Names and faces
■ “Love Is Blind” creator Chris Coelen is publicly addressing allegations by a former contestant of sexual assault, false imprisonment and negligence on set — calling the accusations “100% false and defamatory.” Tran Dang was a cast member on Season 5 of the series — filmed in the first half of 2022, but only recently streaming on Netflix — though she has not been featured on the show. Publicized as a social experiment, “Love
Is Blind” chronicles marriage-seeking singles who go on dates while in pods — separated from their date by a wall — with the goal to get engaged before ever seeing each other in person. In a lawsuit filed against the series’ production companies after the season wrapped, Dang claims she was “intentionally sequestered for two weeks” on set and had to get permission from producers to do “virtually anything,” including go to the bathroom. Fellow contestant Thomas Smith — to whom Dang got engaged but is no longer with — is also named as a defendant in the suit. Dang claims that May 3, 2022, while in Mexico as part of filming for the series, Smith “sexually assaulted the plaintiff throughout the night.” Dang ultimately decided to quit the show in the wake of her experience. She is now seeking in excess of $1 million. “She did not make any kind of claim of assault of any kind,” Coelen said in a statement to People. “We would not continue filming with someone who was expressing that an incident of that sort had happened.”
■ A $40 million investment will help several African manufacturers produce new messenger RNA vaccines on the continent where people were last in line to receive jabs during the covid-19 pandemic, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced Monday. While it could still take at least three more years before any of the vaccines are approved and on the market, the foundation said that its mRNA investment marks an important step forward in improving vaccine equity. “Whether it’s for local diseases in Africa like Rift Valley (fever) or for global diseases like TB, mRNA looks like a very promising approach,” Bill Gates told The Associated Press on Sunday after visiting one of the facilities involved, the Institut Pasteur in Dakar, Senegal. “And so it allows us to bring in lots of African capabilities to work on these vaccines, and then this can be scaled up.” Institut Pasteur, along with the South Africa-based company Biovac, will be using an mRNA research and manufacturing platform that was developed by Quantoom Biosciences in Belgium. The two Africa-based vaccine manufacturers are receiving $5 million each in funding from the foundation, while another $10 million is earmarked for other companies that have not yet been named. The remaining $20 million is going to Quantoom “to further advance the technology and lower costs.”