Raphael Stevens

In this articleJNJA member of a key CDC advisory panel told CNBC on Friday morning that he expects the U.S. pause on Johnson & Johnson’s one-dose coronavirus vaccine to eventually be lifted.”I think that there is a willingness for us to use this vaccine. We did need to make an important pause to be able to look at this safety information to be able to consider the risks. But certainly, I think there’s a huge amount of evidence that the benefit greatly outweighs this risk,” said Dr. Wilbur Chen, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.Chen spoke on “Worldwide Exchange” hours before taking part in a meeting later Friday of the agency’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to discuss the rare, but severe, blood clotting disorder that a few women experienced after receiving the J&J shot.In addition to the six who developed rare but severe blood clotting issues after getting the vaccine, the CDC is looking into two more possible cases: an Oregon woman who died and a Texas woman who was hospitalized. Of the original six women, one died and one became critically ill. There’s been roughly 8 million J&J vaccine doses administered.Concerns over the issue led the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the FDA to last week temporarily halt the use of the J&J vaccine in the U.S. However, when asked by CNBC’s Brian Sullivan whether he believes Americans will start receiving the J&J vaccine at some point, Chen said, “Yes.”The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, known as ACIP, is an outside panel of experts that makes recommendations to the CDC. It convened a meeting last week on the J&J vaccine, but postponed a decision until this week. Ultimately, it’s up to the CDC and Food and Drug Administration on what to do next.Chen said ACIP now has better information on the blood clotting issues upon which to base its vaccine guidance. “We will be able to get a good case count. It may not be perfect, but we don’t need to have perfect to have actionable information,” Chen said, adding he expects the panel to “come up with a set of recommendations that I think everybody will be happy with.”In an emailed statement to CNBC, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said she hopes the public health agency receives a “recommendation that takes into account the risk versus reward of using the Johnson & Johnson vaccine based on the new case data and the risk-benefit analysis CDC has been conducting over the last week.””I truly appreciate the complex question before the committee and look forward to hearing from them. I also appreciate the importance of acting swiftly, in collaboration with the FDA, once we hear from ACIP,” Walensky added.Given the urgency of the coronavirus pandemic, some people have criticized the decision to halt the J&J Covid vaccine — which only requires one dose for full immunity protection — while the investigation into blood clots took place.Chen disagreed.”The risk is very, very minor but until we were able to fully consider that information, we could not contextualize that to the rest of the medical community and also to the public as well,” he said. “We’ve only paused for 10 days. Hopefully that will not be harmful in the long run, but we of course want to engender that there is some confidence in the system for collecting safety information.”The other two Covid vaccines approved for emergency use in the U.S. are from Pfizer and Moderna; both of them require two shots. More

The GameStop frenzy in late January forced Wall Street to pay attention to retail investors like never before.The r/WallStreetBets community piled into the video game retailer’s stock and options, triggering a short squeeze and leaving short sellers with huge losses.In the aftermath, Wall Street and news outlets dove deep into subreddit to understand how this happened. WallStreetBets’ unique mix of self-deprecating, camaraderie and tongue-in-cheek humor captured and identified with the American public.”In the way they define themselves, they are setting up ‘this is who we are’ and that can bring people in,” College of Charleston communication professor Ryan Milner said. “There really is a power in the collectivism happening on WallStreetBets.”Here’s an explainer on why these collective actions are becoming more common, the role memes play in these situations and what’s next for retail investing. More

