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  • Fact check: Biden makes false and misleading claims in economic speech | CNN Politics

    Fact check: Biden makes false and misleading claims in economic speech | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden delivered a Thursday speech to hail economic progress during his administration and to attack congressional Republicans for their proposals on the economy and the social safety net.

    Some of Biden’s claims in the speech were false, misleading or lacking critical context, though others were correct. Here’s a breakdown of the 14 claims CNN fact-checked.

    Touting the bipartisan infrastructure law he signed in 2021, Biden said, “Last year, we funded 700,000 major construction projects – 700,000 all across America. From highways to airports to bridges to tunnels to broadband.”

    Facts First: Biden’s “700,000” figure is wildly inaccurate; it adds an extra two zeros to the correct figure Biden used in a speech last week and the White House has also used before: 7,000 projects. The White House acknowledged his misstatement later on Thursday by correcting the official transcript to say 7,000 rather than 700,000.

    Biden said, “Well, here’s the deal: I put a – we put a cap, and it’s now in effect – now in effect, as of January 1 – of $2,000 a year on prescription drug costs for seniors.”

    Facts First: Biden’s claims that this cap is now in effect and that it came into effect on January 1 are false. The $2,000 annual cap contained in the Inflation Reduction Act that Biden signed last year – on Medicare Part D enrollees’ out-of-pocket spending on covered prescription drugs – takes effect in 2025. The maximum may be higher than $2,000 in subsequent years, since it is tied to Medicare Part D’s per capita costs.

    Asked for comment, a White House official noted that other Inflation Reduction Act health care provisions that will save Americans money did indeed come into effect on January 1, 2023.

    – CNN’s Tami Luhby contributed to this item.

    Criticizing former President Donald Trump over his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, Biden said, “Back then, only 3.5 million people had been – even had their first vaccination, because the other guy and the other team didn’t think it mattered a whole lot.”

    Facts First: Biden is free to criticize Trump’s vaccine rollout, but his “only 3.5 million” figure is misleading at best. As of the day Trump left office in January 2021, about 19 million people had received a first shot of a Covid-19 vaccine, according to figures published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The “3.5 million” figure Biden cited is, in reality, the number of people at the time who had received two shots to complete their primary vaccination series.

    Someone could perhaps try to argue that completing a primary series is what Biden meant by “had their first vaccination” – but he used a different term, “fully vaccinated,” to refer to the roughly 230 million people in that very same group today. His contrasting language made it sound like there are 230 million people with at least two shots today versus 3.5 million people with just one shot when he took office. That isn’t true.

    Biden said Republicans want to cut taxes for billionaires, “who pay virtually only 3% of their income now – 3%, they pay.”

    Facts First: Biden’s “3%” claim is incorrect. For the second time in less than a week, Biden inaccurately described a 2021 finding from economists in his administration that the wealthiest 400 billionaire families paid an average of 8.2% of their income in federal individual income taxes between 2010 and 2018; after CNN inquired about Biden’s “3%” claim on Thursday, the White House published a corrected official transcript that uses “8%” instead. Also, it’s important to note that even that 8% number is contested, since it is an alternative calculation that includes unrealized capital gains that are not treated as taxable income under federal law.

    “Biden’s numbers are way too low,” said Howard Gleckman, senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute think tank, though Gleckman also said we don’t know precisely what tax rates billionaires do pay. Gleckman wrote in an email: “In 2019, Berkeley economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabe Zucman estimated the top 400 households paid an average effective tax rate of about 23 percent in 2018. They got a lot of attention at the time because that rate was lower than the average rate of 24 percent for the bottom half of the income distribution. But it still was way more than 2 or 3, or even 8 percent.”

    Biden has cited the 8% statistic in various other speeches, but unlike the administration economists who came up with it, he tends not to explain that it doesn’t describe tax rates in a conventional way. And regardless, he said “3%” in this speech and “2%” in a speech last week.

    Biden cited a 2021 report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy think tank that found that 55 of the country’s largest corporations had made $40 billion in profit in their previous fiscal year but not paid any federal corporate income taxes. Before touting the 15% alternative corporate minimum tax he signed into law in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, Biden said, “The days are over when corporations are paying zero in federal taxes.”

    Facts First: Biden exaggerated. The new minimum tax will reduce the number of companies that don’t pay any federal taxes, but it’s not true that the days of companies paying zero are “over.” That’s because the minimum tax, on the “book income” companies report to investors, only applies to companies with at least $1 billion in average annual income. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, only 14 of the companies on its 2021 list of 55 non-payers reported having US pre-tax income of at least $1 billion.

    In other words, there will clearly still be some large and profitable corporations paying no federal income tax even after the minimum tax takes effect this year. The exact number is not yet known.

    Matthew Gardner, a senior fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, told CNN in the fall that the new tax is “an important step forward from the status quo” and that it will raise substantial revenue, but he also said: “I wouldn’t want to assert that the minimum tax will end the phenomenon of zero-tax profitable corporations. A more accurate phrasing would be to say that the minimum tax will *help* ensure that *the most profitable* corporations pay at least some federal income tax.”

    There are lots of nuances to the tax; you can read more specifics here. Asked for comment on Thursday, a White House official told CNN: “The Inflation Reduction Act ensures the wealthiest corporations pay a 15% minimum tax, precisely the corporations the President focused on during the campaign and in office. The President’s full Made in America tax plan would ensure all corporations pay a 15% minimum tax, and the President has called on Congress to pass that plan.”

    Noting the big increase in the federal debt under Trump, Biden said that his administration has taken a “different path” and boasted: “As a result, the last two years – my administration – we cut the deficit by $1.7 trillion, the largest reduction in debt in American history.”

    Facts First: Biden’s boast leaves out important context. It is true that the federal deficit fell by a total of $1.7 trillion under Biden in the 2021 and 2022 fiscal years, including a record $1.4 trillion drop in 2022 – but it is highly questionable how much credit Biden deserves for this reduction. Biden did not mention that the primary reason the deficit fell so substantially was that it had skyrocketed to a record high under Trump in 2020 because of bipartisan emergency pandemic relief spending, then fell as expected as the spending expired as planned. Independent analysts say Biden’s own actions, including his laws and executive orders, have had the overall effect of adding to current and projected future deficits, not reducing those deficits.

    Dan White, senior director of economic research at Moody’s Analytics – an economics firm whose assessments Biden has repeatedly cited during his presidency – told CNN’s Matt Egan in October: “On net, the policies of the administration have increased the deficit, not reduced it.” The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an advocacy group, wrote in September that Biden’s actions will add more than $4.8 trillion to deficits from 2021 through 2031, or $2.5 trillion if you don’t count the American Rescue Plan pandemic relief bill of 2021.

    National Economic Council director Brian Deese wrote on the White House website last week that the American Rescue Plan pandemic relief bill “facilitated a strong economic recovery and enabled the responsible wind-down of emergency spending programs,” thereby reducing the deficit; David Kelly, chief global strategist at J.P. Morgan Funds, told Egan in October that the Biden administration does deserve credit for the recovery that has pushed the deficit downward. And Deese correctly noted that Biden’s signature legislation, last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, is expected to bring down deficits by more than $200 billion over the next decade.

    Still, the deficit-reducing impact of that one bill is expected to be swamped by the deficit-increasing impact of various additional bills and policies Biden has approved.

    Biden said, “Wages are up, and they’re growing faster than inflation. Over the past six months, inflation has gone down every month and, God willing, will continue to do that.”

    Facts First: Biden’s claim that wages are up and growing faster than inflation is true if you start the calculation seven months ago; “real” wages, which take inflation into account, started rising in mid-2022 as inflation slowed. (Biden is right that inflation has declined, on an annual basis, every month for the last six months.) However, real wages are lower today than they were both a full year ago and at the beginning of Biden’s presidency in January 2021. That’s because inflation was so high in 2021 and the beginning of 2022.

    There are various ways to measure real wages. Real average hourly earnings declined 1.7% between December 2021 and December 2022, while real average weekly earnings (which factors in the number of hours people worked) declined 3.1% over that period.

    Biden said he was disappointed that the first bill passed by the new Republican majority in the House of Representatives “added $114 billion to the deficit.”

    Facts First: Biden is correct about how the bill would affect the deficit if it became law. He accurately cited an estimate from the government’s nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

    The bill would eliminate more than $71 billion of the $80 billion in additional funding for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) that Biden signed into law in the Inflation Reduction Act. The Congressional Budget Office found that taking away this funding – some of which the Biden administration said will go toward increased audits of high-income individuals and large corporations – would result in a loss of nearly $186 billion in government revenue between 2023 and 2032, for a net increase to the deficit of about $114 billion.

    The Republican bill has no chance of becoming law under Biden, who has vowed to veto it in the highly unlikely event it got through the Democratic-controlled Senate.

    Biden said that “MAGA Republicans” in the House “want to impose a 30 percent national sales tax on everything from food, clothing, school supplies, housing, cars – a whole deal.” He said they want to do that because “they want to eliminate the income tax system.”

    Facts First: This is a fair description of the Republicans’ “FairTax” bill. The bill would eliminate federal income taxes, plus the payroll tax, capital gains tax and estate tax, and replace it with a national sales tax. The bill describes a rate of 23% on the “gross payments” on a product or service, but when the tax rate is described in the way consumers are used to sales taxes being described, it’s actually right around 30%, as a pro-FairTax website acknowledges.

    It is not clear how much support the bill currently has among the House Republican caucus. Notably, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy told CNN’s Manu Raju this week that he opposes the bill – though, while seeking right-wing votes for his bid for speaker in early January, he promised its supporters that it would be considered in committee. Biden wryly said in his speech, “The Republican speaker says he’s not so sure he’s for it.”

    Biden claimed the unemployment rate “is the lowest it’s been in 50 years.”

    Facts First: This is true. The unemployment rate was just below 3.5% in December, the lowest figure since 1969.

    The headline monthly rate, which is rounded to a single decimal place, was reported as 3.5% in December and also reported as 3.5% in three months of President Donald Trump’s tenure, in late 2019 and in early 2020. But if you look at more precise figures, December was indeed the lowest since 1969 – 3.47% – just below the figures for February 2020, January 2020 and September 2019.

    Biden said that the unemployment rates for Black and Hispanic Americans are “near record lows” and that the unemployment rate for people with disabilities is “the lowest ever recorded” and the “lowest ever in history.”

    Facts First: Biden’s claims are accurate, though it’s worth noting that the unemployment rate for people with disabilities has only been released by the government since 2008.

    The Black or African American unemployment rate was 5.7% in December, not far from the record low of 5.3% that was set in August 2019. (This data series goes back to 1972.) The rate was 9.2% in January 2021, the month Biden became president. The Hispanic or Latino unemployment rate was 4.1% in December, just above the record low of 4.0% that was set in September 2019. (This data series goes back to 1973.) The rate was 8.5% in January 2021.

    The unemployment rate for people with disabilities was 5.0% in December, the lowest since the beginning of the data series in 2008. The rate was 12.0% in January 2021.

    Biden said that fewer families are facing foreclosure than before the pandemic.

    Facts First: Biden is correct. According to a report published by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, about 28,500 people had new foreclosure notations on their credit reports in the third quarter of 2022, the most recent quarter for which data is available; that was down from about 71,420 people with new foreclosure notations in the fourth quarter of 2019 and 74,860 people in the first quarter of 2020.

    Foreclosures plummeted in the second quarter of 2020 because of government moratoriums put in place because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Foreclosures spiked in 2022, relative to 2020-2021 levels, after the expiry of these moratoriums, but they remained very low by historical standards.

    Biden said, “More American families have health insurance today than any time in American history.”

    Facts First: Biden’s claim is accurate. An analysis provided to CNN by the Kaiser Family Foundation, which studies US health care, found that about 295 million US residents had health insurance in 2021, the highest on record – and Jennifer Tolbert, the foundation’s director for state health reform, told CNN this week that “I expect the number of people with insurance continued to increase in 2022.”

    Tolbert noted that the number of insured residents generally rises over time because of population growth, but she added that “it is not a given” that there will be an increase in the number of insured residents every year – the number declined slightly under Trump from 2018 to 2019, for example – and that “policy changes as well as economic factors also affect these numbers.”

    As CNN’s Tami Luhby has reported, sign-ups on the federal insurance exchange created by the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, have spiked nearly 50% under Biden. Biden’s 2021 American Rescue Plan pandemic relief law and then the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act temporarily boosted federal premium subsidies for exchange enrollees, and the Biden administration has also taken various other steps to get people to sign up on the exchanges. In addition, enrollment in Medicaid health insurance has increased significantly during the Covid-19 pandemic, in part because of a bipartisan 2020 law that temporarily prevented people from being disenrolled from the program.

    The percentage of residents without health insurance fell to an all-time low of 8.0% in the first quarter of 2022, according to an analysis published last summer by the federal government’s Department of Health and Human Services. That meant there were 26.4 million people without health insurance, down from 48.3 million in 2010, the year Obamacare was signed into law.

    Biden said, “And over the last two years, more than 10 million people have applied to start a small business. That’s more than any two years in all of recorded American history.”

    Facts First: This is true. There were about 5.4 million business applications in 2021, the highest since 2005 (the first year for which the federal government released this data for a full year), and about 5.1 million business applications in 2022. Not every application turns into a real business, but the number of “high-propensity” business applications – those deemed to have a high likelihood of turning into a business with a payroll – also hit a record in 2021 and saw its second-highest total in 2022.

    Trump’s last full year in office, 2020, also set a then-record for total and high-propensity applications. There are various reasons for the pandemic-era boom in entrepreneurship, which began after millions of Americans lost their jobs in early 2020. Among them: some newly unemployed workers seized the moment to start their own enterprises; Americans had extra money from stimulus bills signed by Trump and Biden; interest rates were particularly low until a series of rate hikes that began in the spring of 2022.

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  • Why is Britain’s health service, a much-loved national treasure, falling apart? | CNN

    Why is Britain’s health service, a much-loved national treasure, falling apart? | CNN

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    London
    CNN
     — 

    Most winters, headlines warn that Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) is at “breaking point.” The alarms sound over and over and over again. But the current crisis has set warning bells ringing louder than before.

    “This time feels different,” said Peter Neville, a doctor who has worked in the NHS since 1989. “It’s never been as bad as this.”

    Scenes that would until recently have been unthinkable have now become commonplace. Hospitals are running well over capacity. Many patients don’t get treated in wards, but in the back of ambulances or in corridors, waiting rooms and cupboards – or not at all. “It’s like a war zone,” an NHS worker at a hospital in Liverpool told CNN.

    These stories are borne out by the data. In December, 54,000 people in England had to wait more than 12 hours for an emergency admission. The figure was virtually zero before the pandemic, according to data from NHS England. The average wait time for an ambulance to attend a “category 2” condition – like a stroke or heart attack – exceeded 90 minutes. The target is 18 minutes. There were 1,474 (20%) more excess deaths in the week ending December 30 than the 5-year average.

    Ambulance staff and nurses have staged a series of strikes over pay and working conditions, with the latest walkout by ambulance workers happening Monday. More are planned for the coming weeks. The chief executive of the NHS Confederation, which represents NHS organizations in England, wrote to the government on the eve of an ambulance strike last month to warn of NHS leaders’ concerns that they “cannot guarantee patient safety” that day. In response, a government health minister advised the public to avoid “risky activity.”

    While the NHS has suffered crises before, this winter has brought a new reality: In Britain, people can no longer rely on getting healthcare in an emergency.

