“April, who works at a pet shop in Minneapolis, makes $11.75 an hour. She loves her job, and it pays better than the federal minimum wage, but not by much. She and her partner get by. They still don’t make enough money to afford a car, but they can manage rent, their phones, and internet, and support their 12-year-old daughter.
Her partner lost his job as a body piercer when the pandemic hit. He went on unemployment insurance for a while, and he and April finally found health insurance through a public assistance program. It was more consistent income than they’d seen in quite some time. “We were able to get a little bit of extra money into our accounts for once. We weren’t going paycheck to paycheck for a while. That was wonderful,” April said. “I think a ton of people were finally out of the poverty level with that money.” Her partner has now found a different job that allows him to work from home.
Life is more or less fine, but April said it would be better if they made more. “We would be able to have a house like a normal family,” she added.
April and her family’s situation is quite normal: In 2019, about 39 million people made less than $15 an hour. When the pandemic hit, that number actually fell — not because people were making more but because low-wage workers became unemployed.”
“Both the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended a pause in distributing the vaccine after six reported cases of cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST). These clots block blood flowing out of the brain and can quickly turn deadly.
The complications were found in women between the ages of 18 and 48, and they arose between six and 13 days after receiving the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. “Of the clots seen in the United States, one case was fatal, and one patient is in critical condition,” said Peter Marks, the head of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, during a Tuesday press conference.”
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“For regulators, the episode highlights the tricky challenge of balancing caution against an urgent need for a vaccine in a still-raging pandemic. And as they investigate the problem, they also have to try to maintain public confidence in the vaccination program. The pause helps show that regulators are taking potential problems seriously, but if they botch the messaging, that could make people less likely to get vaccinated.”
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“there are several factors that made regulators pay close attention to the recent cases following vaccinations with the Johnson & Johnson shot. Marks explained that patients with these clots also had thrombocytopenia, a condition where platelets in the blood drop to very low levels, leading to bleeding and bruising. The combination of blood clots and low platelets means that patients cannot receive conventional blood clot therapies like heparin, a blood thinner. That’s why health officials want to wait to resume vaccinations with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine until they can investigate the concern and come up with new guidelines if necessary.
Another factor is that these cases occurred in younger women, who normally don’t face a high risk of these types of clots.”
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“when vaccines make the jump from thousands of carefully screened trial participants to millions of people in the general population, rare problems — the one-in-a-million complications — start to emerge.”
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“Regulators could, then, take a similar approach with the Johnson & Johnson shot to the one they used for allergies and the mRNA vaccines, adding a screening criterion for people at highest risk of these blood clots before they receive the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.”
“Although the U.S. continues to struggle with COVID-19, it has apparently beaten the flu into submission. Since the end of September, the combined total of positive flu cases identified by both public health and clinical labs is fewer than 1,500. There are high schools with more people in them. The phenomenon is not only in the United States — worldwide, rates of influenza are nearly off-the-charts low. When you line multiple years up on the same graph, it can even look like there are no cases of flu this year. That’s how out of step we are with the norm.”
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“This massive shift, experts told me, is likely tied to the precautions we’ve taken to avoid catching COVID-19: mask-wearing, social distancing, obsessive cleaning of surfaces (which doesn’t do much to prevent COVID-19 but probably is preventing flu) and even keeping kids out of the classroom. “The major vector for influenza is children,” said David Topham, co-director of the New York Influenza Center of Excellence in Rochester. If they don’t get to breathe on each other like normal, they also can’t transmit as much flu. And that trick still works, even if flu isn’t the reason we’re keeping them distanced.
Influenza hasn’t been our target with all these interventions, but we’ve certainly given it a good pummelling. And that’s because flu just isn’t as transmissible as COVID-19.”
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“Our strategies are working on COVID-19, as well. Just not as dramatically, because it was more likely to spread to more people to begin with.”
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“Significantly reduced international travel has probably played a role in that, Brammer said. Usually, our flu season follows that of the Southern Hemisphere. But if there wasn’t much of one there, and there wasn’t much travel to transport the virus — the flu has no way to travel.”
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“scientists don’t know for certain what’s happening because the trouble with a really, really minuscule flu season is that it doesn’t leave you enough cases to make solid statistical inferences. We don’t know, for example, much about what happens when you get both the flu and COVID-19, because there haven’t been enough cases of it to do good research. We don’t really know how this bottleneck is affecting which strains of flu are circulating for the same reason. We don’t even know, for certain, that it is the masks and distancing that are squashing the flu because there are so few flu cases left to look at.”
“The Treasury has a cash pile of well over $1 trillion, which will allow the government to quickly disburse money in line with the sweeping new law, including direct checks to millions of Americans that are expected to start hitting bank accounts in the coming week. That robust rainy-day fund was built last year by then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who preemptively cranked up the pace of government borrowing, unsure of how and when Congress might mandate further relief measures.
So, despite concerns that markets will be flooded with new U.S. government debt to pay for the rescue package, the Treasury Department might not have to change its borrowing plans much at all to fund the legislation signed into law”
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““There are enormous implications for everyone else, but the Treasury was out in front of this nine months ago,” said Lou Crandall, chief economist at research firm Wrightson ICAP.
