EU approves use of J&J’s 1-shot vaccine
The European Medicines Agency on Thursday gave the greenlight to Johnson & Johnson’s one-dose COVID19 vaccine, handing the European Union’s 27 nations a fourth vaccine to try to speed up the bloc’s much-criticized vaccination rollout.
The EU medicines regulator advised the vaccine be cleared for use in all adults over 18 “after a thorough evaluation” of J&J’s data found the vaccine met the criteria for efficacy, safety and quality.
The EMA has already recommended the COVID-19 vaccines made by PfizerBioNTech, Moderna and AstraZeneca — but all of those vaccines require two doses, several weeks apart. Production delays have also plagued all three vaccine-makers.
In its statement Thursday, the EMA said the J&J vaccine was about 67% effective.
The European Commission quickly granted a conditional marketing authorization to the vaccine.
“The entry on the market of the [J&J] vaccine ensures that we have access to a total of up to 1.8 billion doses of approved vaccines,” Health Commissioner Stella Kyriakides said.
Carlson under fire for mocking reporter
Tucker Carlson’s belittling of a New York Times reporter this week for publicly discussing how she had been harassed has spotlighted both a toxic online culture and the bad blood between the newspaper and Fox News Channel’s most popular personality.
The targeting of reporter Taylor Lorenz started a day after the International Women’s Media Foundation announced that it was starting a new resource center for journalists subject to online abuse. Ms. Lorenz, who covers internet culture, tweeted Tuesday that her followers should consider supporting women enduring online harassment.
“It’s not an exaggeration to say that the harassment and smear campaign I’ve had to endure over the past year has destroyed my life,” she wrote.
Mr. Carlson pointed out the tweet that night on his show, which usually reaches between 3 million to 4 million viewers each weeknight. He cited her as a privileged person claiming victimhood.
The Times, in a statement Wednesday, called Mr. Carlson’s attack on Ms. Lorenz “a calculated and cruel tactic, which he regularly deploys to unleash a wave of harassment and vitriol at his intended target.”
Digital art sells at auction for $69.4M
Christie’s says it has auctioned off a digital collage by an artist named Beeple for nearly $70 million — an unprecedented sale of a digital artwork that fetched more money than physical works by many better-known artists.
The piece, titled “Everydays: The First 5,000 Days,” sold for $69.4 million in an online auction, “positioning him among the top three most valuable living artists,” Christie’s tweeted Thursday.
Christie’s said it also marks the first time a major auction house has offered a digitalonly artwork with a non-fungible token as a guarantee of its authenticity, as well as the first time cryptocurrency has been used to pay for an artwork at auction.
“Artists have been using hardware and software to create artwork and distribute it on the internet for the last 20+ years but there was never a real way to truly own and collect it,” Beeple, whose real name is Mike Winkelmann, said in a statement. “With NFT’s that has now changed. I believe we are witnessing the beginning of the next chapter in art history, digital art.”
Christie’s did not identify the buyer of the artwork, which consists of 5,000 digital pictures stitched together that Beeple created — one each day — starting in May 2007.