    Founded shortly after World War II, the NHS is treated with an almost religious reverence by many. Britons danced for it during the 2012 London Olympics and clapped for it during the pandemic. “Our NHS” is a source of national pride.

    Now, it is coming unstuck. There has long been an implicit contract between British people and the state: Pay taxes and National Insurance contributions in return for a health service that is free at the point of use.

    But, with the tax burden on track to reach its highest sustained level since the NHS was founded, Britons are paying more and more for a service they increasingly cannot access as quickly as they need.

    Some of these strains can be seen elsewhere in Europe. Doctors in both France and Spain have held strikes in recent weeks, as many countries face the same problems of providing care to an increasingly aging population – when inflation is at its highest level in decades.

    Yet there are fears that the NHS is in worse shape than its international peers, and CNN spoke with experts who said they fear they’re witnessing the “collapse” of the service.

    So how did Britain get here?

    When Covid-19 hit, the NHS went into full crisis-fighting mode, diverting staff and resources from across the organization to care for patients with the disease.

    But, for many in the NHS, Covid-19 remains a crisis from which they are yet to emerge.

    During the height of the pandemic, many ordinary practices were put on hold. Millions of operations were canceled. The NHS “backlog” has ballooned. Data from November showed there were more than 7 million people on a hospital waiting list in England.

    This winter, a “twindemic” of Covid and flu continues to put additional strain on capacity.

    Many feel that Covid is a crisis from which the NHS has not yet emerged.

    Explanations for the current crisis “have to start with a consideration of Covid-19,” Ben Zaranko, an economist at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) whose work focuses on Britain’s health care system, told CNN. “There’s the simple fact that there are beds in hospitals occupied by Covid patients, which means those beds can’t be used for other things.”

    Covid also created a strain on the amount of work the NHS can do. “If you add up all the time that staff spend doing infection control measures, donning protective equipment and separating out wards into people with and without Covid … that might impede the overall productivity of the system,” Zaranko said. Rates of NHS staff sickness are also considerably higher than they were pre-pandemic, according to IFS analysis.

    But, again, Britain was not alone in battling the pandemic, yet it appears to have suffered a worse hit than comparable nations.

    This is despite there being more doctors and nurses in the NHS now than there were before Covid. According to an IFS report, even after adjusting for staff sickness absences, there are 9% more consultants, 15% more junior doctors and 8% more nurses than in 2019.

    Yet the NHS is treating fewer patients than before the pandemic.

    “It seems to be that bits of the system aren’t fitting together anymore,” Zaranko said. “It’s not just about how much staff there are and how much money there is. It’s how it’s being used.”

    Even with the increase in funding since the pandemic, the UK is still playing catchup, after what critics say is more than a decade of underfunding the NHS.

    Neville, a consultant in a hospital, judges 2008 the “best” he has seen the NHS in more than 30 years of working in it. By that time, the NHS had enjoyed nearly a decade of hugely increased investment. Waiting lists fell substantially. Some even complained about getting doctor appointments too quickly.

    “When the Labour government came in in 1997, they injected considerably more money into the NHS. It enabled us to appoint an adequate number of staff and get on top of our waiting lists,” Neville told CNN.

    But this level of investment did not last. In response to the 2007-2008 financial crisis, the Conservatives elected in the coalition government in 2010 embarked on a program of austerity. Budgets were cut and staff salaries frozen. For Neville, the ensuing decade saw a gradual “erosion” of the system: “Slow, subtle, but nonetheless happening.”

    Health Secretary Steve Barclay on a visit to King's College University Hospital in London.

    According to analysis by health charity the Health Foundation, average day-to-day health spending in the UK between 2010 and 2019 was £3,005 ($3,715) per person per year – 18% below the EU14 [countries that joined the EU before 2004] average of £3,655 ($4,518).

    During this period, capital expenditure – the amount spent on buildings and equipment – was especially low, according to the Health Foundation analysis. The UK has far fewer MRI and CT scanners per person than the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average, meaning staff often have to wait for equipment to become available.

    Hospital beds are particularly scarce. Over the past 30 years the number of beds in England has more than halved, from around 299,000 in 1987 to 141,000 in 2019, according to analysis by the King’s Fund, an independent think tank.

    Siva Anandiciva, chief analyst at the King’s Fund, told CNN this decrease was partly attributable to the “changing model of care.” As technology and treatments improved, people spent less time in hospital, reducing the need for beds. The last Labour government, in power from 1997 to 2010, also cut bed numbers, despite increasing investment elsewhere.

    “You can keep reducing how long patients stay in hospital,” said Anandaciva, but eventually “you approach a minimum. If you then keep cutting bed numbers … that’s when you start to get into problems like performance.”

    During the austerity years, bed numbers continued to be cut, leaving the UK with fewer beds per capita than almost any developed nation, according to OECD data.

    “For a long time we knew we just didn’t have the bed capacity,” Anandaciva said. But cuts continued in the name of “efficiency,” he added.

    While low bed numbers were seen as a marker of “success” indicating that the NHS was running efficiently, it left the UK woefully underprepared for a shock like Covid-19. The same factors that made the NHS “efficient” in one context made it grossly inefficient when that context changed, in his analysis.

    The bed shortage has been made even more acute by the fact that many of those in hospital no longer need to be there – there is simply nowhere else for them to go.

    “The longest I had a patient that was physically and medically ready to go home, but was sitting around waiting for discharge, was four weeks,” said Angus Livingstone, a doctor working in the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford.

    The problem is caused by a crisis in another sector: Social care. Patients that could leave the hospital end up staying there because they cannot access more modest care in a home setting and so cannot be safely discharged.

    Many patients are well enough to leave hospital, but cannot be looked after elsewhere.

    Health and social care are separate sectors in the UK system. Healthcare is provided by the NHS, whereas social care is provided by local councils. Unlike the NHS, social care is not free at the point of use: It is rationed and means-tested.

    There have long been calls to integrate the two systems, since a crisis in one system feeds through into the other.

    “If you allow us to regain the enormous number of beds that are currently occupied by people awaiting social care, then I would be very confident that the immediate snarl-up in A&E and ambulances waiting outside would pretty much disappear overnight,” Neville said.

    “When people ask me, ‘where do you want the money in the NHS?’ My answer is ‘I don’t want it in the NHS. I want it in social care.’”

    With an increasingly aging population – the latest census data show nearly 19% of the population of England and Wales is now 65 or older – demand for social care is increasing. But the sector is struggling to provide it in the face of staffing shortages, rising costs and funding pressures.

    Care work can be grueling and underpaid. Most supermarkets offer a better hourly wage, analysis from the King’s Fund found. So, it is perhaps unsurprising that the sector reported 165,000 vacancies in August.

    The NHS is also reporting an alarming number of vacancies, with about 133,000 open positions as of September.

    This points to a deeper crisis: Morale.

    Jatinder Hayre, a doctor completing the foundation program at a hospital in East London, told CNN that morale is “at an all time low.” Staff are “stressed, fatigued, tired,” he said. “There doesn’t seem to be an end to this.”

    “When you walk into the hospital in the morning, you’re met with this cacophony of grief and dismay and dissatisfaction from patients, who are lined up in the corridor,” Hayre said.

    “You feel awful, but there’s nothing you can do. You’re fighting against a system that’s collapsing.”

    Hayre said that most days there are “around 40 to 50 patients lined up in the corridors” as there is no space left in the wards. “It’s not appropriate. It’s not a safe or dignified environment.”

    Unable to deliver an acceptable standard of care, many staff are demoralized – and considering their options. At Hayre’s hospital, “the day-to-day workplace talk is, ‘are we going to leave?’”

    Britain is braced for another wave of strikes over low pay and working conditions.

    A junior doctor at a hospital in Manchester, who wished to remain anonymous, told CNN that she had made the decision to join the growing number of NHS doctors who are moving abroad. She plans to move abroad in the summer, to work in a country that offers doctors better pay and working conditions.

    Of the eight doctors she lived with at university, six have already left. “They’ve all gone to Australia. They love it,” she said. Only one is planning to stay in the UK.

    Medical students are watching in alarm as their future workplace deteriorates.

    “For everyone I know, it’s almost a given that at some point they’re going to go to Australia or New Zealand,” said Eilidh Garrett, who studies medicine at Newcastle University. She is considering taking exams to work as a doctor in Canada.

    This is a hugely painful decision for many young doctors. “I think about my closest friends. If I go to another country and treat other people’s closest friends, while my friends struggle to see a doctor in the UK – that is really heartbreaking,” Garrett told CNN.

    A growing number of doctors are considering leaving the NHS to work abroad.

    Meanwhile, Britain’s vote to leave the European Union in 2016 has likely not helped the situation. Research by the Nuffield Trust health think tank, published in November, finds that long-standing staff shortages in nursing and social care “have been exacerbated by Brexit.”

    The picture is “more complex” for doctors working in the NHS, the researchers found. While overall “EU numbers have remained relatively stable,” the report says, the data suggest a slowdown in the registration of specialists from the EU and European Free Trade Association countries since Brexit, particularly in certain specialties such as anesthetics.

    The concern is that these issues get worse the longer they go untreated.

    When patients finally get seen, their treatments take more time, forcing those after them to wait even longer as they get sicker.

    “In terms of the system performance, it feels like we’re past the tipping point,” Zaranko said. “The NHS has been gradually deteriorating in its performance for some time. But we’ve gone off a cliff in recent months.”

    It is unclear how the NHS regains its footing. Some compare this crisis to a period in the 1990s when services were rapidly deteriorating. The NHS was in bad shape, but restored its levels of service after a decade of historically high investment while Labour was in power.

    Injections of cash on this scale are unlikely to be replicated. The most recent budget announced by the government in November will see NHS England spending rise by only 2% in real terms on average over the next two years.

    “We recognize the pressures the NHS is facing so announced up to £250 million [$309 million] of additional funding to immediately help reduce hospital bed occupancy, alleviate pressures on A&E and unlock much-needed ambulance handovers,” a spokesperson from the Department of Health and Social Care told CNN in a statement.

    “This is on top of the £500 million [$618 million] Discharge Fund to speed up the safe discharge of patients and rolling out virtual wards to free up hospital beds and cut waiting cuts,” the statement continued.

    Pay negotiations between the government and nursing unions have so far been unsuccessful. British media outlets have reported that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak may be considering offering a one-off hardship payment of £1,000 ($1,236) to attempt to resolve the dispute, but many feel this underestimates the true nature of the crisis.

    “All I hear about is sticking plasters,” Neville said. “It depresses us all.”

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  • How Big Tech’s pandemic bubble burst | CNN Business

    How Big Tech’s pandemic bubble burst | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    In January 2021, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella spoke in lofty terms about how the first year of the pandemic had sparked a staggering shift toward online services, benefiting his company in the process. “What we have witnessed over the past year is the dawn of a second wave of digital transformation sweeping every company and every industry,” he said.

    Two years later, the situation appears much more stark. This week, Microsoft said it planned to lay off 10,000 employees as businesses rethink their pandemic-era digital spending and confront broader economic uncertainty. Microsoft’s customers, Nadella said, are now trying “to do more with less.”

    Microsoft isn’t the only company experiencing such a dramatic reversal. Days later, Google-parent company Alphabet followed suit, saying it plans to cut around 12,000 jobs, amounting to more than 6% of its staff.

    Over the past three months, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Facebook-parent Meta have announced plans to cut more than 50,000 employees from their collective ranks, a stunning reversal from the early days of the pandemic when the tech giants were growing rapidly to meet surging demand from countless households living, shopping and working online. At the time, many tech leaders seemed to expect that growth to continue unabated.

    By September of 2022, Amazon

    (AMZN)     had more than doubled its corporate staff compared to the same month in 2019, hiring more than half a million additional workers and vastly expanding its warehouse footprint. Meta nearly doubled its headcount between March 2020 and September of last year. Microsoft

    (MSFT)     and Google

    (GOOGL GOOGLE)     also hired thousands of additional workers, as did other tech firms like Salesforce

    (CRM)    , Snap

    (SNAP)     and Twitter, all of which have announced layoffs in recent weeks, too.

    But many of those same leaders appear to have misjudged just how much growth spurred by the pandemic would continue once people returned to their offline lives.

    In recent months, higher interest rates, inflation and recession fears causing a pullback in advertising and consumer spending have all weighed on tech companies’ profits and share prices. Wall Street analysts now project single-digit revenue growth during the all-important December quarter for Google, Microsoft and Amazon, and declines for Meta and Apple, when they report earnings in the coming weeks, according to Refinitiv estimates.

    The recent cuts in most cases amount to a relatively small percentage of each company’s overall headcount, essentially erasing the last year of gains for some but leaving them with tens or in some cases hundreds of thousands of remaining workers. But it nonetheless upends the lives of many workers now left to search for new jobs after their employers exit a period of seemingly limitless growth.

    “They went from being on top of the world to having to make some really tough decisions,” said Scott Kessler, global sector lead for technology, media and telecommunications at investment firm Third Bridge. “To see this dramatic reversal of fortunes… it’s not just the magnitude of these moves but the speed that they’ve played out. You’ve seen companies make the wrong strategic decisions at the wrong times.”

    Apple

    (AAPL)     remains an outlier as the one major tech company that has yet to announce layoffs, although the iPhone maker has reportedly instituted a hiring freeze of all areas except research and development. Apple

    (AAPL)     grew its staff by 20% from 2019 through last year, markedly less than some of its peers.

    “They’ve taken a more seemingly thoughtful approach to hiring and overall managing the company,” Kessler said.

    Tech CEOs, from Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg to Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, have blamed themselves for over-hiring early on in the pandemic and misreading how a surge in demand for their products would cool once Covid-19 restrictions eased. Pichai on Friday also took the blame for Alphabet’s cuts, and said he plans to return the company’s focus to its core business and “highest priorities.”

    “The fact that these changes will impact the lives of Googlers weighs heavily on me, and I take full responsibility for the decisions that led us here,” Pichai said in an email to employees that was posted to the company’s website Friday.

    Notably, however, none of the Big Tech company CEOs now overseeing layoffs appear to have been hit with any change to their compensation or title.

    The tech layoff announcements are likely to continue into the upcoming earnings season, Kessler said, amid ongoing economic warning signs. And even companies that might not yet be feeling the pain may follow their peers’ lead in trimming their workforces.

    “I think there is an element of [some companies saying], ‘We might not see this right now but all these other big companies, these companies that we compete with, that we know, that we respect, are taking these kinds of actions, so maybe we should be thinking and acting accordingly,” Kessler said.

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  • Here are the companies that have laid off employees this year — so far | CNN Business

    Here are the companies that have laid off employees this year — so far | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    Just this week, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, Microsoft

    (MSFT)     and Vox Media announced layoffs that will affect more than 22,000 workers.

    Their moves follow on the heels of job cuts earlier this month at Amazon, Goldman Sachs and Salesforce. More companies are expected to do the same as firms that aggressively hired over the last two years slam on the brakes, and in many cases shift into reverse.

    The cutbacks are in sharp contrast to 2022, which had the second-highest level of job gains on record, with 4.5 million. But last year’s job numbers began falling as the year went on, with December’s job report showing the lowest monthly gains in two years.

    The highest level of hiring occurred in 2021, when 6.7 million jobs were added. But that came on the heels of the first year of the pandemic, when the US effectively shut down and 9.3 million jobs were lost.

    The current layoffs are across multiple industries, from media firms to Wall Street, but so far are hitting Big Tech especially hard.

