Markets priced for perfection amid vaccine roll-out

The vaccination race is on. US stocks rose to record highs last week, with the Food and Drug Administration set to approve emergency use of the vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech. Roughly 2.9 million doses are set to fan out across a nation battered by a winter wave of infections in the coming days alone.

For those records to hold, a lot of things have to go right.

Never has a product rollout happened on such a large scale, with such high stakes. Roughly 3,000 people are dying every day in US hospitals of Covid-19, the most since the pandemic began. Major metropolitan areas such as New York and Los Angeles are reversing reopening measures, some of which were only put in place weeks ago.