TheStreet.com TV Recap: Vaccines Give Merck Booster Shot

Merck is (MRK) winning big with vaccines, Jim Cramer said on TheStreet.com TV's Wall Street Confidential Web video Friday.

Cramer said the company decided to get into vaccines when everyone said there was no money in vaccines. That thinking turned out to be wrong. Becton Dickinson (BDX) and Cepheid (CPHD) also are doing well with vaccines, Cramer said.

Gardasil, the human papillomavirus vaccine from Merck, is going to be huge, Cramer and stockpickr.com's James Altucher agreed. It's going from about $300 million to $4 billion in revenue over the next year, and that's just one vaccine, he said. Plus, now they're doing late-stage trials on a hepatitis-B vaccine. "I think if you want a solid 15%, maybe 20% a year for a long time, Merck is a great bet," Altucher said.

Cramer & Altucher: Give Vaccines a Shot

"This is a re-energized Merck," Cramer said. "It's a really great Merck. It keeps going up. It keeps beating numbers, but it's still only back to where it was a couple of years ago, so I agree with you, I think there's more [room for it] to climb."

When Altucher pointed out Sanofi-Aventis (SNY), where vaccine growth was 50%, Cramer said it is another company that he likes.

For years, vaccines were risky, because if something went wrong, it was only a matter of time before a company had a class-action suit against it. "So the drug companies pretty much decided there was no real money in vaccines," Cramer explained. One of the big changes the analysts didn't pick up on is that since then, the plaintiffs' bar has been beaten back, so the litigation risk of vaccines has declined.