    That’s a contrast from job losses during the pandemic, which saw consumers’ buying habits shifting toward e-commerce and other online services during lockdown. Tech firms went on a hiring spree.

    But now, workers are returning to their offices and in-person shopping is bouncing back. Add in the increasing likelihood of a recession, higher interest rates and tepid demand due to rising prices, and tech businesses are slashing their costs.

    January has been filled with headlines announcing job cuts at company after company. Here is a list of layoffs this month – so far.

    Google

    (GOOGL)    ’s parent said Friday it is laying off 12,000 workers across product areas and regions, or 6% of its workforce. Alphabet added 50,000 workers over the past two years as the pandemic created greater demand for its services. But recent recession fears has advertisers pulling back from its core digital ad business.

    “Over the past two years we’ve seen periods of dramatic growth,” CEO Sundar Pichai said in an email to employees. “To match and fuel that growth, we hired for a different economic reality than the one we face today.”

    The tech behemoth is laying off 10,000 employees, the company said in a securities filing on Wednesday. Globally, Microsoft has 221,000 full-time employees with 122,000 of them based in the US.

    CEO Satya Nadella said during a talk at Davos that “no one can defy gravity” and that Microsoft could not ignore the weaker global economy.

    “We’re living through times of significant change, and as I meet with customers and partners, a few things are clear,” Nadella wrote in a memo. “First, as we saw customers accelerate their digital spend during the pandemic, we’re now seeing them optimize their digital spend to do more with less.”

    The publisher of the news and opinion website Vox, tech website The Verge and New York Magazine, announced Friday that it’s cutting 7% of its staff, or about 130 people.

    “We are experiencing and expect more of the same economic and financial pressures that others in the media and tech industries have encountered,” chief executive Jim Bankoff said in a memo.

    Layoffs are also hitting Wall Street hard. The world’s largest asset manager is eliminating 500 jobs, or less than 3% of its workforce.

    Today’s “unprecedented market environment” is a stark contrast from its attitude over the last three years,, when it increased its staff by about 22%. Its last major round of cutbacks was in 2019.

    The bank will lay off up to 3,200 workers this month amid a slump in global dealmaking activity. More than a third of the cuts are expected to be from the firm’s trading and banking units. Goldman Sachs

    (FADXX)     had almost 50,000 employees at the end of last year’s third quarter.

    The crypto brokerage announced in early January that it’s cutting 950 people – almost one in five employees in its workforce. The move comes just a few months after Coinbase laid off 1,100 people.

    Though Bitcoin had a solid start to the new year, crypto companies were slammed by significant drops in prices of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

    McDonald’s

    (MCD)    , which thrived during the pandemic, is planning on cutting some of its corporate staff, CEO Chris Kempczinski said this month.

    “We will evaluate roles and staffing levels in parts of the organization and there will be difficult discussions and decisions ahead,” Kempszinski said, outlining a plan to “break down internal barriers, grow more innovative and reduce work that doesn’t align with the company’s priorities.”

    The online personalized subscription clothing retailer said it plans to lay off 20% of its salaried staff.

    “We will be losing many talented team members from across the company and I am truly sorry,” Stitch Fix

    (SFIX)     founder and former CEO Katrina Lake wrote in a blog post.

    As the new year began, Amazon

    (AMZN)     said it plans to lay off more than 18,000 employees. Departments from human resources to the company’s Amazon

    (AMZN)     Stores will be affected.

    “Companies that last a long time go through different phases. They’re not in heavy people expansion mode every year,” CEO Andy Jassy said in a memo to employees.

    Amazon boomed during the pandemic, and hired rapidly over the last few years. But demand has cooled as consumers return to their offline lives and battle high prices. Amazon says it has more than 800,000 employees.

    At The New York Times DealBook summit In November, Jassy said he believes Amazon “made the right decision” regarding its rapid infrastructure build out but said its hiring spree is a “lesson for everyone.”

    Even as he spoke, Amazon warehouse workers who helped organize the company’s first-ever US labor union at a Staten Island facility last year were picketing Jassy’s appearance outside the conference venue.

    “We definitely want to take this opportunity to let him know that the workers are waiting and we are ready to negotiate our first contract,” Amazon Labor Union President Chris Smalls said, calling the protest a “welcoming party” for Jassy.

    Salesforce

    (CRM)     will cut about 10% of its workforce from its more than 70,000 employess and reduce its real estate footprint. In a letter to employees, Salesforce

    (CRM)    ’s chair and co-CEO Marc Benioff admitted to adding too much to the company’s headcount early in the pandemic.

    – CNN’s Clare Duffy, Matt Egan, Oliver Darcy, Julia Horowitz, Catherine Thorbecke, Paul R. La Monica, Nathaniel Meyersohn, Parija Kavilanz, Danielle Wiener-Bronner and Hanna Ziady contributed to this report.

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  • Japan considers downgrading Covid-19 to same level as seasonal flu | CNN

    Japan considers downgrading Covid-19 to same level as seasonal flu | CNN

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    Tokyo
    CNN
     — 

    Japan will consider downgrading Covid-19 to the same category as seasonal influenza this spring, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida announced Friday.

    Kishida said he had instructed Health Ministry officials to discuss the move and his administration would also review rules on face masks and other pandemic measures.

    “In order to further advance the efforts of ‘living with Corona’ and restore Japan to a state of normalcy, we will transition the various policies and measures to date in phases,” Kishida said.

    While daily Covid-19 cases in Japan have declined in recent weeks, the country still faces around 100,000 new infections a day.

    Covid-19 is categorized as a Class 2 disease, the same status as tuberculosis and avian influenza, according to Japan’s Health Ministry. Officials will now discuss reclassifying it to Class 5 – the lowest rank, which includes seasonal flu.

    Japan fully reopened its borders to overseas visitors last October after more than two years of pandemic restrictions, ending one of the world’s strictest border controls.

    Influenza – or the common flu – and Covid-19 are both contagious respiratory illnesses with simlar symptoms, but they are caused by different viruses and require testing to confirm a diagnosis, the United States’ Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says on its website.

    According to the CDC, the risk of death or hospitalization from Covid-19 is greatly reduced for most people due to high levels of vaccination and population immunity from previous infections.

    However, the World Health Organization still lists the coronavirus outbreak as a pandemic, and reiterated in its latest update a recommendation for people to wear masks following recent exposure or close contact with Covid-19, and for “anyone in a crowded, enclosed, or poorly ventilated space” to do the same.

    WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called on governments last week to continue sharing the sequencing data of the coronavirus, as it remained vital to detect and track the emergence and spread of new variants.

    “It’s understandable that countries cannot maintain the same levels of testing and sequencing they had during the Omicron peak. At the same time, the world cannot close its eyes and hope this virus will go away. It won’t,” he said.

    The news came as South Korea announced it will lift its mask mandate for most indoor areas, with exceptions for public transport and health facilities. The changes will take effect on January 30, South Korean Prime Minister Han Duck-soo said Friday.

    The measure will be lifted after the Lunar New Year holiday, when a large number of people are expected to travel, the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) said.

    New Covid-19 cases, severe cases and related deaths are all declining and the country’s medical response capacity remains stable, KDCA added.

    The agency has strongly recommended people wear masks if they have Covid-19 related symptoms, belong to a high-risk group, have been in contact recently with a positive case, or are in a crowded space.

    Masks will still be required on public transport and in health facilities after South Korea eases its indoor mask mandate on January 30, 2023.

    The prime minister said the easing of the mandate could result in a temporary surge of new cases and urged health authorities to stay vigilant.

    South Korea has scrapped most of its pandemic restrictions and eased its outdoor mask mandate in May 2022. It still requires people who test positive to undergo seven days of home isolation.

    The country has also restricted travel from mainland China and implemented testing requirements for people arriving from China, Hong Kong and Macau following Beijing’s easing of Covid restrictions.

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  • Peru’s crisis is a cautionary tale for democracies | CNN

    Peru’s crisis is a cautionary tale for democracies | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Peru is seeing some of its worst political violence in recent decades, but the grievances of protesters are all but new; they reflect a system that has failed to deliver for over twenty years.

    Sparked by the ousting of former President Pedro Castillo last month, some of Peru’s most intense protests have taken place in the south of the country where dozens of people were killed in violent clashes with security forces over the last few weeks.

    This region, around the Andean Mountain range at over ten thousand feet above sea level and home to some of Peru’s most famous archeological sites like the ancient ruins of Machu Picchu and the city of Cusco, is also one of the poorest in the country.

    In recent days, protesters from this and other rural regions of Peru have started travelling towards the capital, Lima – sometimes for days – to express their grievances to the country’s leadership and demand that the current president, Dina Boluarte, to step down.

    Their anger highlights a much deeper democratic crisis. After years of political bedlam, Peru is a country that has fallen out of love with democracy: both the presidency and congress are widely discredited and perceived as corrupt institutions.

    A 2021 poll by LABOP, a survey research laboratory at Vanderbilt University, revealed that only 21% of Peruvians said they are satisfied with democratic rule, the least in any country in Latin American and the Caribbean except Haiti.

    Worryingly, more than half of Peruvians who took part in that poll said a military takeover of the country would be justified under a high degree of corruption.

    At the core of the crisis are demands for better living conditions that have gone unfulfilled in the two decades since democratic rule was restored in the country. Peru is one of the youngest democracies in the Americas, with free and fair elections having been restored only in the year 2001 after the ousting of right wing leader Alberto Fujimori.

    Peru’s economy flourished both under Fujimori and in the years that followed the restoration of democracy, outpacing almost any other in the region thanks to robust exports of raw material and healthy foreign investments. The term Lima Consensus, after the Peruvian capital, was coined to describe the system of free-market policies that Peruvian elites promoted to fuel the economic boom.

    But while the economy boomed, state institutions were inherently weakened by a governing philosophy that reduced state intervention to a minimum.

    As early as 2014, Professor Steven Levitsky of Harvard University, highlighted a particular Peruvian paradox: While in most democracies public opinion reflects the state of the economy, in Peru presidential approval ratings consistently plummeted during the 2000s, even as growth soared, he wrote in journal Revista.

    Levitsky highlighted chronic deficiencies in security, justice, education, and other basic services from Peru’s successive governments as threats to the young democracy’s sustainability.

    “Security, justice, education and other basic services continue to be under-provided, resulting in widespread perceptions of government corruption, unfairness, ineffectiveness and neglect. This is a major source of public discontent. Where such perceptions persist, across successive governments, public trust in democratic institutions is likely to erode,” he wrote, an observation that today seems prophetic.

    The Covid-19 pandemic only exacerbated this structural weakness at the core of the Peruvian society. Whereas many countries expanded social safety nets to counter the damaging economic impact of lockdowns, Peru had no net to fall back on.

    According to the United Nations, over half of the Peruvian populations lacked access to enough food in the months of the Covid-19 pandemic, as the virus swept around the country. Data from Johns Hopkins University also show that Peru recorded the highest per-capita death toll in the world due to coronavirus.

    The country’s economy is back on track after the pandemic shock – Peru’s GDP grew an astonishing 13.3% in 2021 – but public trust in democratic institutions has broken down, just as Levitsky predicted.

    People who traveled from different parts of Peru to protest against Boluarte's government rest on January 18, ahead of protests on Thursday.

    A poll published September 2022 by IEP showed 84% of Peruvians disapproved Congress’s performance. Lawmakers are perceived not only as pursuing their own interests in Congress, but are also associated with corrupt practices.

    The country’s frustrations have been reflected in its years-long revolving door presidency. Current president Boluarte is the sixth head of state in less than five years.

    Her predecessor Castillo rose to power in 2021’s general elections, styled as man of the people who would get the country a fresh start. But polarization and the chaos surrounding his presidency – including corruption allegations and multiple impeachment attempts by Congress, which Castillo dismissed as politically motivated – only exacerbated pre-existing tensions.

    Most protesters who spoke with CNN on Wednesday said the country needs a fresh start and demanded new elections across the board to restore a sense of legitimacy to public institutions.

    But Boluarte and legislators have so far resisted calls for early general elections. On Sunday, the president declared a state of emergency in the areas of the country most affected by the protests, including Lima. The measure is due to last until mid-February but that has not stopped more people from taking to the streets.

    Peru’s Attorney General meanwhile has opened an investigation into Boluarte’s handling of the unrest.

    Current president Boluarte is the sixth head of state in less than five years.

    But even if the current leadership were to go and yet another politician raised to the presidency, the root causes of Peru’s unrest persist.

    As in many other regions of Latin America, addressing those issues requires structural change in terms of social and economic equality, tackling the cost-of-living crisis and fighting corruption.

    Across the region, the pandemic has proven a reality check after years of economic and social development under democratic regimes gave the impression that Latin America had finally put the era of coups, dictatorships and revolt behind its back.

    Today’s Peru may be a cautionary tale for any democracy that fails to deliver for its people and spins upon itself.

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  • Covid broke supply chains. Now on the mend, can they withstand another shock? | CNN Business

    Covid broke supply chains. Now on the mend, can they withstand another shock? | CNN Business

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    Minneapolis
    CNN
     — 

    The pandemic dislodged the global supply chain, hurling once smoothly running businesses, industries and economies into a state of disarray.

    After almost three years of enduring wild swings and extremes, the system is slowly getting up to speed and into better sync: Ocean freight timelines are on a steady decline, ports are less congested, labor strikes have been narrowly averted, product and worker shortages have eased, prices have fallen, warehouses are full (maybe too full), friendshoring, nearshoring and reshoring efforts have accelerated and China has lifted its “zero Covid” policy.

    “We’ve had a fundamental shift that started about six months ago,” said Timothy Fiore, chair of the Institute for Supply Management. “There are certain components, like integrated circuits [and] microcontrollers, that still are impacting manufacturers’ ability to flow material. But, by and large, the pressure has come off.”

    However, plenty of potential roadblocks still loom large.

    Globally, developments in China and Ukraine remain ongoing question marks, especially if the manufacturing megapower suffers another setback or lockdown, or if conditions worsen with Russia’s war in Europe.

    Domestically, exports have weakened and the state of consumer demand remains a wild card, said Phil Levy, chief economist with freight forwarder and consultancy firm Flexport.

    “I would not describe this as a machine that’s humming along at the moment,” he said. “It’s more getting its bearings and trying to figure out what’s next.”

    Among the potential bottlenecks: Warehousing capacity in certain locales, notably Southern California, is pretty near full, he said. Additionally, the inland distribution network — especially rail and areas where transfers are made from one mode to another — has experienced some challenges, he said.

    The system isn’t yet at a steady state where businesses have a good sense of how long it will take for production, shipping and, ultimately, selling.

    “I don’t think we have that,” Levy said. “There’s still a lot of uncertainty about how long it takes to move stuff. When we see the warehouses piled full, is this because demand is too low? Is it because people moved stuff too early? So there’s a lot of stuff that’s still sorting out.”

    Supply chain activity has yet to normalize, but it’s returning to pre-pandemic trajectories, said Zac Rogers, assistant professor of operations and supply chain management at Colorado State University.

    “There’s a sort of reaction-overreaction pattern that always tends to happen anytime there’s a major disruption,” Rogers said. “And Covid is the major-est disruption we’ve had.”

    Early in the pandemic, businesses canceled orders, believing consumer spending would be crushed. However, trillions of dollars were injected into the economy to try to keep consumers and businesses afloat. Americans, stuck at home with fewer outlets for discretionary spending, turned to e-commerce for their shopping.

    The surge in demand for finished goods at a time when supply was severely limited in part due to pandemic-related labor shortages and shutdowns —notably of cities, factories and manufacturing hubs in China — knocked the global logistics system out of whack.