Stephe Curry and Iron man.Getty ImagesDisney-owned ESPN announced Friday it will broadcast the Golden State Warriors and New Orleans Pelicans game during a Marvel-themed telecast entitled “Arena of Heroes” on May 3.The game’s traditional broadcast will air on ESPN, and the Marvel game will be available on the network’s ESPN2 channel and streaming service ESPN+. Characters including Black Panther, Iron Man and Capital Marvel will be incorporated. Broadcasters will call the game in a Marvel-themed studio.It might help attract viewers. NBA games on ESPN are averaging roughly 1.2 million viewers this season, down 15% compared with 2020, the network said. Its Saturday national games on ABC are averaging 2.3 million viewers, down 2% year over year.”We’re eager for fans to experience this unique, innovative presentation that will pair Marvel and ESPN’s exceptional storytelling and production,” said Matt Kenny, ESPN vice president of programming and acquisitions.Here’s how the Marvel tie-in will work, according to ESPN:”Recognizing the superior physical abilities, agility, and tenacity of Earth’s greatest athletes, the Avengers will hold a series of contests where the winners earn the right to train and fight alongside them as Marvel’s Champions! The Avengers will begin their recruitment with the NBA elite and observe the battle between the Warriors and the Pelicans, focusing on three star players from each team.”Those players include Steph Curry, Draymond Green and Andrew Wiggins on the Warriors, and the Pelicans’ Zion Williamson, Brandon Ingram and Lonzo Ball. An alternate player will be selected if any of them aren’t able to participate.The NBA stars earn “Marvel Hero” points for every point, rebound, assist, steal and block. But they lose hero points for every missed field goal, free throw or turnover. “[The] telecast will be the first of its kind to bring Marvel’s storytelling directly to the real-time experience of a NBA game,” said Mike Pasciullo, Marvel Entertainment president of marketing. ViacomCBS property Nickelodeon rolled out a similar telecast with its children’s game that aired during the National Football League season. Nickelodeon simulcasted the Jan. 10 postseason contest between the New Orleans Saints and Chicago Bears, which attracted 2 million viewers. It was the network’s most-watched program among total viewers in nearly four years.Zion Williamson #1 of the New Orleans Pelicans drives to the basket during the game against the Golden State Warriors on February 23, 2020 at Chase Center in San Francisco, California.Noah Graham | National Basketball Association | Getty ImagesResearch company Morning Consult found more than 70% of parents polled on the children’s NFL game said they would watch a similar game with their kids.”It scored really well with these Alpha parents,” said Alex Silverman, who analyzes sports studies for Morning Consult.ESPN has experimented with themed telecasts in the past. The network held a youth-themed Little League Baseball game in 2019 with teenage reporters and commentators. ESPN also hosted a 2019 NBA Finals game targeted at Generation Z featuring concepts from the classic video game, NBA Jam. More

In this articleLBShoppers stand in line as they wait for a Victoria’s Secret store to open on Black Friday, at the Tysons Corner Center, in Tysons, Virginia, November 27, 2020.Hannah McKay | ReutersL Brands is back in sale talks with potential buyers for its Victoria’s Secret lingerie brand, according to a new report, where it is seeking possibly more than double the $1.1 billion valuation that it had roughly one year ago when a prior deal fell apart.Hinging on Victoria’s Secret’s recent sales momentum, the company could now target a valuation of at least $2 billion to $3 billion in a potential sale, Bloomberg reported Friday, citing people familiar with the private negotiations.A representative from L Brands, which also owns Bath & Body Works, did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.Sycamore Partners sued L Brands last April, to terminate a deal that would have given the private equity firm 55% control of the lingerie chain, for around $525 million. It argued that L Brands had violated the terms of their agreement, when it failed to pay rent and furloughed workers during the Covid pandemic. L Brands averted a legal battle by agreeing to call off the deal.Since the holidays, L Brands’ management team has called out growing momentum at the lingerie chain. The company has already boosted its profit outlook for the first quarter twice, citing heightened shopper demand at Victoria’s Secret.It named Martin Waters as CEO of Victoria’s Secret last November, effective immediately. He succeeded John Mehas, who had only been in the role for about two years.Former Chairman Les Wexner, who has been associated with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, also gave up his chair seat in February 2020. Wexner and his wife, who are both on the company’s board, will not be up for reelection at an upcoming annual shareholders meeting, either.L Brands has said it anticipates completing either a sale or a spinoff of Victoria’s Secret by August.L Brands shares were up more than 1% on Friday morning. The stock has risen over 75% year to date. The company has a market cap of more than $18.5 billion.Read the full report from Bloomberg here. More

