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NEW YORK/WASHINGTON/MELBOURNE/LONDON (Reuters Breakingviews) - Corona Capital is a daily column updated throughout the day by Breakingviews columnists around the world with short, sharp pandemic-related insights.
Logos of ExxonMobil are seen in its booth at Gastech, the world s biggest expo for the gas industry, in Chiba, Japan April 4, 2017. REUTERS/Toru Hanai
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BLACK TAR. Exxon Mobil boss Darren Woods made a rare appearance on the $190 billion oil giant’s earnings call on Tuesday. He artfully dodged questions about the company’s deals strategy following a Reuters report that said it had conversations with peer Chevron about merging. Woods said the company looks “at a lot of things in that whole space” and that it had been “active in that for quite some time.”
7 Min Read
NEW YORK/LONDON/MELBOURNE/MUMBAI (Reuters Breakingviews) - Corona Capital is a column updated throughout the day by Breakingviews columnists around the world with short, sharp pandemic-related insights.
The north view of the Manhattan skyline is seen from the 86th floor observation deck of the Empire State Building in midtown Manhattan, as the iconic tower prepares to open to more tenants and visitors following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in New York City, New York, U.S., June 24, 2020. REUTERS/Mike Segar
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OFFICE SPACES. If Zoom Video Communications is a pandemic winner, then commercial office space is its mirror image. The vacancy rate in New York edged above 15% in December, according to Savills, with leasing running at the lowest rate in at least two decades. It’s not an outlier among cities either as things continue to worsen.
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A researcher works inside a laboratory of Chulalongkorn University during the development of an mRNA type vaccine candidate for the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Bangkok, Thailand, May 25, 2020. REUTERS/Athit Perawongmetha
NEW YORK (Reuters Breakingviews) - Biotech firms Moderna and BioNTech used a biotechnology known as messenger RNA, or mRNA, to produce vaccines effective against Covid-19 with miraculous speed. That has pushed the combined worth of specialists in this emerging field to more than $120 billion. That’s a glimpse of what’s possible if it can be applied post-pandemic to treat cancer or rare diseases.
The technology is the closest thing yet to making medicine digital. MRNA vaccines essentially inject genetic code that instructs a recipients’ cells to construct a part of the virus. The body recognizes the produced protein as foreign and mounts a future immune response when exposed. Moderna and BioNTech’s vaccines show the technology works fast. V