    Ports grew congested, lead times got lengthy, and costs climbed considerably higher as shortages spiked throughout the supply chain.

    “Everyone way over-ordered, and around February and March of [last] year, everything got here — pretty much right in time for the invasion of Ukraine,” Rogers said.

    Gas prices and inflation soared, putting a huge dent in consumer spending.

    “The challenge for the last 10 months in supply chains has been to try to thread the needle between bringing inventories down to a reasonable level, while also not overreacting, yet again, and [landing] back into a shortage situation,” he said. “We’re getting back toward the trend line in a way that we haven’t in the last few years.”

    Helping that along is that supply chains are far more resilient now than they were at the end of 2019, Rogers said.

    “In 2019, we had basically all of our chips in on one hand, which was, things are built in East Asia, come on a boat through the ports in Southern California, they get on trains that go to Chicago and then on other trains or trucks to distribute to the East Coast,” he said.

    And while it’s nearly impossible to divorce from China, companies are embracing different paths for the supply chain, whether it be in Vietnam, Bangladesh, Central America or domestically, Rogers said.

    “Because of that, supply chains are not as brittle as they were three years ago,” he said. “And so if there is another shock — particularly if there’s a China-centric shock — I think we’ll be able to absorb it a little better than we had. … But you can’t price in something like the invasion of Ukraine or a viral outbreak that shuts down the world — no systems are built to handle that smoothly.”

    Rogers is also a researcher and co-author of the Logistics Managers’ Index, a monthly survey of supply chain executives conducted by a team of university researchers and the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals.

    The index’s December reading — which measures inventory levels and costs; warehousing capacity; utilization and prices; and transportation capacity, utilization and prices — came in at 54.6, a 1-point increase following eight months of declines.

    The majority of the LMI metrics were in the range of 40s, 50s and 60s, Rogers said, noting it’s the first time since the onset of the pandemic that the indices haven’t been in the 70s or 80s.

    The container ship Ever Libra (TW) is moored at the Port of Los Angeles on Monday, Nov. 21, 2022. The supply backlogs of the past two years -- and the delays, shortages and outrageous prices they brought with them -- have improved dramatically since summer.

    “If you’re in 40, that’s contraction, but 50s are normal, healthy rates of growth,” he said. “There could be another huge black swan event in a month that throws everything upside down; but for right now, it seems like respondents are predicting steadiness in the supply chain.”

    If anything, the pandemic’s shock to the supply chain should be a wake-up call, said Jack Buffington, director of supply chain and sustainability at First Key Consulting and assistant professor of supply chain management at the University of Denver.

    “I would categorize it as ‘efficiently broken,’” said Buffington, whose own book about supply chains, “Reinventing the Supply Chain: A 21st Century Covenant with America,” had its release delayed due to supply chain issues.

    “All supply chains really are is supply and demand, and there’s been so much disruption in materials and consumer demand related to labor and inflation and geopolitics,” he said. “Inherently, the foundation of the model is broken in comparison to what the demands are for today. The complexities related to a globalized supply chain, human systems aren’t capable of handling it.”

    He added: “Covid wasn’t the cause of the problems with the supply chain, it was a trigger to show how bad it was,” he said.

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  • The top 1% captured nearly twice as much new wealth as the rest of the world over last two years | CNN Business

    The top 1% captured nearly twice as much new wealth as the rest of the world over last two years | CNN Business

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    New York
    CNN
     — 

    The world’s wealthiest residents have been getting far richer, far faster than everyone else over the past two years.

    The top 1% have captured nearly twice as much new wealth as the rest of the world during that period, according to Oxfam’s annual inequality report, released Sunday. Their fortune soared by $26 trillion, while the bottom 99% only saw their net worth rise by $16 trillion.

    And the wealth accumulation of the super-rich accelerated during the pandemic. Looking over the past decade, they netted just half of all the new wealth created, compared to two-thirds during the last few years.

    The report, which draws on data compiled by Forbes, is timed to coincide with the kickoff of the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, an elite gathering of some of the wealthiest people and world leaders.

    Meanwhile, many of the less fortunate are struggling. Some 1.7 billion workers live in countries where inflation is outpacing wages. And poverty reduction likely stalled last year after the number of global poor skyrocketed in 2020.

    “While ordinary people are making daily sacrifices on essentials like food, the super-rich have outdone even their wildest dreams,” said Gabriela Bucher, executive director of Oxfam International. “Just two years in, this decade is shaping up to be the best yet for billionaires — a roaring ’20s boom for the world’s richest.”

    Though their riches have slipped somewhat over the past year, global billionaires are still far wealthier than they were at the start of the pandemic.

    Their net worth totals $11.9 trillion, according to Oxfam. While that’s down nearly $2 trillion from late 2021, it’s still well above the $8.6 trillion billionaires had in March 2020.

    The wealthy are benefiting from three trends, said Nabil Ahmed, Oxfam America’s director of economic justice.

    At the start of the pandemic, global governments, particularly wealthier countries, poured trillions of dollars into their economies to prevent a collapse. That prompted stocks and other assets to soar in value.

    “So much of that fresh cash ended up with the ultra-wealthy, who were able to ride this stock market surge, this asset boom,” Ahmed said. “And the guardrails of fair taxation weren’t in place.”

    Also, many corporations have done well in recent years. Some 95 food and energy companies have more than doubled their profits in 2022, Oxfam said, as inflation sent prices soaring. Much of this money was paid out to shareholders.

    In addition, the longer term trends of the unwinding of workers’ rights and greater market concentration is heightening inequality.

    By contrast, global poverty increased greatly early in the pandemic. Though some progress in poverty reduction has been made since then, it is expected to have stalled in 2022, in part because of the war in Ukraine, which exacerbated high food and energy prices, according to World Bank data cited by Oxfam.

    It’s the first time that extreme wealth and extreme poverty have increased simultaneously in 25 years, said Oxfam.

    To counter this growing inequality, Oxfam is calling on governments to raise taxes on their wealthiest residents.

    It proposes introducing one-time wealth tax and windfall taxes to end profiteering off global crises, as well as permanently increasing taxes on the richest 1% of residents to at least 60% of their income from labor and capital.

    Oxfam believes the rates on the top 1% should be high enough to significantly reduce their numbers and wealth. The funds should then be redistributed.

    “We do face an extreme crisis of wealth concentration,” Ahmed said. “And it’s important before all, I think, to recognize that it’s not inevitable. A strategic precondition to reining in extreme inequality is taxing the ultra-wealthy.”

    The group, however, faces an uphill battle. Some 11 countries cut taxes on the rich during the pandemic. And efforts to hike levies on the wealthy fell apart in the US Congress in 2021, even though Democrats controlled both chambers and the White House.

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  • ‘This is the last thing we need:’ Millions of businesses hammered by the pandemic need to start paying back Covid loans | CNN Business

    ‘This is the last thing we need:’ Millions of businesses hammered by the pandemic need to start paying back Covid loans | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    At Teddy & The Bully Bar restaurant near downtown Washington, DC, business has never been the same since the pandemic hit.

    “It’s very challenging,” owner Alan Popovsky said. “I’m still going to be climbing the hill for quite some time. Probably for the rest of my life.”

    The pandemic closed two of Popovsky’s four restaurants in the area. He said government loans saved the other two. But with city centers struggling to bring back commuters and foot traffic, he said revenue is still down more than 45%, and they’re fighting to stay open.

    To make matters worse, it’s time to start paying back those loans.

    “We just got over paying back the landlord,” Popovsky said. “It’s really a feeling that you’re just a hamster spinning on a wheel.”

    At the start of the pandemic, as business stalled, nearly 3.8 million small business owners took out Economic Injury Disaster Loans (known as EIDL loans) from the federal government, averaging roughly $100,000 per loan, according to the Small Business Administration. Unlike some other pandemic programs, these 30-year loans, carrying an interest rate of 3.75% for businesses, were intended to be paid back.

    After more than two years of deferrals, the first EIDL loan monthly payments have started to come due. Around 2.6 million businesses across the country will owe money by the end of January.

    Popovsky said he owes the federal government roughly $780,000, and started receiving monthly bills for more than $3,700 in October.

    “We can’t afford anything, but what we’re doing is paying the interest only right now,” he said. “We have not made a dent on the principal.”

    A new survey from the National Federation of Independent Business found only 36% of their small business members have reached their pre-pandemic sales levels, while 31% of businesses are still below 75% of their pre-crisis sales.

    Coming out of the pandemic, small businesses have faced difficult hurdles, like staffing shortages, supply chain issues and inflation.

    Now add a possible looming recession, just as these EIDL loans come due.

    “The challenges are immense for many of them and they’re having to navigate a lot of those headwinds,” said Holly Wade, executive director of the NFIB Research Center. “It is one more cost that they’re going to have to deal with, and some small business owners, unfortunately, are going to struggle with meeting those obligations.”

    Lisa Klein, who owns a physical therapy practice in the Washington, DC, area, said Covid-19 is still keeping some patients away.

    Lisa Klein, who owns and operates an outpatient physical therapy practice with offices in Virginia and in Washington, DC, said her practice is still trying to claw its way back after Covid-19, which is keeping some patients away or forcing costly last-minute cancellations.

    “The costs of everything have gone up,” Klein said. “The whole business is still suffering, and this is just kind of adding insult to injury.”

    Klein took out a $200,000 EIDL loan at the start of the pandemic but returned half of it after a year as the interest began piling up. The SBA estimates that businesses have accrued between $32 billion and $34 billion in interest over the 30-month deferment period.

    She’s now paying nearly $1,000 a month, with a total balance of just under $80,000.

    “It’s like you’re swimming and trying to catch up and get your head above water, and you just keep getting hit by something else,” Klein said. “But we have no choice, because if we don’t keep paying it, it’s going to accrue more interest.”

    Struggling businesses can declare hardship and make partial payments of 10% of the regular monthly payment with a minimum of $25 for six months, according to the SBA. But interest will keep accruing, forcing owners like Klein to weigh short-term protection against a big bill further down the line.

    Borrowers are still responsible for repaying loans even if their business closes, unless the debt has been discharged in bankruptcy, according to the SBA. For EIDL loans over $200,000, a personal guaranty was required for individuals with 20% or more ownership in the business.

    Popovsky said he has considered shutting down Teddy & The Bully Bear but has felt inspired to keep fighting by the memory of his father as well as his co-founder, Melvyn, who passed away in 2014, just one year after the restaurant opened.

    “I feel them saying keep pushing on, Alan, keep pushing on,” he said. “I feel like they’re the wind beneath my wings.”

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  • How much should people worry about Covid’s newly-dominant XBB.1.5 variant? Our medical analyst explains | CNN

    How much should people worry about Covid’s newly-dominant XBB.1.5 variant? Our medical analyst explains | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    A new Covid-19 variant, XBB.1.5, is spreading rapidly throughout the United States. In December 2022, the proportion of new Covid-19 infections due to this Omicron offshoot have increased from 4% to 18%, according to a January 6 release from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and is projected to rise further still. In some parts of the country, it constitutes more than half of all new infections. According to the World Health Organization, XBB.1.5 is the most transmissible form of Omicron yet.

    What should people know about XBB.1.5? Do vaccines and treatments work against it? Can tests pick it up? Will hospitals become overwhelmed again? Should kids wear masks to school again? And could there be even more worrisome variants that emerge in the future?

    To guide us through these questions, I spoke with CNN Medical Analyst Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician, public health expert and professor of health policy and management at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health. She is also author of “Lifelines: A Doctor’s Journey in the Fight for Public Health.”

    CNN: What should people know about the latest Covid-19 variant, XBB.1.5?

    Dr. Leana Wen: People should not be surprised that there is a new variant. The more viruses replicate, the more they mutate. Most mutations do not confer evolutionary advantage and won’t spread further, but some do.

    There are three key questions to ask about new variants. First, is it more contagious? Second, does it cause more serious disease? And third, is it more immune-evasive, meaning it undercuts the protection of existing vaccines and treatments?

    The mutations XBB.1.5 has acquired have made it more contagious. A more transmissible strain has the evolutionary advantage that it will spread faster than others, and therefore could displace other strains. This is a trend seen throughout the coronavirus pandemic — new, even more transmissible strains replacing their predecessors and becoming dominant.

    The good news is that, thus far, this strain does not appear to cause more severe disease. Like other Omicron descendants, it probably causes milder illness compared with the Delta variants that predated Omicron.

    There are some studies that suggest XBB.1.5 is more immune-evasive compared with previously dominant Omicron strains. Further research is underway to identify the degree of immune protection afforded by existing vaccines; the White House’s Covid-19 response coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha said that “data suggests that if you’ve been vaccinated, if you’ve gotten that updated bivalent booster, you’re still going to have a good amount of protection,” during an interview Friday with CNN’s Kate Bolduan.

    But even if it turns out these vaccines don’t hold up as well against infection with XBB.1.5, they will probably protect well against severe illness — which underscores the need for people to receive the updated booster if they are eligible.

    CNN: Can tests pick up this new variant?

    Wen: PCR tests definitely can, and there’s no reason to think that this variant won’t be picked up by rapid home antigen tests. If you have symptoms or are exposed to someone with the coronavirus, you should certainly get tested. The tests won’t show you which strain you picked up, but they should detect circulating variants.

    CNN: Do existing treatments work against XBB.1.5?

    Wen: Antiviral treatments like Paxlovid should work against XBB.1.5. Unfortunately, monoclonal antibody treatments probably don’t. In November, the US. Food and Drug Administration withdrew their authorization of the last remaining monoclonal antibody because of its lack of efficacy against new variants. And on January 6, the agency issued a statement that the preventive antibody Evusheld may be ineffective against XBB.1.5.

    On a policy level, it’s critical there are urgent investments into better treatments. There are many people vulnerable to severe outcomes due to Covid-19, and we need to have a wider range of effective treatments available for them.

    CNN: Could hospitals become overwhelmed again?

    Wen: Covid-19 infections could rise in the coming weeks due to a combination of this new variant and the fact that many people will have traveled and gathered over the holidays. I don’t think the surge will be nearly as bad as the initial Omicron wave in early 2022, though, because of the large proportion of Americans who have by this point already contracted Covid-19 and have some baseline immunity to it.

    If you have symptoms or are exposed to someone with the coronavirus, you should certainly get tested, says Dr. Leana Wen.

    Increasing booster rates, particularly among the elderly, will help blunt the rise in hospitalizations. It’s a major problem that only about a third of Americans ages 65 and older have received the updated bivalent booster, which has been shown in a recent study to reduce hospitalization by 73% in this age group.

    CNN: How much should people worry about XBB.1.5?

    Wen: It depends on the individual. There are many people who are not concerned about contracting Covid-19. They may be young and healthy and unlikely to become severely ill due to the coronavirus. Maybe they have just recovered from a previous infection and are protected against serious illness for several months. Or maybe the downside of continuing precautions is significant to them. I don’t think it’s wrong for people to proceed with their pre-pandemic routines, considering that XBB.1.5 is not likely to be the last variant of concern we see — and that it doesn’t appear to cause more severe disease.

    On the other hand, there are many people who are worried about becoming severely ill from Covid-19. People who are elderly or who have underlying health conditions should speak with their physician about their risk of severe illness due to Covid-19. If they are at high risk even after getting the bivalent booster, they should consider additional precautions to avoid infection while this highly transmissible variant is circulating. That includes asking others to take a rapid test prior to socializing and wearing a high-quality N95 or equivalent mask while in crowded indoor places.

