No surprise here "Investors Buy Up Shares of Flu Drug Makers "

[dixiegrrrrl]

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/28/business/global/28drug.html

but the stock increases are incredible....

PARIS — Shares of GlaxoSmithKline and Roche, makers of prescription flu treatments, rose Monday amid expectations that the swine flu scare would lift demand for their products.

There were no immediate signs of shortages of flu drugs. Roche, the Swiss maker of Tamiflu, said Monday that the World Health Organization has enough stockpiled to treat up to 5 million people, on top of millions more doses held by governments. Tamiflu has been stockpiled for years by governments, companies and health authorities. Still, shares of Roche rose 4.1 percent in Zurich, and GlaxoSmithKline rose 5 percent in London after the W.H.O. warned that the new A (H1N1) swine flu virus, which originates in pigs, could become a pandemic.

Biota Holdings, the Australian company that discovered the chemical behind Relenza and licensed it to Glaxo, rose nearly 82 percent in Sydney. Chugai Pharmaceutical, a unit of Roche that markets Tamiflu in Japan, rose 14 percent Monday, while Eiken Chemical, a maker of clinical diagnostic tools, also rose 14 percent. Gilead Sciences, the California biotechnology company that invented Tamiflu, rose 3.8 percent in early New York trading Monday.

Novavax, an American vaccine maker, soared 75 percent last Friday in New York, though it was not clear if that movement reflected anything more than a rush by investors into any stock that might conceivably gain from the epidemic. It rose another 160 percent Monday in early trading.