaccination for COVID-19, who will get it first?

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