    CNN: Some school districts are bringing back mask mandates. Should kids wear masks to schools again?

    Wen: This will depend on the family. If everyone is generally healthy, the parents or caregivers are going to work without a mask and all members are socializing freely with others outside of school, then it wouldn’t add much more protection to mask in the classroom.

    On the other hand, families that are still taking many precautions because of, for example, a severely immunocompromised household member might decide to all mask while in in crowded indoor spaces.

    My children have not been masking in school since the beginning of this school year, and I don’t currently plan for this to change. We would reconsider if a new variant emerges that causes much more severe disease, but that does not appear to be the case with XBB.1.5.

    CNN: Could there be even more worrisome variants that emerge in the future?

    Wen: Yes. This is the reason why genomic surveillance is so important. We need to identify and study new variants as they emerge. This is part of our “new normal”— there will be new variants that, from time to time, lead to surges of infections. The key is to make sure people are still protected against severe disease and to keep hospitals from becoming overwhelmed. And we must make sure everyone makes use of the tools we have available, including vaccines.

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  • Uganda declares end of Ebola outbreak | CNN

    Uganda declares end of Ebola outbreak | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Ugandan authorities have officially declared the end of a recent Ebola outbreak after 42 consecutive days with no new cases.

    A formal declaration was made during a televised ceremony held in the central Mubende district, the epicenter of the outbreak, on Wednesday.

    According to the World Health Organisation, an Ebola outbreak is over if there are no new cases after 42 days, which is twice the incubation period.

    “Today, 11th January 2023 marks 113 days since the start of the Ebola outbreak in Uganda,​” said the health minister Dr. Jane Ruth Aceng Ocero.

    “I urge the population to remain vigilant, implement the standard operating procedures and to report any person in the community that presents with Ebola-like symptoms,” she stressed.

    The outbreak, the eighth in Ugana’s history, killed 55 people, said Aceng Ocero. There were a total 143 confirmed cases and 22 probable cases, she added.

    Ugandan Red Cross workers in Mubende, the epicenter of the outbreak.

    To combat the outbreak, officials launched aggressive contact-tracing to track down relatives and friends who handled the bodies of victims or attended funerals.

    Some escaped from quarantine facilities, others traveled as far as the capital Kampala, and a few visited traditional healers and witchdoctors for treatment instead.

    Cases were eventually confirmed in nine districts, including Kampala, according to the health ministry.

    Contact tracers pictured on October 12.

    The Ebola virus is transmissible – but not as transmissible as some other infectious diseases, like Covid-19. It can spread from person to person through direct contact with blood or other bodily fluids such as saliva, sweat, semen or feces, or through contaminated objects like bedding or needles.

    Ebola symptoms include fever, aches and pains, and fatigue, which then can progress to diarrhea, vomiting and unexplained bleeding.

    In 2012 an outbreak in the Kibaale district in the west of the country led to 17 deaths out of 24 confirmed cases, but was declared over in less than three months.

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  • What the return of Chinese tourists means for the global economy | CNN Business

    What the return of Chinese tourists means for the global economy | CNN Business

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    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    In the years before Covid, China was the world’s most important source of international travelers. Its 155 million tourists spent more than a quarter of a trillion dollars beyond its borders in 2019.

    That largesse fell precipitously over the past three years as the country essentially closed its borders. But, as China prepares to reopen on Sunday, millions of tourists are poised to return to the world stage, raising hopes of a rebound for the global hospitality industry.

    Although international travel may not return immediately to pre-pandemic levels, companies, industries and countries that rely on Chinese tourists will get a boost in 2023, according to analysts.

    China averaged about 12 million outbound air passengers per month in 2019, but those numbers fell 95% during the Covid years, according to Steve Saxon, a partner in McKinsey’s Shenzhen office. He predicts that figure will recover to about 6 million per month by the summer, driven by the pent-up wanderlust of young, wealthy Chinese like Emmy Lu, who works for an advertising company in Beijing.

    “I’m so happy [about the reopening]! ” Lu told CNN. “Because of the pandemic, I could only wander around the country for the past years. It was difficult.”

    “It’s just that I’ve been stuck inside the country for a little too long. I’m really looking forward to the lifting of the restrictions, so that I can go somewhere for fun! ” the 30-year-old said, adding that she wanted to visit Japan and Europe the most.

    As China announced last month it would no longer subject inbound travelers to quarantine starting January 8, including residents returning from trips abroad, searches for international flights and accommodations immediately hit a three-year high on Trip.com

    (TCOM)    .

    Bookings for overseas travel during the upcoming Lunar New Year holiday, which falls between January 21 and January 27 this year, have soared by 540% from a year ago, according to data from the Chinese travel site. Average spending per booking jumped 32%.

    The top destinations are in the Asia Pacific region, including Australia, Thailand, Japan and Hong Kong. The United States and the United Kingdom also ranked among the top 10.

    “The rapid buildup in … [bank] deposits over the past year suggests that households in China have accumulated significant cash holdings,” said Alex Loo, a macro strategist for TD Securities, adding that frequent lockdowns have likely led to restraints on household spending.

    There could be “revenge spending” by Chinese consumers, mirroring what happened in many developed markets when they reopened early last year, he said.

    That’s good news for many economies battered by the pandemic.

    “We estimate that Hong Kong, Thailand, Vietnam and Singapore would benefit the most if China’s travel service imports were to return to 2019 levels,” said Goldman Sachs analysts。

    Hong Kong — the world’s most visited city with just under 56 million arrivals in 2019, most of them from mainland China — could see an estimated 7.6% boost to its GDP as exports and tourism income increase, they said. Thailand’s GDP may be boosted by 2.9%, while Singapore would get a lift of 1.2%.

    Elsewhere in the world, Cambodia, Mauritius, Malaysia, Taiwan, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, South Korea and Philippines are also likely to benefit from the return of Chinese tourists, according to research by Capital Economics.

    Hong Kong has suffered particularly acutely from the closure of its border with mainland China. The city’s pillar industries of tourism and real estate have been hit hard. The financial hub expects GDP to have contracted by 3.2% in 2022.

    The city government announced Thursday that up to 60,000 people would be allowed to cross the border daily each way, starting Sunday.

    Several other Southeast Asian countries reliant on tourism have kept entry rules relatively relaxed for Chinese tourists, despite the record Covid-19 outbreak that has swept through China in recent weeks. They include Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore and the Philippines.

    “This is one of the opportunities that we can accelerate economic recovery,” Thailand’s health minister said this week.

    New Zealand has also waived testing requirements for Chinese visitors, who were the second largest source of tourist revenue for the country before the pandemic.

    But other governments are more cautious. So far, nearly a dozen countries, including the United States, Germany, France, Canada, Japan, Australia and South Korea, have mandated testing.

    The European Union on Wednesday “strongly encouraged” its members states to require a negative Covid test for visitors from China before arrival.

    There is clearly “conflict” between the tourism authorities and the political and health officials in some countries, said Saxon, who leads McKinsey’s travel practice in Asia.

    Airlines and airports have already blasted the EU’s recommendations for testing requirements.

    The International Air Transport Association, the airline industry’s global lobby group, together with airports represented by ACI Europe as well as Airlines for Europe, issued a joint statement on Thursday, calling the EU move “regrettable” and “a knee-jerk reaction.”

    But they welcomed the additional recommendation to test wastewater as a way of identifying new variants of the disease, saying it should be an alternative to testing passengers.

    Besides restrictions, it will take time for international travel to fully rebound because many Chinese must renew their passports and apply for visas again, according to analysts.

    Lu from Beijing said she was still considering her travel plans, taking into consideration the various testing requirements and the high price of flying.

    “The restrictions are normal, because everyone wants to protect people in their own country,” she said. “I’ll wait and see if some policies will be eased.”

    Liu Chaonan, a 24-year-old in Shenzhen, said she had initially wanted to go to the Philippines to celebrate the Chinese New Year, but didn’t have time to apply for the visa. So she switched to Thailand, which offers quick and easy electronic permits.

    “Time is short and I need to leave in about 10 days. People may choose some visa-friendly places and countries to travel to,” she said, adding that she plans to learn scuba diving and wants to buy cosmetics. Her total budget for the trip could exceed 10,000 yuan ($1,460).

    Saxon said he expected China’s outbound international travel to fully recover by the year end.

    “Generally, individuals are pragmatic and countries will welcome Chinese tourists due to their spending power,” he said, adding that countries may remove restrictions quickly when the Covid situation improves in China.

    “It will take time for international tourism to get going, but it will come rushing back, when it happens.”

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  • America capped off an extraordinary year for job growth, adding 223,000 positions in December | CNN Business

    America capped off an extraordinary year for job growth, adding 223,000 positions in December | CNN Business

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    Minneapolis
    CNN
     — 

    The US economy added 223,000 jobs in December, according to the monthly employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, capping a year of extraordinary job growth and marking the second-best year for the labor market in records that go back to 1939.

    The unemployment rate fell back to a record low of 3.5% from a revised 3.6% in November.

    Economists were expecting 200,000 job gains for the last month of the year, according to Refinitiv. December’s job total is lower than the downwardly revised 256,000 jobs added in November.

    Including last month’s gains, which are subject to revision, the economy added about 4.5 million jobs in 2022. That’s the second-highest-ever total, after the 6.7 million jobs added in 2021 — a boomerang from 2020’s 9.3 million job losses.

    The labor market slowed in 2022, compared to the previous year’s tear. December’s jobs total represents the lowest monthly gains in two years.

    Those latest gains come following months of jumbo interest rate increases from the Federal Reserve in its attempt to cool off the economy after inflation last year hit its highest level since the 1980s. Those efforts have, so far, remained mostly elusive.

    That means the Fed is entering 2023 looking for a considerably softer and looser labor market — notably, increased labor participation, a better alignment of job seekers to open positions, and lower levels of wage growth.

    “This is about the best report one could hope for, given a still very hot US labor market,” said Joe Brusuelas, principal and chief economist for RSM US.

    Wall Street responded positively to Friday’s jobs data, with the Dow rising by almost 500 points by mid-morning — mostly a reaction to the slower pace of wage growth. Average hourly earnings increased 0.3% over the previous month and 4.6% annually. That’s compared to 0.4% month-on-month growth in November and 4.8% annual growth.

    The December report showed that the labor force participation rate, an estimation of the active workforce and people looking for work, ticked up to 62.3% from 62.2%.

    Labor force participation rates have been on a decline — largely due to demographic changes and aging Baby Boomers — since hitting a high of 67.3% in early 2000, and had fallen to 63.3% in the month before the onset of the pandemic. The participation rate has not returned to pre-pandemic levels, vexing economists and the Fed, while also contributing to an imbalance of worker supply and demand.

    “The labor market is moving in the right direction for the Federal Reserve, according to the December employment report, but is not there yet,” Gus Faucher, senior economist for PNC Financial services said in a statement. “Job growth is slowing to a more sustainable pace, and wage growth is softening as demand in the job market slackens somewhat.”

    However, with job growth well above pre-pandemic levels, when job gains averaged 164,000 in 2019, and the unemployment rate returning to a 50-year low, there is little indication that there will be enough of a boost in the labor force to help cool off the job market, he said.

    Some of the largest monthly gains were in industries such as leisure and hospitality, health care, and accommodation and food services, which all were hit hard during the pandemic. There were also notable monthly job losses in technology and interest-rate-sensitive sectors that surged during the pandemic and are now rebalancing as consumers shift spending toward services.

    Industries such as information, finance and professional and business services, shed jobs between November and December.

    The losses seen in areas such as professional and business services are likely an effect of the waves of mass layoffs hitting the tech industry, said Ken Kim, a senior economist at KPMG.

    “We are seeing a little bit of spread to other areas,” he said.

    In addition to Friday’s strong jobs numbers, several other pieces of jobs data released this week continue to reflect a healthy labor market. Wednesday’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) report showed that the number of available jobs remained steady at 10.5 million in November. It also showed that quits, layoffs and hires didn’t really show any major signs of cooling that month.

    ADP’s private-sector employment report on Thursday also showed a robust labor market, with 235,000 jobs added in the private sector during December, well exceeding expectations of 150,000.

    And Thursday’s weekly jobless claims fell by 21,000 to 204,000 for the week ending November 26, while continuing claims decreased to 1.69 million from 1.72 million to 1.61 million.

    —CNN’s Matt Egan contributed to this report.

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  • Big questions on student loan forgiveness loom in 2023 | CNN Politics

    Big questions on student loan forgiveness loom in 2023 | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Student loan borrowers are starting 2023 with a lot of uncertainty.

    The fate of President Joe Biden’s major student loan forgiveness program lies with the US Supreme Court, and it could be as late as summer before the justices rule on whether the policy can take effect.

    The pandemic-related pause on student loan payments remains in place. But a restart date is up in the air, dependent on when the Supreme Court rules on the forgiveness program.

    Meanwhile, significant changes are coming in July to the existing Public Service Loan Forgiveness program that aids government and nonprofit workers. And a new income-driven repayment plan that could lower payments for some federal student loan borrowers is in the works.

    The mired rollout of Biden’s forgiveness program has created confusion for borrowers. Here are some of the big questions surrounding student loans this year:

    In late February, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in two cases concerning Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, which could deliver up to $20,000 of debt relief for millions of low- and middle-income borrowers.

    A decision on whether the program is legal and can move forward is expected by June. Until then, it is on hold and no debt will be discharged under the program.

    Biden’s student loan forgiveness program has faced several legal challenges since the president announced the program in August. The Department of Education received about 26 million applications for debt relief by the time a federal district court judge struck down the program on November 10.

    Lawyers for the Biden administration say that Congress gave the secretary of education “expansive authority to alleviate the hardship that federal student loan recipients may suffer as a result of national emergencies,” like the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a memo from the Department of Justice.

    But litigants argue the Biden administration has overstepped its authority, and other recent Supreme Court decisions have ruled against aggressive executive agency actions. The justices curbed the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to set certain climate change regulations last year, for example, as well as limited the federal government’s power to implement a pandemic-related eviction moratorium in 2021 and mandate Covid-19 vaccinations in 2022.

    For the third consecutive time, federal student loan borrowers begin a new year without having to make payments on their loans thanks to a pandemic-related pause.

    Payments were set to resume in January, but the Biden administration extended the pause after its student loan forgiveness program was halted by federal courts. Officials had told borrowers debt relief would be granted before payments restarted.

    The payment pause will now last until 60 days after litigation over Biden’s student loan forgiveness program is resolved. If the program has not been implemented and the litigation has not been resolved by June 30, payments will resume 60 days after that.

    Borrower balances have effectively been frozen since March 2020, with no payments required on most federal student loans. During this time, interest has stopped adding up and collections on defaulted debt have also been on hold.

    For some borrowers, the pause on payments delivers an even bigger benefit than Biden’s forgiveness program ever could.

    The yearslong pause cost the government $155 billion through the end of 2022, according to an estimate from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

    The Public Service Loan Forgiveness program allows certain government and nonprofit employees to seek federal student loan forgiveness after making 10 years of qualifying payments – but it has been plagued with implementation problems for years.

    A yearlong waiver that expanded eligibility for the PSLF program expired on October 31, but some of those temporary changes will be made permanent starting in July.

    Under the new rules, borrowers will be able to receive credit toward PSLF on payments that are made late, in installments or in a lump sum. Prior rules only counted a payment as eligible if it was made in full within 15 days of its due date.

    Also, time spent in certain periods of deferment or forbearance will count toward PSLF. These periods include deferments for cancer treatment, military service, economic hardship and time served in AmeriCorps and the National Guard.

