In vaccine news, AstraZeneca resumed its British clinical trials of its COVID-19 vaccine. And shares in Pfizer Inc gained 2.6% after the drugmaker and German biotech firm BioNTech SE proposed to expand their Phase 3 pivotal COVID-19 vaccine trial to about 44,000 participants.
In merger news, shares in Nvidia Corp rose 5.8% on plans to buy UK-based chip designer Arm from Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp for as much as $40 billion. And shares in Oracle rose 4.3% as the cloud services company said it would team up with China’s ByteDance to keep TikTok operating in the United States. The Dow Jones rose by 328 points or 1.2%. The S&P500 index lifted 1.3% and the Nasdaq index gained 203 points or 1.9%.