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk gives an update on the next-generation Starship spacecraft at the company’s Texas launch facility on September 28, 2019 in Boca Chica near Brownsville, Texas.Loren Elliott | Getty Images News | Getty ImagesSpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk remains focused on his vision for the company: Establishing a permanent human presence on Mars, with its Starship rockets carrying people to and from the red planet.”We don’t want to be one of those single planet species, we want to be a multi-planet species,” Musk said on Friday, speaking after the company launched its Crew-2 mission to orbit.”It’s been now almost half a century since humans were last on the moon. That’s too long, we need to get back there and have a permanent base on the moon — again, like a big permanently occupied base on the moon. And then build a city on Mars to become a spacefaring civilization, a multi-planet species,” Musk also said.Starship is the enormous stainless steel rocket that SpaceX has been building and testing at its development facility in Boca Chica, Texas. Starship’s goal is to launch cargo and people on missions to the moon and Mars. Current Starship prototypes stand at about 150 feet tall, or about the size of a 15-story building, and each one is powered by three Raptor rocket engines.Starship prototype rocket SN10 stands on the launchpad at the company’s facility in Boca Chica, Texas.SpaceXMusk has previously estimated that it will cost about $5 billion to fully develop Starship, although SpaceX has not disclosed how much it has spent on the program to date. The company has steadily raised funds in the past few years, to fund both Starship and its similarly ambitious Starlink project, with SpaceX’s valuation soaring to about $74 billion — making it one of the most valuable private companies in the world.Additionally, SpaceX last week won a $2.9 billion contract from NASA, to help the space agency land astronauts on the moon’s surface with the first crewed mission targeting 2024.”[Starship has] mostly been funded internally thus far and it’s pretty expensive. As you can tell, if you’ve been watching videos, we’ve blown up a few of them,” Musk said.The company has performed multiple successful test flights of Starship, although landing attempts after the last four high-altitude flights ended in fiery explosions. Despite the the prototypes’ destruction, SpaceX sees the test flights as progress toward creating a rocket that is fully reusable. SpaceX’s current Falcon fleet of rockets is partially reusable, as the company can land and reuse the rocket’s boosters.But Musk hopes Starship transforms space travel into something more akin to commercial air travel. The rocket’s enormous size would also make it capable of launching several times as much cargo at once — for comparison, while SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets can send as many as 60 Starlink satellites at a time, SpaceX says Starship will be able to launch 400 Starlink satellites at a time.Musk remains “highly confident” that SpaceX will land humans on Mars by 2026, saying last December that it’s an achievable goal “about six years from now.” He added that SpaceX plans to send a Starship rocket without crew “in two years.”An artist rendering of SpaceX’s Starship rockets on the surface of Mars.SpaceXIn the meantime, SpaceX has many milestones to go before Starship can carry passengers. The rocket has yet to reach orbit. Musk last year said that the company will fly “hundreds of missions with satellites before we put people on board.”Musk may be focused on Mars, but the hurdles of Starship’s development are not lost on the space billionaire.”It’s a tough vehicle to build because we’re trying to crack this nut of a rapid and fully reusable rocket,” Musk said. “But the thing that’s really important to revolutionize space is a rapidly reusable rocket that’s reliable, too.” More

In this article.COVID19It is increasingly likely that students returning to college campuses in the fall will be required to get the Covid-19 vaccine.In just the last few days, California State University and the University of California announced that all students, staff and faculty who plan to be on campus must be vaccinated against Covid — a move that will impact more than 1 million people.Across the country, a growing number of other colleges and universities have also said vaccinations will be mandatory for the fall of 2021, including Yale University, Georgetown University, Stanford University, Wesleyan University, Grinnell College, Bowdoin College, George Washington University, American University, Emory University, Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College, Spelman College, College of the Atlantic in Maine, Seattle University, Vassar College, Manhattanville College, Fairleigh Dickinson University and Assumption University in Worcester, Massachusetts.More from Personal Finance:25% of students postponed college during CovidStudy: Virtual school resulted in ‘significant’ learning lossMany schools struggle to reopen for in-person learningThey join a host of other schools that made similar announcements, including Duke University; Brown University; Northeastern University; the University of Notre Dame; Syracuse University; Ithaca College; Cornell University; Rutgers University; DePaul University and Columbia College in Chicago; Nova Southeastern University; Roger Williams University in Bristol, Rhode Island; Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado; and St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas.Even more institutions are likely to follow, according to Lynn Pasquerella, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.Across the country, campuses struggled to remain open over the last year as fraternities, sororities and off-campus parties drove sudden spikes in coronavirus cases among undergraduates. Meanwhile, students overwhelmingly declared remote school a mediocre substitute for being in the classroom.As eligibility and access for Covid vaccines expands, schools must consider how a vaccine mandate can help higher education get back on track, Pasquerella said.For those enrolled in school, there are many vaccination requirements already in place to prevent the spread of diseases such as polio, diphtheria, tetanus and whooping cough.All 50 states have at least some vaccine mandates for children attending public schools and even those attending private schools and day-care centers. In every case, there are medical exemptions, and in some cases there are religious or philosophical exemptions, as well.”Adding Covid-19 vaccination to our student immunization requirements will help provide a safer and more robust college experience for our students,” Rutgers President Jonathan Holloway said in a statement.In most cases, students can request an exemption from vaccination for medical or religious reasons and students enrolled in fully remote programs will not be required to be vaccinated.And yet, vaccine hesitancy remains a powerful force among parents, in particular.Only 58% of parents or caregivers said they would vaccinate their children against Covid, despite 70% of parents saying they would vaccinate themselves, according to a March poll by ParentsTogether, a national advocacy group.Low-income and minority households were even less likely to vaccinate their children, ParentsTogether found.Other studies have shown Black and Latino people to be more skeptical of the vaccines than the overall U.S. population due to historic mistreatment in medicine. Disparities along racial lines in vaccine distribution also have been observed in the U.S.”Colleges do need to get ahead of this and think about how this is going to play out,” said Bethany Robertson, co-founder and co-director of ParentsTogether.  “We need to start the conversation with parents now, to build trust and understanding about how getting kids vaccinated against Covid-19 protects their health, their family’s health and the health of our communities,” Robertson said.    However, in addition to students, parents and community members, schools must also weigh the interests of the faculty, staff, legislators and boards of trustees, Pasquerella said.”It’s complicated,” she said. “No matter what decision one makes, one group will ultimately be displeased.”  Subscribe to CNBC on YouTube. More