    Starting in July, borrowers will receive some credit for past payments when they consolidate older loans into federal Direct Loans in order to qualify for the program. Borrowers previously lost all progress toward forgiveness when they consolidated. After July, they will receive a weighted average of existing qualifying payments toward PSLF.

    The new rules will also simplify the criteria to meet the requirement that a borrower be a full-time employee in a public sector job. The new standard will consider full-time employment at 30 hours a week. In particular, the change will help adjunct faculty at public colleges qualify for the program.

    The Biden administration has proposed a new income-driven repayment plan that is intended to make payments more manageable for borrowers, though it’s unclear when it could take effect.

    Several income-driven repayment plans already exist for federal student loan borrowers, but the new proposal could offer more favorable terms.

    The new rule is expected to cap payments at 5% of a borrower’s discretionary income, down from 10% that is offered in most current income-driven plans, as well as reduce the amount of income that is considered discretionary. It would also forgive remaining balances after 10 years of repayment, instead of 20 or 25 years, as well as cover the borrower’s unpaid monthly interest.

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  • The year that brought Silicon Valley back down to earth | CNN Business

    The year that brought Silicon Valley back down to earth | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    On the first trading day of 2022, Apple hit a new milestone for the tech industry: the iPhone maker became the first publicly traded company to hit a $3 trillion market cap, with Microsoft and Google not far behind. As eye-popping as that valuation was, there were headlines speculating about how long it would be before Apple and its rivals topped $5 trillion.

    The tech industry, already dominant, only seemed destined to grow even bigger at the start of this year. The spread of the Omicron variant suggested a continued pandemic-fueled demand for digital goods and services, which had buoyed many tech companies. Near 0% interest rates meant startups still had easy access to the funding that had fueled their high valuations and risky ventures.

    But the year is ending on a much different note. A perfect storm of factors have forced a dizzying reality check for the once high-flying tech sector, making it one of the biggest losers of 2022.

    Over the course of the year, pandemic-era demand for many tech tools shifted; inflation soared; interest rates rose and fears of a looming recession weighed on consumer and advertiser spending, the latter of which makes up the core business of many household names in tech.

    The result was a bloodbath unlike anything the tech industry has seen in the past decade. Tech stocks plunged, amid a broader market downturn. Tens of thousands of rank-and-file tech workers lost their livelihoods amid mass layoffs, both at tech giants like Amazon and Facebook-parent Meta as well as at smaller tech companies like Lyft, Peloton and Stripe. The crypto world all but imploded. And an entire industry known for burning cash on ambitious moonshots instead started shutting down projects and announcing cost-cutting efforts.

    Even the title of world’s richest man, which previously belonged to serial tech founder Elon Musk, ended up passing to Bernard Arnault, the chairman of French luxury goods giant LVMH, after Musk’s chaotic purchase of Twitter appeared to sour investors on his car company, Tesla.

    The sharp shift in sentiment not only removed the air of invincibility for the industry; it also exposed some of its underlying myths. For years, Silicon Valley has held up its founders as visionaries who can see far into the future. But suddenly, many of its most prominent founders had to admit a harsh truth: they couldn’t even predict two years ahead.

    As Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg put it in a memo to staff last month announcing the company would cut 11,000 employees: “Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected.”

    He was far from the only one in the industry caught off guard.

    When the pandemic upended the broader economy in early 2020, tech firms only seemed to grow bigger and more powerful as people were forced to live out their lives online. Facebook (now Meta) could afford to nearly double its headcount and make multi-billion-dollar bets on a future version of the internet dubbed the metaverse. Amazon similarly went on a hiring spree and doubled its fulfilment center footprint to meet the surge in online shopping demand.

    “At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth,” Zuckerberg wrote in his memo to staff last month. “Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments.”

    Then the market shifted.

    “People are terrible at predicting the future, and we always think that what’s happening now is going to happen forever,” Angela Lee, a professor at Columbia Business School who teaches venture capital, leadership, and strategy courses, told CNN. “But the reality is that the pandemic was a black swan event, and none of us knew what would happen going forward.”

    One by one, the visionaries of Silicon Valley issued mea culpas. The founders of Stripe, Twitter and Facebook each took turns admitting they either grew their companies too quickly or were overly optimistic about pandemic-fueled growth in their sector.

    “We were much too optimistic about the internet economy’s near-term growth in 2022 and 2023 and underestimated both the likelihood and impact of a broader slowdown,” Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe, wrote in a note to employees last month announcing 14% of the staff would be cut.

    It wasn’t only a shift in consumers living their lives offline again that hurt the industry. The tech sector was particularly pummeled by the impacts of rising interest rates this year. Silicon Valley as a whole is arguably more sensitive to interest rate hikes than other industries, as many tech companies rely on easy access to funding to pursue their ambitious projects, typically before even turning a profit.

    In a move to tame inflation, the Fed approved seven-straight rate hikes in 2022. Since the beginning of the year, the tech-heavy Nasdaq index shed more than 30% as of Dec. 21. By comparison, the Nasdaq soared more than 40% in 2020 and a further 20% in 2021. And the S&P 500’s Information Technology sector shed more than 28% this year through Dec. 21, considerably higher than the broader S&P 500’s fall of just 19% over that same period.

    Apple’s market cap now hovers just above $2 trillion. Amazon’s stock has shed some 50% year to date. And shares for Meta have been hit even harder, losing nearly two thirds of their value in 2022. Once a trillion-dollar business last year, Meta has since seen its market value drop below companies like Home Depot.

    The shift in sentiment for tech has also hit the next generation of companies that aspire to be household names.

    Global venture funding hit a nine quarter low of $74.5 billion in the third quarter of 2022, according to data from analytics firm CB Insights. This marked the largest quarterly percentage drop in a decade (34%), and a 58% decline from the investment peak reached in the fourth quarter of 2021.

    In another sign of how this played out in the startup world: more than two new unicorns (startups valued at $1 billion or more) were born on average per business day in 2021, according separate data from CB Insights. That rate dropped to a pace of less than one new unicorn for every other business day in the third quarter of 2022, per CB Insights’ most recent analysis, the lowest since the first quarter of 2020.

    Lee, who is also the founder of investing network 37 Angels, said when she met with tech founders this year, “I have said these words, which is, ‘I might have done this deal last year, but I am not going to do it now.’ And I’ve heard a lot of other people say that as well.”

    While the belt tightening might be painful for tech founders, Lee says she views it as a good thing for the tech industry overall. Many industry insiders have long said these sorts of corrections can help weed out some of the excess in the market and ensure more financially viable companies are the ones that survive.

    “Right now, there are like a lot of headlines that are just like, ‘The sky is falling, the end is near,’ and the way that I describe it is more of like a return to normalcy,” said Lee, noting that most charts tracking VC spending (from the number of mega-rounds to the number of IPOs) had a huge hump in 2020 and 2021 when interest rates were low, and now these charts are starting to look like how they did in 2019.

    “I would just call it like a ‘return to sanity,’ versus like, ‘the sky is falling,’” Lee said. “I do not think venture is cratering, or the tech industry is cratering as an industry.”

    But for now, at least, there appears to be no end in sight to the pain for Silicon Valley and those who work in it.

    In his own memo acknowledging job cuts at Amazon, CEO Andy Jassy said the layoffs at Amazon, reported to total some 10,000 roles, would continue into 2023. At a conference last month, he called the earlier hiring spree a “lesson” for everybody.

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  • Biden and his team feeling vindicated by a 2022 turnaround built on the same decades-old principles | CNN Politics

    Biden and his team feeling vindicated by a 2022 turnaround built on the same decades-old principles | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden spent hours during his first foreign trip behind closed doors, attempting to reassure a shaken group of US allies that America was back. It was clear, he later told advisers, just how much work remained to convince them of the durability of that commitment.

    Eighteen months after those meetings in Europe, Biden departed Washington on Tuesday for his year-end vacation, riding the momentum of historic legislative success and the defiance of political gravity that has reshaped the expectations for the critical months – and decisions – ahead. It’s a moment that Biden never seemed to doubt would come, even as his party – and some inside the White House – questioned or outright urged a change in approach to address political and economic headwinds driven primarily by soaring inflation that threatened to drag down his presidency.

    During those 2021 meetings in England and Belgium, Biden found a group of allies genuinely shaken by the January 6 insurrection and the events that led to it. But the president tried to reassure them that the visceral divides that culminated in the violence that day would heal and the bleak moment in US politics would pass.

    He was met with polite appreciation from his foreign counterparts. But the deep skepticism served only to underscore his commitment to a belief that sat at the heart of a pledge that was often pilloried during the campaign as naïve. The only real reassurance, Biden would note, was delivering on what he’d promised.

    “That’s why it’s so important that I succeed in my agenda, whether it’s dealing with the vaccine, the economy, infrastructure,” Biden told reporters in Brussels shortly before he boarded Air Force One for a flight to Switzerland and a sit down with Russian President Vladimir Putin. “It’s important that we demonstrate we can make progress and continue to make progress. And I think we’re going to be able to do that.”

    The moment provided a brief window into the president’s high-stakes theory of the case – one that appeared exceedingly aspirational given his party’s narrow congressional majorities and staunch GOP opposition. But even as this year began, Biden and his team were grasping to break free of a series of crises and the cornerstone of his agenda – a sweeping bill that included numerous administration priorities – appeared in shambles.

    Biden’s anticipated final major action before the end of 2022 serves as an almost poetic coda for his first two years. The $1.7 trillion bipartisan spending package he will sign will lock in key funding priorities and include an overhaul of the law his predecessor cited in the lead up to the January 6 riot.

    The turn from aspirational goals to palpable accomplishments – highlighted over the last several months by Biden’s travel to major corporate groundbreakings in states like Ohio, Arizona and Michigan – underpins the sharp reversal for the White House. That turnaround serves as evidence of Biden’s steely belief in his strategies and policy proposals –an approach deeply rooted over his decades in public service.

    “One thing that is foundational with him is if he says he’s going to do something, he does it,” Steve Ricchetti, one of Biden’s closest and longest-serving advisers, told CNN in an interview, underscoring an approach that has been defined by steady, and at times stubborn, persistence.

    Simple as it may seem, a campaign promise or commitment has tipped internal debates on policy decisions more than once, one White House official noted.

    Biden’s closest confidants also stress that it’s a perspective that is instructive as the White House prepares for the dramatically reshaped Washington that will confront him upon his return from his family vacation to the US Virgin Islands.

    “The whole idea of showing people government can work – we were mocked for that in some corners,” a Biden adviser said. “That’s literally what’s happening now.”

    There are still clear challenges ahead. Inflation remains high even if its grip appears to be easing. Biden’s advisers expect economic growth to slow in the quarters ahead, though they remain cautiously optimistic a recession can be avoided.

    Biden’s approval ratings, while ticking up, remain low and his age remains a real, if less publicly addressed, concern held by Democrats as they wait for an official decision about whether he will seek reelection.

    But Biden’s overarching approach has guided the early-stage planning for the legislative and political implications of a new House Republican majority and served as the basis for aides already working through the outlines of the State of the Union address that will come early next year.

    It’s also a defining element of the structure and message planning of a nascent campaign that has taken shape over the last several months and accelerated. Biden’s senior team has become increasingly confident that a reelection campaign will be green lit in the weeks ahead.

    White House officials view the political salience of his agenda as both an underappreciated element of their ability to defy the expectations of sweeping GOP gains in the midterms and as a critical piece of what comes next. The prospect of divided government – and the exceedingly narrow legislative pathway it brings – has limited effect on an agenda that is now in the implementation phase.

    “It forms the foundation for even stronger achievements as the nation heads into the New Year,” Mike Donilon, the White House senior adviser and long-standing member of Biden’s inner circle, wrote in a political memo circulated to allies this month.

    Biden, advisers said, has laid down strict directives to senior aides and Cabinet officials about the necessity of efficient implementation in the months ahead.

    “It’s not subtle,” a senior administration official said of the message from the top. “We have to get it right and in the moments we don’t, we damn well be ready to explain it – and fix it.”

    For Biden’s tight-knit and long-serving advisers, this is a moment that both vindicates and validates core elements of a campaign and presidency that at various points were dismissed, underestimated or at some points even mocked.

    “A lot of people told him that this wouldn’t resonate, or that it wasn’t the message, or that it’s outdated,” Stef Feldman, the longtime Biden aide who served as the 2020 campaign policy director before following him to the White House, told CNN.

    Biden viewed his infrastructure proposal, in particular, as a central policy plank of his campaign as Democratic primary opponents raced to outdo one another with transformational progressive proposals – none of which included a viable way to pass a bitterly divided Congress.

    Biden and his economic advisers zeroed in on an intensive manufacturing and supply chain agenda that grew more aggressive and transformational as a once-in-a-century pandemic gripped the country. They saw it as the key to reverse the accelerants at the heart of the atmosphere that created the opening for Donald Trump to reach the Oval Office.

    “This was the right moment for his theory of the case,” Feldman said. “He could apply the principles that have really guided him throughout his whole career.”

    Those principles have largely stayed with Biden through his time as a senator and vice president and were refined during the critical two years spent out of office as he weighed yet another run for the presidency.

    “Ever since I’ve talked to the president about the economy, he’s distinguished between the short-term and the long-term, between consumption and investment,” said Jared Bernstein, Biden’s chief economist as vice president who now sits on the Council of Economic Advisers. “These have always been foundational to his economic thinking.”

    The animating principles of Biden’s 2020 campaign hardly diverged from the key themes outlined by Donilon, Biden’s in-house mind-meld, in the 22-page memo he drafted in early 2015 as the then-vice president weighed jumping into the 2016 race.

    From think tanks to business schools to Davos, Biden took the role of a kind of middle class evangelist, pressing for the pursuit of policies that addressed short-term incentives that had driven jobs away and wages down. Those speeches and discussions served as a roadmap of sorts for an agenda that is now largely law. They detailed major infrastructure investments and a incentivizing research and development that had atrophied. There were broad outlines of nascent ideas to connect hollowed out manufacturing centers and communities to new opportunities. Biden proposed changes to the tax code that tracked near where his administration would eventually land as it sought to finance spending plans.

    Even the anecdotes from the period – whether the one about Chinese leader Xi Jinping and American “possibilities” or his father’s sayings about the dignity of work, or the importance of “breathing room” – are the same that populate his speeches as president.

    Ricchetti, who as counselor to the president helped lead the White House legislative effort, pointed to a clear “through-line” from Biden’s days as a senator, through his time as vice president and during the first two years of Trump’s presidency.

    Biden wrote a book detailing his decision not to run for president as he dealt with the pain of his son Beau’s fight with, and eventual death from, brain cancer. That process and the book tour that followed are viewed by Biden’s inner circle as an essential experience in the eventual decision to run in 2020.

    “Much of what we prioritized at that time we took with us and used as the foundation,” Ricchetti said of the years leading up to the campaign.

    If the effort to turn that foundation into a coherent policy agenda was accelerated and expanded in the final months of the campaign, it was turbocharged during a transition that saw Democrats take control of the Senate majority.

    Officials structured the infrastructure, manufacturing, research and development, climate and equity proposals into interlocking pieces, designed to work in tandem even if they were eventually scaled back during the legislative process.

    “At the core of this strategy was that the power of it is that these things work together,” National Economic Council Chairman Brian Deese, one of the architects of the package, said in an interview.

