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Investing.com — U.S. stocks tumbled at the opening of a holiday-shortened session on Friday, as concerns about a new and potentially vaccine-resistant variant of Covid-19 spooked global markets, triggering a rush to reactivate pandemic trades.
By 9:40 AM ET, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 791 points, or 2.2%, at 35,013 points. The S&P 500 was down 1.6% and the Nasdaq Composite was, outperforming, down only 1.0%.
There were few movements across the board that weren’t attributable – directly or indirectly – to the news that South African scientists had identified a new variant of the virus, known as 1.1.529, the first one to have displaced the delta variant as the most common strain in the regions where it has been identified. Travel, leisure and hospitality stocks were predictably hard hit, with cruise line stocks all falling over 10%, the Dow Jones Airlines index falling 7.2%, and the Dow Jones Hotels index falling 7.5%.
Although many new variants have been discovered over recent months, the new one differs in having a protein spike so different from the original strain (which today’s vaccines were designed to combat) that health regulators fear that current vaccines may not be effective against it. So far, there is no evidence either way to suggest whether that is the case or not.