In this articleJNJ[The stream is slated to start at 11 a.m. ET. Please refresh the page if you do not see a player above at that time.]A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advisory panel is holding an emergency meeting Friday to debate the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine and how it should be used after six women developed a rare, but potentially life-threatening, blood clotting disorder that left one dead.A favorable recommendation from the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices could pave the way for U.S. regulators to lift its recommended pause on the use of the J&J shot as early as this weekend.The CDC panel decided to postpone a decision on the vaccine last week while officials continued to investigate cases of six women who developed cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, or CVST, within about two weeks of receiving the shot.Earlier this week, J&J said it would resume the rollout of its vaccine in Europe after regulators there backed the single-shot vaccine with the recommendation that a warning be added to the label. The European Medicines Agency researched all available evidence, it said, including the reports from the United States. More

This file photo, taken on July 31, 2018, shows workers checking the quality of newly-manufactured wind turbine blades at a factory in China.AFP | Getty ImagesA collaboration between academia and industry is to focus on the recycling of glass fiber products, in a move that could eventually help to reduce the waste produced by wind turbine blades.In an announcement on Thursday, the University of Strathclyde, which is based in Glasgow, Scotland, said it had signed a memorandum of understanding with Aker Offshore Wind and Aker Horizons.Among other things, the trio will work together to scale-up and commercialize a process developed in the laboratory which centers around recycling glass-reinforced polymer composites used in wind turbine blades.According to the university, the system focuses on the “thermal recovery and post-treatment of glass fibres” from glass-reinforced polymer composite scrap, with the end result “near-virgin quality glass fibres.” The idea is that, using this system, the composite waste could be re-used.”This is a challenge not only for the wind power industry, but for all industries reliant on GRP materials in their production and manufacturing,” Liu Yang, who is head of the Advanced Composites Group at the University of Strathclyde, said in statement.”Retaining and redeploying the embodied energy in the fibres is essential as we move to a more circular economy,” he added. The issue of what to do with wind turbine blades when they’re no longer needed is a headache for the industry. This is because the composite materials blades are made from can prove to be difficult to recycle, which means that many end up as landfill when their service life ends.As the number of wind turbines on the planet increases, the problem will become even bigger. Strathclyde says blade waste could hit 400,000 tons a year in 2030. In recent years, a number of companies involved in the sector have attempted to find solutions to the issue.Last December, for example, GE Renewable Energy and Veolia North America signed a “multi-year agreement” to recycle blades removed from onshore wind turbines in the United States.In an announcement at the time, GE Renewable Energy said the blades would be shredded at a Veolia North America site in Missouri before being “used as a replacement for coal, sand and clay at cement manufacturing facilities across the U.S.”In January 2020, Danish wind energy giant Vestas said it was aiming to produce “zero-waste” wind turbines by the year 2040. More