    What the proposals – particularly across industries and policy priorities tied to climate and manufacturing – also represented was a dramatic shift in what had become an entrenched, if not monolithic, economic orthodoxy. Biden would oversee the most consequential pursuit of an industrial policy strategy in decades. He’d do so in many cases with Republican support.

    To be clear, subscribing to the term “industrial policy” still isn’t universally embraced. Even Deese, who has driven and defined its core elements, prefers “Modern American Industrial Strategy.” In its simplest form, it’s the idea that “if you do public investment in a thoughtful way, what you’ll actually do is crowd in private investment,” Deese said.

    Deese likes to point out its roots in the American economy can be traced to Alexander Hamilton.

    But the convergence of factors that led it to once again gain broader, and bipartisan, traction was in many ways tailor-made for Biden.

    A resurgence in research and development funding. Significant public investments designed for critical areas of national and economic security. The elevation of labor unions and a focus on creating the conditions to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US.

    On their face, these issues are politically popular and hardly exclusive to Biden. They’re also exceedingly difficult to turn into policy. At least until the pandemic.

    “There’s a cost associated with industrial weakness,” Deese said. “The pandemic laid bare something that had been the case for years.”

    That was true for semiconductors – the tiny chips essential for everything from cars and washing machines to advanced weapons systems – that drove the bipartisan urgency behind the $280 billion CHIPS and Science law. Sen. Todd Young, an Indiana Republican up for reelection in 2022, drove the effort on Capitol Hill – something that underscored the salience of an issue that scrambled traditional political dynamics.

    For Young, who had pressed for legislation tied to the issue in the year before Biden entered the White House, it was less about embracing a broader shift in economic policy and more about addressing the fact China had pursued exactly that for a decade or longer. Young was one of 17 Senate Republicans who voted to advance the eventual law that has driven new private sector investment or commitments in the last several months.

    The pandemic. The rise of China as key feature of policy making in both parties. A president animated by the idea of long-term economic incentives crafted to connect workers and communities left behind for decades.

    “These policy insights might not have come to fruition were it not for a confluence of events,” Bernstein acknowledged.

    Ted Kaufman has a simple explanation for Biden’s approach and the places where it paid off after two years.

    “There’s a confidence that comes from knowing what you’re doing,” said Kaufman, the former Delaware senator, longtime Biden Senate chief of staff and one of the president’s closest friends. “This is a guy who is so incredibly well qualified to be president because of experience.”

    As to why that experience has rarely been rewarded by voters, Kaufman had another simple explanation.

    “It’s hard because you have a record,” he said.

    In a way it’s both an implicit acknowledgment of the unprecedented factors – most notably Trump, but in some ways the pandemic as well – that created an opening to the presidency for Biden. Another incumbent, or another moment, and advisers note that it wouldn’t be a question of if Biden would win. He wouldn’t have even run.

    Instead, as he weighs running for reelection at age 80, he enters the final two years of this term with much of his agenda now law. Core elements of that agenda were driven by bipartisan consensus. Even Biden’s final bipartisan achievement of the year – the $1.7 trillion spending package – includes an initial $500 million to seed the technology and innovation hubs created by the CHIPS and Science Act in parts of the country outside of traditional tech sectors.

    While Democrats narrowly lost their House majority in the midterm elections, the party expanded its Senate majority by a seat.

    Perhaps most critically for Biden, the voters sharply reject some of the most extreme voices parroting 2020 election lies in critical races for governor and secretary of state.

    In the months leading up to the midterm elections, Biden had started regularly recounting the experience with his foreign counterparts on that first foreign trip in an effort to underscore the stakes.

    In the weeks that followed, after his travel to Indonesia for the G-20 Summit, he was ready to provide an updated version as he stood against the backdrop of a new factory in Arizona to celebrate the announcement by a Taiwanese chip maker of what would mark one of the largest foreign investments in US history.

    “What was clear in those meetings is the United States is better positioned than any other nation to lead the world economy in the years ahead if we keep our focus,” Biden said.

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  • Democracy has its flaws, but it has emerged from the pandemic in much ruder health than the alternative | CNN

    Democracy has its flaws, but it has emerged from the pandemic in much ruder health than the alternative | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    For nearly half a decade, you could be forgiven for thinking just about everything in Western democracy seemed a bit broken. The social-media yelling in 140 characters. The wild populism, and dog-whistle racism. The clumsy coronavirus lockdowns and their attendant conspiracy theories. The tolerance of absolute, constant falsehoods. The questioning and beleaguering of the electoral process.

    Some began to behave as if it were smoother on the other side of the fence, in autocracies where things are just ordered to happen, and criticism is swallowed whole.

    Yet, as we stagger past the third anniversary of Covid-19’s emergence, the fallacy that autocracies are a superior social contract is crumbling. At the end of 2022, the world is a place where consent matters, and debate might actually save your hide.

    The Trump era created a safe space for autocracies to flex on the global stage, while American tried to put itself First, and its commander-in-chief was happy to receive “lovely” letters from North Korea, or get very close to the Kremlin. But it took the pandemic to expose the utter mess one man in charge can create.

    The most glaring and unimaginably stark example is Russia. President Vladimir Putin bumbled his way through the pandemic with snap lockdowns, a poorly performing vaccine, and a general disregard for how useful accurate data can be in defeating a complex foe like Nature. But it was his personal choices that led to a disconnect which has proved fatal to tens of thousands of innocent Ukrainians, and perhaps even more Russian soldiers.

    The persistent warnings from Western intelligence in January that an invasion of Ukraine was imminent seemed far-fetched to many analysts, including me. Those analysts overlooked the enormity of the task, and the assumption the Kremlin remained a rational actor. Those calming caveats were swiftly whisked away when – in the days leading up to the war – Putin summoned his security henchmen and dressed them down, at a safe distance of well over 20 feet, and then delivered a 57-minute televised speech showing he had spent the pandemic reading all the wrong parts of the internet.

    His spoken dissertation even reminded Russians how mean Bill Clinton had been 20 years ago, shunning Putin’s stated desire to join NATO. Putin’s isolation had compounded not just his historical grievances. There were now fewer subordinates in contact with him, and fewer opinions voiced to counter the absurd assumption Russia’s invasion would be welcomed by Ukrainians and last about three days.

    A RUSI report recently noted that seized Russian orders showed units expected to be “cleaning up” within 10 days, and that no effective “red team” assessment of the plan – challenging its assumptions – had happened.

    And so, the largest land war in Europe for 75 years began, and with it a likely military defeat for Russia that may rewrite the established norms of European security and see Moscow’s place as a global superpower evaporate. Putin’s insecurities over NATO and the practical task of connecting the occupied Crimean Peninsula to the Russian mainland fueled his catastrophic decision. But the Kremlin head’s isolation – along with his echo chamber of paranoid nonsense – cemented it.

    But even now, in this late stage in the Russian military demise, when its readiest form of resupply is forced conscripts to the frontline, Moscow must be mindful of consent. The “partial mobilization” announced in September has sent 77,000 Russian men to Ukraine, Putin recently said. But it has also unleashed a wave of protests perhaps not seen in Russia since the 1990s.

    Tightening the screws on dissent is a sign opposition is growing, not ebbing. The nastier Russia gets, the more acutely aware the Kremlin is of its unpopularity. Invading Ukraine was the worst decision a Russian leader has made since the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. We know how that misadventure ended.

    Police officers detain demonstrators in St. Petersburg on September 21, 2022, following calls to protest against partial military mobilisation announced by President Vladimir Putin.

    The pandemic caused economic and emotional stress in every society, leaving citizens less tolerant of poor managers and outdated dogma. Even the United Kingdom swiftly ejected two prime ministers over issues of conduct and incompetence, not long after their ruling Conservative Party had won a landslide victory at the last election.

    The economic fallout from the pandemic is also the backdrop for another dazzling failure of autocracy, in Iran. But the focal point of recent protests has been the brutal treatment of teenagers for protesting mandatory headscarves. Killing a young woman for not wanting to dress more conservatively than her grandmother perhaps did (Iran was – as recently as the 1970s – secular) is grotesque in any society.

    Iranians protest the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini after she was detained by the morality police, in Tehran, Iran, on October 1, 2022.

    But it lit the touch paper in communities ravaged by years of sanctions, the pandemic, and persistent inflation of perhaps as much as 50%. Permit salaries and savings to diminish that much annually, and any elected government could expect to be ousted fast. In Iran’s cities, the violence around this dogma did not distract from the economic fury, but amplify it.

    Well over half of Iran’s population was born in the 1990s, when the Islamic Revolution was already a decade old. A system born in the era of the landline is telling youth born into the world of fax machines how to behave in the era of quantum computing.

    The pandemic hit Iran hard, and I witnessed in 2020 how poorly resourced Tehran’s hospitals were. When your parent is dying and you can’t get a ventilator for them, you don’t have time for a lengthy discourse blaming US sanctions imposed because of Iran’s confrontation of the American hegemony in the region. An emergency like Covid can damage what remains of the contract between ruling conservatives and citizens: If you cannot protect us from a disease at our time of need, then what is the purpose of the corruption, repression and rules on women’s dress?

    Medical workers transport a patient with Covid-19 at Rasoul Akram Hospital in Tehran on October 20, 2020.

    The recent public confusion over whether the country’s morality police would be disbanded – a statement made by the prosecutor general which was later mauled – is a sign of government reform perhaps, but also an indication of how state power is not a tidy behemoth in Iran. There is debate, too, and here it clearly, with hundreds of corpses already underfoot, considered bending to popular will.

    This stark and deadly repression does not at this time herald the demise of the Iranian regime. But it is perhaps a moment of irreversible acceptance that the people cannot just be Ctrl-Alt-Deleted when they don’t suit the state program. It is a recognition that even the best-resourced, most controlling and efficient of repressive regimes – China – has had to deal with.

    Iranians protest the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini after she was detained by the morality police, in Tehran on October 27, 2022.

    The pandemic led Beijing to resort to mass control on a whole new level. Its solution to the disease ravaging the planet was to be the harshest of all – in limiting movement. The authorities’ favored tool – used to its limits – was the one almost every other society realized would not work indefinitely.

    Until recently, Chinese citizens were still being welded into their homes in quarantine, and even burning to death in one tragic instance when they perhaps could have been rescued from a domestic fire. It’s perhaps the most damning indictment of China’s one-person rule this century.

    Workers in protective clothes walk past barriers placed to close off streets in areas locked down after the detection of cases of Covid-19 in Shanghai on March 15, 2022.

    The world has been on a steep learning curve, where social distancing, economic subsidies, vaccines, agonizing deaths and limited global travel have led most societies to now accept the Covid-esque persistent cough as part of what happens in winter. Yet China’s initial decision – stifle the disease – has barely evolved. Its vaccine program has faltered, yet its original tool of mass surveillance has not.

    What is more remarkable is not protests breaking out under such an authoritarian yoke, but that President Xi Jinping did not presume they would.

    Beijing appeared to have been taken by surprise, but also believed it could repress its way out of the unrest. The recent removal of significant parts of the quarantine and testing systems does not solve China’s Covid problems. It was simply their authorities’ only choice. And it is a badly timed one. China is not adequately vaccinated to cope with a massive rise in cases, particularly its elderly population, many experts argue. Even if 1% catch it badly, that is 14 million people in need of medical care – roughly the population of Zimbabwe.

    A demonstrator holds a blank sign and chants slogans during a protest in Beijing, China, on Monday, November 28, 2022.

    Huge challenges require decision-makers of enormous ability. Xi has unparalleled power, evidenced when he sat by as his predecessor Hu Jintao was inexplicably led out during the highly choreographed closing moments of the recent National Congress. But it is pretty clear that Xi got the big decisions around Covid wrong. And that the country where SARS-Cov-2 first emerged is enduring the longest impact of the virus because of poor decisions by its leaders.

    It is a problem for Xi. The singular selling point of autocratic power is that it is absolute: that you can get things done without the delay of debate and compromise that democratic systems endure.

    The point is to be strong, implement decisions fast, and consider dissent the cost of tough, good decisions; not to appear strong, implement fast, and then change your mind publicly after months pursuing a bad idea. For Xi, it is also dangerous for a population to learn they can only truly communicate with their government through disobedience and protest.

    It’s important to feel discomfort when extolling the virtues of modern democracy. It doesn’t really work. It is slow and encourages ego and half-measures. It keeps changing its mind and wasting endless resources while stumbling for the solution.

    But it provides space for dissent and, more importantly, other, competing ideas. And, if you are forcing taxi drivers to fight in a war of choice you are losing, or shooting teenagers for taking off headscarves, or imprisoning people in their apartments to suppress a virus the rest of the world is living calmly with, alternative ideas are important.

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  • India on alert for new variants as Covid wave sweeps China | CNN

    India on alert for new variants as Covid wave sweeps China | CNN

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    New Delhi
    CNN
     — 

    India’s health minister has advised the public to take precautions against Covid-19, including getting vaccinated and wearing masks, as the country remains on alert for potential new variants that could emerge from the wave of infections sweeping neighboring China.

    Health Minister Mansukh Mandaviya on Thursday told Parliament that India would begin randomly testing 2% of international travelers arriving at the country’s airports, after he asked regional authorities to send positive samples to laboratories monitoring for new Covid strains.

    “States have been told to make people aware of (the need to) wear masks, use hand sanitizers, maintain respiratory hygiene and social distancing,” Mandaviya said, as he encouraged Indians to receive vaccines or booster shots.

    Speaking Wednesday at a meeting to review the Covid situation in the country amid rising cases in several Asian nations, Mandaviya said: “Covid is not over yet. I have directed all concerned to be on the alert, and strengthen surveillance.”

    India, a country of 1.3 billion, relaxed its Covid restrictions earlier this year after a drop in infections, and people have mostly stopped wearing masks outside.

    The warnings from the Indian minister come as China braces for infections to spread from its biggest cities to its vast rural areas following its hurried and under-prepared exit from the zero-Covid strategy earlier this month.

    On Wednesday, World Health Organization (WHO) chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus expressed concern over rising cases in China, emphasizing he was worried about “increasing reports of severe disease.”

    “In order to make a comprehensive risk assessment of the situation on the ground, WHO needs more detailed information on disease severity, hospital admissions and requirements for ICU support,” Tedros told a news conference.

    The surge could lead to nearly 1 million deaths in China, according to a study released last week, which added it was also likely to overload many local health systems in the country.

    Meanwhile, Chinese experts have warned that the worst may be yet to come. Wu Zunyou, chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said last week that China is being hit by the first of three expected waves of infections this winter.

    Last year, India was devastated by a second wave of Covid-19, which killed tens of thousands and overwhelmed the country’s health system.

    Since then, India has administered more than 2 billion Covid vaccines and nearly 75% of its population has received at least one dose, according to data from Johns’ Hopkins University.

    According to the Health Ministry, India had seen a “steady decline” in cases, with an average of about 150 infections a day nationwide as of December 19.

    “We are prepared to manage any situation,” Health Minister Mandaviya said in a Twitter post Wednesday.

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  • US intel agencies likely missed chances to investigate Covid pandemic’s origin, House Democrats’ report says | CNN Politics

    US intel agencies likely missed chances to investigate Covid pandemic’s origin, House Democrats’ report says | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    Democratic investigators on the House Intelligence Committee have alleged that US intelligence agencies may have lost a critical opportunity to gather useful information on the Covid-19 pandemic’s origins by failing to pivot its collection resources earlier. In a report released on Thursday morning, the Democrats also laid out perhaps the most detailed timeline to date of the litany of warnings the intelligence community offered the Trump administration in the early days of the pandemic.

