Oil's Vaccine Trade Faces Hurdles Ahead
Oil prices have surged on hopes effective vaccines mean we can quickly put the pandemic behind us. Not so fast.
Good riddance.
Photographer: David Dee Delgado/Getty Images
It’s easy to get caught up in oil’s recovery. After an exceptionally fraught year, hopes are high that putting 2020 soundly behind us can only mean better days. But there’s still a long way to go to get back to anything like normal.
That hard reality didn’t stop crude prices from rising by $14 a barrel, or 37%, since the beginning of November. That’s when trial data showed vaccines were proving extremely effective against SARS-Cov-2, followed by the rapid roll-out of the first doses in the U.K. and U.S. There’s a sense of optimism that hasn’t been felt since the world woke up early in the year to a new disease that had emerged in China.