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Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell criticized President Donald Trump’s role in fomenting the mob that stormed the Capitol building on Jan 6. “The mob was fed lies,” McConnell said on the Senate floor. “They were provoked by the president and other powerful people.” The Senate will soon begin outgoing President Trump’s second impeachment trial and McConnell, who will become the minority leader once Democrats take control of the chamber, has not yet publicly said how he will vote, but has increased his criticism of Trump after years of being wary of doing so.
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Medical workers carry cold storage boxes containing injection material during a Phase 3 trial of the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine. Angel Garcia/Bloomberg
The stock market hasn’t been this spooked since Halloween.
The
Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 283.71 points, or 0.9%, this past week, to 30,814.26, while the
Nasdaq Composite dropped 1.5%, to 12,998.50. The S&P 500 fell 1.5%, to 3768.25, its largest decline since the week ended Oct. 30, though back then it dropped 5.6%. Still, it was the
S&P 500’s first weekly drop of more than 1% since then, a sign that investors, unflappable until now, really were taken aback by what they saw.
Global dividend growth, which came under pressure in 2020 as many companies cut or suspended their payouts earlier in the pandemic, looks poised to recover this year. The big region not expected to contribute: the U.S.
New data on early-stage trials of
Johnson & Johnson’s Covid-19 vaccine are giving experts increased confidence that the vaccine will work as they await results of a large Phase 3 trial expected in the coming weeks.
The trial data, published Wednesday by the New England Journal of Medicine, offered an expanded and updated account of a paper posted weeks ago on a so-called preprint server. The paper showed that 90% or more of participants developed neutralizing antibodies against the virus that causes Covid-19 within 29 days after injection with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, and that the neutralizing antibodies remained 71 days after injection.
Shares of Johnson & Johnson were up 1.8% in premarket trading on Thursday.
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The preliminary findings provided no evidence toward responses from Covid-19 vaccines, which the study will consider later this year. Getty Images
People who have had Covid-19 are likely to be protected from reinfection for at least five months, a preliminary study of health care workers in the U.K. has found.
However, researchers warned those with immunity may still carry the virus in their nose and throat risking transmitting it to others. The Public Health England (PHE) SIREN study, involving more than 20,000 health care workers, was published on Thursday and hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed.