Asian shares track Wall Street decline on pandemic jitters

Shares were mostly lower in Asia on Wednesday after pandemic concerns snapped a four-day winning streak on Wall Street.

Rising coronavirus counts in many countries are raising the urgency to develop vaccines and treatments and setbacks in that process tend to discourage investors.

On Tuesday, independent monitors paused enrollment in a study testing the COVID-19 antiviral drug remdesivir plus an experimental antibody therapy being developed by Eli Lilly. The company said the study was paused “out of an abundance of caution.” The news followed a disclosure late Monday by Johnson & Johnson, which said it had to temporarily pause a late-stage study of a potential COVID-19 vaccine “due to an unexplained illness in a study participant.”

Meanwhile, uncertainty about the prospects for more stimulus for the economy from Washington continues to hang over markets.

“As U.S. case counts heads north into October, the market is evidently still very much sensitive to the twist and turns of the vaccine development and perhaps now more than ever still lacking another fiscal injection to plug the gap into the year-end," Jingyi Pan of IG said in a commentary.

Japan's Nikkei 225 erased early losses to gain 0.2% to 23,645.81 while the Hang Seng in Hong Kong gave up 0.2% to 24,608.27. South Korea's Kospi lost 0.7% to 2,386.54 and the S&P/ASX 200 in Australia declined 0.2% to 6,185.30. The Shanghai Composite index shed 0.4% to 3,346.53.

The Bank of Korea opted to keep its benchmark interest rate unchanged.

Overnight, the S&P 500 lost 0.6% to 3,511.93, giving back some of its gains from a day earlier.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 0.6% to 28,679.81 and the Nasdaq composite gave up an early gain, slipping 0.1% to 11,863.90. The Russell 2000 index of small-cap...