    The Democratic report comes just 24 hours after committee Republicans released their own report on the intelligence community’s examination of the pandemic’s origins in what has become an indirect battle for the narrative surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic just weeks before Republicans are poised to claim control of the House.

    The Democratic investigators’ report says that the intelligence community was slow to pivot its clandestine resources to the growing crisis – in ways that have likely undermined its efforts to understand how or where the virus emerged.

    “It’s a hypothetical – no one could say with certainty, yes or no,” said one committee investigator. “But hypothetically speaking, if you have more information from clandestine sources from the very earliest days of the virus – perhaps before Chinese authorities entirely know what’s going on – you may be better positioned to answer some of those questions [about the virus’s origins] that are I think still open questions.”

    Investigators declined to offer specifics about what resources should have been trained on the problem. But according to the report, “the first valuable piece of clandestine collection on the virus” was disseminated only in late January 2020. Analysts from the Defense Intelligence Agency unit that provided the intelligence community’s first warning of the pandemic told the House committee that by then, they had grown “frustrated at the lack of clandestine collection to inform their analysis.”

    “The lack of clandestine collection was a reflection of the Intelligence Community’s overall lack of preparedness to face an emerging pandemic,” the report found. “The first significant dissemination of intelligence this late in the development of the crisis demonstrates how the IC was underserving expert policymakers and analysts.”

    According to the Democrats’ report, the first warning the intelligence community offered to the Trump administration came from a little-known Defense Intelligence Agency unit in Fort Detrick, Maryland, which on December 31, 2019, published an open-source warning of an undiagnosed pneumonia in China, labeling it a “possible pandemic warning update.”

    By the end of January, the Office of the National Director of Intelligence had issued a memo directing the intelligence community to direct more resources at gathering information on the burgeoning crisis, calling it “the top intelligence concern in East Asia,” and warnings began to ripple out through the senior levels of government.

    On January 24, the same DIA unit warned that there was a “roughly even” chance of a global pandemic. President Donald Trump received what Democratic investigators believe was likely his first formal Presidential Daily Briefing on the virus the day before, and another on January 28.

    According to a witness who spoke to the committee about the January 28 PDB briefing, deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger “was ‘losing it’ when talking about the disease’s severity and trying to convince the President and those assembled that ‘this will be a really big thing.’”

    The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff received a warning about the virus in an intelligence briefing on January 29, 2020, and the next day, the CIA began to produce what are known as “executive updates” on the virus – “shorter intelligence products that demonstrate the CIA’s taking a potential crisis serious,” according to the report.

    Still, Democratic investigators allege, despite the drumbeat of warnings from the IC, “White House messaging” failed to effectively inform the public of the risk from the virus. Trump’s rhetoric diverged “striking[ly]” from the intelligence communities late January conclusions, they said, demonstrating “an executive branch that was informed, but failed to warn the American people.”

    The report notes that on January 30 – two days after the January 28 briefing in which Pottinger was allegedly “losing it” – Trump told an audience in Michigan that, “We think we have it very well under control.”

    CNN has reached out to the Trump campaign. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment on the reports.

    “There has been a lot of focus on the first warning to the President on January 28,” the committee investigator said. “There has been much less focus on the rhythm of warnings following that, and what we what we find with a pretty consistent rhythm of warnings starting in late January and then really dialing up the volume throughout February.”

    The committee did not receive access to the original PDBs given to Trump but based its conclusions on draft materials and interviews with different intelligence agencies who contributed to the final product, according to investigators.

    By February, according to the report, PDB staff “pivoted from ‘warning’ of the emerging virus to assessing what the virus would mean for the world as it continued to spread.” The report goes on to list reporting from the State Department and the Department of Health and Human Services throughout the month, as well as what appears to be two additional warnings provided on February 11 and February 13 that are completely redacted.

    “For six weeks, the President’s message – that the virus was not a significant threat – was flatly inconsistent with what the Intelligence Community was reporting,” the report found.

    On March 11, the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic.

    Committee Democrats say that despite some improvements, the intelligence community remains unprepared for the next pandemic. In a series of recommendations, the report calls for the intelligence community to develop the ability to pivot collection faster, better coordinate with health security agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and leverage open-source data more aggressively.

    Although House Republicans have made clear that investigations of the government’s handling of the pandemic – including the investigation into its origins – are a key target next year, it’s not clear how aggressively the Intelligence Committee specifically will move to pursue the issue when Republican Rep. Mike Turner of Ohio takes the chairman’s gavel. Notably, the GOP report was authored by Rep. Brad Wenstrup, who will not be on the committee next year unless he receives a waiver from the incoming House speaker to serve.

    Republicans in their report, released on Wednesday night, are accusing the intelligence community of “downplay[ing] the possibility” that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, “was connected to China’s bioweapons program” – an assertion that directly challenges the intelligence community’s own declassified report, released earlier this year, that said that there was “broad agreement” that the virus was not developed as a biological weapon. The GOP report provides no details to back up its claims, citing classification concerns. CNN is unable to verify the GOP report’s claims.

    The Republican’s report also alleges that the classified version of the intelligence community’s report on the pandemic’s origins “omits additional vital information and dismisses important intelligence in a cursory manner.”

    “Although our unclassified summary cannot reveal details, we can state that the classified Updated Assessment claimed the IC lacked information regarding one key classified issue,” the report states. “However, the Committee otherwise found that very information in other intelligence reporting, and this information is particularly relevant to determining SARS-CoV-2’s potential links to China’s bioweapons program.”

    Wenstrup in a call with reporters on Thursday said that while “I can’t reveal it now because there’s a classification status… what we’re wanting to do is let America know that we have found some discrepancy between the two reports.”

    Panel Republicans also allege that the intelligence community’s unclassified report “likely skewed the public’s understanding” of the question of whether SARS-CoV-2 was created as part of a bioweapons program because it did not disclose the technical “confidence level” that it had in that assessment, as it did with some other assessments.

    When pressed by CNN to detail the discrepancies between the classified and unclassified versions of the report, Republican staff investigators noted that the classified version included the confidence level for the bioweapons assessment and suggested that this was part of why they were “making a big deal of it,” but declined to go into further detail.

    The intelligence community’s declassified report said that it has not reached a conclusion on the origins of Covid-19, instead confirming that officials were split about whether the virus originated naturally or escaped from a lab.

    The GOP report also claims, without evidence, that the unclassified report “omitted other key information that was in the classified version in a manner that likely skewed the public’s understanding of key issues” and stonewalled efforts by Congress to provide further oversight over the government’s investigation and its findings.

    Turner, in an interview with CNN earlier this week, also declined to offer any specifics about how he felt that the unclassified report did not accurately represent information in the classified record.

    “I personally do not believe that the unclassified version adequately reflects the assertions or conclusions in the classified version,” Turner said. “That discrepancy is one of great interest to us.”

    Wenstrup in the report and his remarks to reporters said that Republicans will move to subpoena the intelligence community for more information if officials do not testify voluntarily.

    “We’re not vindictive in our approach,” Wenstrup said. “We just want to get to the truth.”

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  • Opinion: After their pandemic debut, mRNA vaccines are just getting started | CNN

    Opinion: After their pandemic debut, mRNA vaccines are just getting started | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Many think the now-famous mRNA vaccines came into existence in the blink of an eye, at warp speed, in the throes of a deadly pandemic. But for Drew Weissman, who, along with his research partner Katalin Karikó, is credited with developing the platform that made the life-saving mRNA vaccines possible, RNA technology was a long time coming.

    Weissman, 63, grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, before attending Brandeis University, and then receiving both a doctorate and a medical degree from Boston University. He eventually landed a fellowship in Dr. Anthony Fauci’s lab at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, where he spent the better part of the ’90s researching dendritic cells, a key biological player in starting the body’s immune response. So, when he found himself at the University of Pennsylvania in 1997, the question of how to bolster the human immune system was already burning in his mind.

    Then, serendipity stepped in. Weissman bumped into Karikó, a biochemist at the university, while waiting at the Xerox machine for articles to be photocopied. They began talking about their shared research interest. Karikó, a native of Hungary, had spent decades researching messenger RNA – the biological instruction manual for the production of proteins in human cells – and was convinced of the potential it held for human therapeutics.

    Just like that, a scientific dream team was formed.

    Their research, however, was an uphill battle. For years, Weissman and Karikó’s experiments with RNA ended in failure. The key problem: The RNA was provoking an immune response that made their lab mice sick. But in 2005, with little support left from the scientific community, the pair had a breakthrough. They realized that by modifying the RNA, it would subvert detection by immune cells, and the proteins that the body synthesized from the RNA would train the immune system to recognize a specific foreign invader. With this modified RNA, the mice no longer got sick and showed the immunity Weissman and Karikó had hoped for.

    So, when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, it didn’t take long – just the amount of time to sequence the genome of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, create the mRNA based on that sequence and send the final product through the regulatory process – for a safe and effective Covid-19 mRNA vaccine to be approved for use.

    Since then, millions of lives have been saved by the vaccines. Covid-19 is still a threat, but vaccinated and boosted Americans have largely been able to return to a normal cadence of life.

    Across the globe, however, life has looked very different. China has resisted the use of Western mRNA vaccines, instead relying on its zero-Covid policy of strict lockdowns and Covid controls to try to keep the virus from spreading within its borders. This policy recently sparked unprecedented demonstrations among Chinese citizens and, as a result, on Wednesday, the Chinese government released extensive revisions to its restrictive, and ultimately unsuccessful, zero-Covid policy.

    Protests against Covid restrictions spread across China in late November as citizens took to the streets to vent their anger.

    The easing of China’s policy may be heralded as a victory, but it’s one that could come with a steep cost. As of late November, 90% of China’s population had completed two doses of a Covid-19 vaccine, while only about 66% of people over 80 had received two doses, according to Chinese officials. What’s more, the vaccines available to Chinese citizens use an inactivated SARS-CoV-2 virus, and pale in comparison to their mRNA counterparts that are approved in the US, says Weissman.

    But now, it seems, China is recognizing the promise of mRNA vaccines; it’s reportedly close to having one, made in its own country, approved for use. If that approval comes soon, it could deliver the nation from its pandemic turmoil.

    This interview has been edited for length and clarity:

    CNN: Can you explain how an mRNA vaccine works? What happens in the body after someone gets an mRNA shot?

    Weissman: In an mRNA vaccine, the mRNA acts as a kind of middleman. In our cells, DNA contains all the codes for the proteins we need to live. The messenger RNA makes a copy of one of those codes and brings it to a machine called a ribosome that reads the mRNA code and produces a protein from it.

    An mRNA Covid-19 vaccine supplies the codes for part of the SARS-CoV-2 virus called the spike protein. The ribosomes read the mRNA vaccine code and create the virus’ spike protein from it — and the body’s immune system starts recognizing it and creating antibodies to respond to it. Then, if the real virus is ever introduced into the system, the body will recognize its spike protein and will have already built up the antibodies needed to fight it off.

    CNN: What were the biggest challenges to developing the mRNA vaccine platform?

    Weissman: The roadblocks started 25 years before the pandemic hit. Back then, everybody took the attitude that mRNA wasn’t a good therapeutic and that it was a waste of resources to do the research. Support and funding were the biggest roadblocks we hit. We finally got funding, but even after that, it was years before people started to think, “Oh, wait a minute, RNA might actually be useful!”

    CNN: When the scientific community was skeptical of investing in RNA research, what was it that kept you from giving up on it?

    Weissman: The reason I kept at it was the potential I thought RNA had. When you have to make a new vaccine for a new disease using live viruses, it’s a huge amount of work. But RNA is simple. It’s plug and play. You take any protein you want to make an immune response against, you make RNA from it, you stick it in lipids, and you’re done. It was a simple platform that could be used emergently if a new virus suddenly appeared. We were thinking that it would be used against a flu pandemic, but when Covid hit, the vaccine was ready to go.

    I also thought that in addition to vaccines, we might be able to deliver therapeutic proteins and gene edit with RNA. There was so much potential that we felt that the drawbacks needed to be addressed and figured out. And that’s why we stuck with it for so many years.

    CNN: Do you see a future in which we turn to RNA therapeutics to treat or prevent things like the flu, cancers or autoimmune diseases?

    Weissman: We’re now turning to RNA for more than just vaccines. There are therapeutics in the works for a variety of diseases, including HIV, influenza, malaria and others. And there are ongoing clinical trials using RNA to treat cancer. We’ll likely also see clinical trials for RNA therapeutics for autoimmune diseases, too. So, it’s hit the mainstream, and people are looking at it as a potential new therapy.

    I’m also speaking with institutions that treat genetic diseases that afflict only 200 people. There is such a small population affected that no pharmaceutical company, and very few academics, are interested in researching them. But there is potential for RNA to be the key to treatment of these diseases because instead of having to reinvent the gene therapy for each disease, we can use the RNA platform we’ve already developed and easily plug in different diseases. We don’t have to spend $100 million in research to make a new treatment.

    CNN: What does the world need to do to better utilize RNA technologies to fight diseases in the future?

    Weissman: We need to develop the infrastructure to make new medicines, new vaccines, new therapies available to the world. I’ve been working with a lot of low- and middle-income countries to help them develop RNA therapeutics. Take Thailand: Through support from its government and charitable donations, Thailand was able to fund the development of an mRNA vaccine, which is currently in clinical trials, and could be distributed through Southeast Asia.

    And it’s not just Covid vaccines. If countries have the infrastructure to produce RNA therapeutics, they could potentially protect their people from some of the biggest infectious diseases. So, the most important thing is building the infrastructure where it’s needed.

    CNN: What are your thoughts on China’s zero Covid approach? Do you think China did its citizens a disservice by not making mRNA vaccines available to them?

    China has relied on a policy of strict lockdowns and Covid controls to try and keep the virus from spreading within its borders.

    Weissman: Initially, I think China took the right approach, which was to lock down to avoid transmitting Covid-19. And that worked in the beginning. The problem is that, once vaccines became available, China then only gave their citizens vaccines that were made in its own country. And, honestly, the vaccines that they made were lousy.

    Now they find themselves in a situation where the virus can be transmitted very easily when people are out in public. Had they purchased mRNA vaccines and immunized their population, they wouldn’t be in this situation. The bottom line is that China’s zero-Covid policy will never work, because Covid is everywhere. You can’t keep it out.

    CNN: The Covid-19 vaccines use messenger RNA, or mRNA. Is mRNA the only type of RNA that is being studied for use in therapeutics?

    Weissman: No, there’s a new institute at the University of Pennsylvania that does all kinds of RNA research. There are some diseases, particularly muscular diseases, that are caused by incorrect splicing of our RNA. So, we’re looking at new therapies to correct that splicing problem, which use different types of RNA.

    CNN: What are the biggest problems that face RNA therapeutics and vaccines moving forward?

    Weissman: The biggest problem is social media distortion of what RNA is and what it can do. Misinformation scares a lot of people away from taking RNA therapies. I can’t tell you how many times a week I hear people say, “Oh, I won’t take the vaccine, it’ll make me sterile, it’ll give me cancer, it’ll change my genes.” All of that is absolute nonsense, and I think it’s important for scientists to let people know that it’s nonsense – that RNA is safe.

    But there are a lot of ways to address that problem. Scientists aren’t vocal enough about science. There are large groups of people who think scientists are all frauds and who don’t believe in science, and they’re being cultured by some of our far right-wing politicians, religious leaders and community leaders. We need to get to those leaders and tell them to stop creating this unwarranted fear. We need to tell them that science isn’t the enemy.

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