We’re going to get some answers on Covid-19 vaccines

It's a particularly crowded week for quarterly earnings calls in the drug industry, which means a few of the leading developers of Covid-19 vaccines will spend an hour and change fielding questions from Wall Street. Here's a preview of what we might learn in the process.

• For Pfizer, which will report its earnings later this morning, today’s Q&A will be the company's first since starting a Phase 3 trial and agreeing to sell its vaccine to the U.S. government for about $20 a dose. Wall Street will likely have some questions about what that deal means for future revenue.
• For Sanofi, reporting Wednesday, this is an opportunity to ask management what they make of the data seen so far — from Moderna, Pfizer, and AstraZeneca — and whether their investigational vaccine might do better. Sanofi is a few months behind its rivals, but the French giant has the benefit of using vaccine technology that has already resulted in approved products.
• As for AstraZeneca, which reports Thursday, expect analysts to ask the company about how the data on its vaccine stack up against competitors’. It’s impossible to make clean comparisons across clinical trials, but the AstraZeneca vaccine seemed to have a more muted effect on neutralizing antibodies. Company executives would certainly dispute that notion, but it’ll be worth listening to what kind of evidence they present.
• Finally, Merck is posting earnings on Friday, which gives CEO Kenneth Frazier a chance to expand on his now-famous statement that everyone promising a vaccine by year's end is doing a “grave disservice” to the public. What does he know that his rivals don't?