Florida Governor Ron DeSantis crushed the numbers for Norwegian Cruise Line (NCLH) by being obstinate that CEO Frank Del Rio had no right to demand that everyone be vaccinated before they take a Norwegian Cruise. Given that cruises were the epicenter of COVID when this whole thing started, I thought Frank was well within his right to insist that people not get sick on cruises.
But DeSantis took a live free or die of COVID approach to Frank's approach, trying to block Frank's attempts to stop COVID on his ships.
Del Rio won a temporary restraining order slapping DeSantis down real hard.
Now it turns out that whatever DeSantis did to hurt Norwegian, he took the other side and is furiously boosting numbers of Regeneron (REGN) . That's the only way I can view his press conference yesterday where he opened a site in Orlando called the "Regeneron clinic" and has made it so you do not need a prescription for the cocktail in Florida as there is now a standing order from Florida's Surgeon General to get it.
The Orlando site at Camping World Stadium will be open seven days a week and DeSantis said he would be opening sites statewide.
Right now Regeneron has a monoclonal antibody cocktail that you can take as soon as you get sick and you can enroll. When the governor announced the plan he was with Secretary Simone Marstiller head of the Agency for Health Care Administration for Florida, whose daughter had contracted COVID and had a 105 degree temperature, went on the Regeneron drug and by the next morning her fever had dropped to 99.6. Nothing like personal experience to get an initiative going.
Why do I care so much about this? Because the FDA itself and the CDC have not embraced the Regeneron cocktail as I thought they would. But if the states do it, if they follow Florida, than the two million doses that Regeneron purportedly has, are no not "in" the numbers. It's a huge windfall for Regeneron not yet reflected in the stock.
Same goes for Abbott Labs (ABT) and Binax. The last big news about Abbott Labs and its at home test kit was that it was too late and COVID was about to be solved so they missed the quarter
Fast forward a couple of months and what did we learn? The anti-vaxxers are so stalwart in their positions that they have kept COVID alive and now the Delta variant can crash through Moderna (MRNA) or Pfizer (PFE) vaccines. You know what that means? Testing, testing, testing.
We bought all the Binax's they had at our Rite Aid this weekend. We have 10 people staying over and we wanted them all tested. We are going to have a party in October and we are going to give people Binax tests before they can participate.
This Binax is the hottest product on the market. Just as the company had to pre-announce how poorly Binax is doing I wonder if they don' have to do the exact opposite now.
Yep, the tables have turned, the fortunes restored for Regeneron and Abbott. Their stocks have been up along with the other "slowdown" winners. Now they have another kicker. I think they go higher still.
(Abbott Labs is a holding in Jim Cramer's Action Alerts PLUS member club. Want to be alerted before Jim Cramer buys or sells ABT? Learn more now.)
