Month: September 2020

Disney+ has a broad variety of content at this point—family shows, animated films, The Mandalorian, and so on. But there's a distinct, Disney-specific formula that has emerged for the streaming network's original series: documentaries talking up the cultural importance of Disney's own brands and the creative contributions of the filmmakers, artists, and so on behind those works.

That continues with a new series titled Marvel's 616; Disney just released a trailer for the show today.

616 will span eight episodes, each directed by a filmmaker of some prominence (some of them more widely known as actors, actually), and each focused on a different aspect of the world of Marvel comics and films and the fandom thereof. In some ways, it sounds a bit like the Marvel version of other self-promotional series like Disney Insider, Disney Gallery / Star Wars: The Mandalorian, One Day at Disney, and The Imagineering Story.

Enlarge / MOSCOW, RUSSIA - AUGUST 14, 2020: Alexander Gintsburg, director of the Gamaleya Scientific Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology of the Russian Healthcare Ministry that produces a COVID-19 vaccine. (credit: Getty | Vyacheslav Prokofyev)

A top Russian researcher behind the Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine defended using the vaccine before testing was complete and said he plans to release clinical trial data early—so early, in fact, the data is unlikely to be interpretable.

Alexander Gintsburg, head of the Gamaleya Institute that developed Sputnik V, laid out his thoughts on the vaccine and the pandemic in an interview with Reuters published Tuesday.

“People are dying just like during a war,” Gintsburg said as he sat in his wood-paneled office in Moscow, holding a crystal model of a coronavirus. “But this fast-tracked pace is not synonymous—as some media have suggested—with corners being cut. No way.”