The advance moves by the Trump team are proving to be key to limiting turbulence in government debt markets from such massive spending. Bond yields have already been inching up in recent months due to brighter prospects for the economy”
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“The planning by Mnuchin also demonstrates that, even as Republicans now balk at the price tag of Biden’s rescue package, the Trump administration itself was prepared for the possibility that the economy would need another big infusion of cash to fully emerge from the pandemic.”
“Mandated “hero pay” will add up to about $0 an hour for some grocery store workers in Los Angeles. Grocers there are closing three stores in response to newly enacted legislation that requires them to pay their workers an additional $5 an hour during the pandemic.
“It’s never our desire to close a store, but when you factor in the increased costs of operating during COVID-19, consistent financial losses at these three locations, and an extra pay mandate that will cost nearly $20 million over the next 120 days, it becomes impossible to operate these three stores,” said grocery store chain Kroger in a statement given to CBS Los Angeles, announcing that two Ralphs-branded stores and one Food 4 Less location, would be shutting down.”
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“The company also said it would be shutting down three underperforming stores in Seattle, Washington, in response to that city’s hazard pay law.”
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“”The fallout from the misguided extra pay ordinances is enormous and politicians are to blame,” said Ruben Guerra of the Latin Business Association in a Wednesday-issued press release. “Workers will lose jobs, and communities of color will be left with fewer grocery options and more food insecurity. Consumers in other areas where grocery stores are able to stay afloat will pay higher grocery bills.””
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“Supporters of hazard pay have argued that grocery stores’ record profits during the pandemic make wage premiums easily affordable, and that store closures are nothing more than cynical politics.
Profits for some grocery chains increased by as much as 100 percent during the height of the pandemic when restaurants were closed and everyone was stocking up on groceries.
The Washington branch of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW)—which represents grocery store workers and has been a driving force behind hero pay laws—called the store closures in Seattle “a transparent attempt to intimidate other local governments,” noting how profits for grocery store companies had “soared.”
“They absolutely can afford this increase,” Los Angeles City Councilmember Paul Koretz said in February about grocery store companies when discussing that city’s hazard pay proposal, reports the Los Angeles Times. “They absolutely should be paying this increase. And if they shut down stores, it’s just out of spite.”
Grocers counter that while their profits did go up, those increases came on top of the very slim one or two percent margins supermarkets typically earn.
A CGA-sponsored analysis of hazard pay mandates found that at $5 an hour, these laws would increase the average grocery store’s labor costs by nearly 30 percent, and their overall costs by about 5 percent. That’s about twice the profit margins most grocery store chains were making during the height of the pandemic. The same report says that those record profits are already starting to recede.
A report by Los Angeles city staff noted that the likely economic impacts of that city’s hazard pay law would be some mix of higher wages for some workers, higher prices for consumers, and the potential for companies to either close stores or delay openings, renovations, and promotions.
The debate about hazard pay laws is a very compressed version of the debate about minimum wage laws. Proponents focus on the fact that a lot of workers will get a pay increase, while detractors note the potential for higher disemployment (meaning job losses but also hours cuts and reduced hiring) and higher prices.
Unlike the minimum wage, however, the costs of hazard pay laws are obvious, immediate, and visible for everyone to see.”
“Inside warehouses in Ohio and Maryland, tens of millions of doses of vaccines that could be used to help end the COVID-19 pandemic are stuck in limbo. They haven’t been approved for Americans to receive, but the White House is refusing to allow them to be shipped elsewhere in the world—to countries where they would be used immediately.
It’s a frustrating mix of two problems that have plagued the global response to the pandemic: bureaucracy and nationalism.
The United States has already purchased tens of millions of doses of the COVID-19 vaccine produced by AstraZeneca, even though the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not yet approved that vaccine for use alongside the vaccines from Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson. But the vaccine has been approved by the public health authorities in more than 70 other countries—including Brazil, where a major outbreak is threatening to overwhelm the country’s hospital system, and the European Union.
The New York Times reports that the Biden administration is refusing to allow America’s unused doses of the vaccine to be shipped overseas, despite requests from foreign governments and AstraZeneca itself. The company has pledged to replace any donated doses of the vaccine once FDA approval has been granted, according to the Times.
This is nearly indefensible. On the long list of ways that the government has screwed up the COVID-19 response, hoarding lifesaving vaccines that it won’t allow to be used deserves a place at or near the very top.”
“While Trump’s Operation Warp Speed program provided incentives for private companies to speed vaccine development and did directly help Moderna develop an effective vaccine, it’s not necessarily the case that vaccines wouldn’t be available today had it not been for Trump. The first FDA-approved coronavirus vaccine was developed by Pfizer last year without any direct help from the federal government.
To be clear — Trump deserves some credit for the fact that multiple vaccines were developed so quickly. As my colleague Dylan Scott reported last October, the federal government’s multibillion-dollar investment in helping companies like Moderna and Johnson & Johnson develop vaccines no doubt helped the country get to a point where there is finally some light at the end of the tunnel. Biden has acknowledged this, saying in December that “I think that the [Trump] administration deserves some credit, getting this [vaccine effort] off the ground, Operation Warp Speed.”
But vaccines don’t do much good if there’s no plan to get them into arms, and this is where Trump really fell short. As was the case when the US struggled to ramp up coronavirus testing infrastructure in the early days of the pandemic, the Trump administration’s plan for vaccine distribution did little more than pass the buck to under-resourced states. Trump’s failure to plan for the “last mile” resulted in episodes where unused vaccines were thrown out in the weeks before Biden took office.”