New Yorkers exhausted from nine months of wearing face masks and avoiding friends now have something new to worry about: Winterized outdoor dining structures that look like potential hotbeds of COVID-19. Whether shaped like cozy yurts or fancy wooden cottages, there are some outdoor structures that have been so protected from the freezing cold that...
Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine will likely protect people from the deadly bug for up to two years, CEO Stéphane Bancel said Thursday. While the Massachusetts biotech firm needs to conduct more research to determine how long its shot wards off the coronavirus, Bancel said the “nightmare scenario” of the vaccine only working for a month or two is “out of the window.” “The antibody decay generated by the vaccine in humans goes down very slowly,” Bancel said at an event sponsored by Oddo BHF, a financial services group. “We believe there will be protection potentially for a couple of years.” The US Food and Drug Administration cleared Moderna’s vaccine for emergency use last month along with a similar shot developed by Pfizer and BioNTech. FDA officials acknowledged that Moderna’s 30,000-person clinical trial of the shot had not yet produced enough data to determine whether it would remain effective for longer than two months. Companies seeking emergency clearance for COVID-19 vaccines should continue their research “to assess long-term safety and efficacy,” the agency has said. Bancel also said Moderna was close to proving that its vaccine would work against new coronavirus variants that have emerged in Britain and South Africa. Both are
If you’re looking for evidence of how the COVID pandemic ravaged the global economy in 2020, don’t look at BlackRock. The world’s largest asset manager demolished expectations for the final quarter of 2020 on Thursday and set a new record high for assets under management. Larry Fink’s financial behemoth saw double-digit growth in almost every category of its business in 2020, riding a resurgent stock market and an ultra-liquid environment. BlackRock’s earnings per share of $10.18 easily beat Wall Street’s consensus estimate of $9.14 and the firm’s assets hit almost $8.7 trillion at the end of the year, up from $7.4 trillion at the end of 2019. Covid’s volatile effect on the economy helped BlackRock to pull money into its exchange-traded funds and active funds as investors tried to beat the market. The company hauled in $391 billion of net inflows for the year, for which BlackRock collected record fees and and 11 percent growth in net revenue. “The world faced unprecedented challenges in 2020 – many of which continue today,” Fink said in a statement accompanying the report. “Through it all, BlackRock remained steadfast in meeting the needs of all our stakeholders.” BlackRock’s growing dominance has been an emerging
