Tag: iab-infectious diseases

Biden signs bill ending Covid-19 national emergency | CNN Politics

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President Joe Biden signed legislation Monday to end the national emergency for Covid-19, the White House said, in a move that will not affect the end of the separate public health emergency scheduled for May 11.

A White House official downplayed the impact of the bill, saying the termination of the emergency “does not impact our ability to wind down authorities in an orderly way.”

The bill to end the national emergency cleared the Senate last month in a bipartisan 68-23 vote and passed the House earlier this year with 11 Democrats crossing party lines to vote for the joint resolution.

“Since Congress voted to terminate the National Emergency earlier than anticipated, the Administration has worked to expedite its wind down and provide as much notice as possible to potentially impacted individuals,” the official said, adding that the country is in a “different place” than it was in January.

The administration has been winding down authorities over the past few months, the official noted.

The official said that “to be clear, ending the National Emergency will not impact the planned wind-down of the Public Health Emergency on May 11” – which enabled the government to provide many Americans with Covid-19 tests, treatments and vaccines at no charge, as well as offer enhanced social safety net benefits, to help the nation cope with the pandemic and minimize its impact, as CNN previously reported.

“But since Congress moved to undo the National Emergency earlier than intended, we’ve been working with agencies to address the impacts of ending the declaration early,” the official said.

The White House had signaled strong opposition to the bill but said that ultimately, the president would sign it if it came across his desk. The White House had planned end to both emergencies by May 11.

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April 12, 2021
Uber’s post-pandemic growth is slowing | CNN Business

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Uber has reported that its revenue ticked up 14% last quarter, marking a slower pace of growth than recent quarters when sales surged as riders returned to pre-pandemic habits.

The company on Tuesday reported revenue of $9.2 billion for the quarter ending in June, a 14% increase from the same period last year, just missing Wall Street’s estimates. The number of trips customers took were up 22% in the quarter.

The company reported its first-ever unadjusted operating profit of $326 million. It also posted record quarterly free cash flow of $1.1 billion.

“For most of our history, ‘profitable’ wasn’t the first thing that came up when you ask someone about Uber,” CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said on a call with analysts Tuesday morning. “But we knew they were wrong about Uber, as did many of our investors who backed us over the years.”

Uber also said gross bookings (the amount paid by customers) surged 16% year over year to $33.6 billion. Trips during the quarter grew 22% to 2.3 billion, or approximately 25 million trips per day on average.

On the call, the chief executive touted “a new all-time high of $15.1 billion in total earnings for drivers and couriers on the platform” that was seen last quarter.

Uber also announced Tuesday that Chief Financial Officer Nelson Chai will leave the company next January, and a search for his replacement is underway.

“Nelson has been a huge part of Uber’s transformation over the past five years,” Khosrowshahi said on the analysts’ call. “I know that I speak for the entire company that we’re grateful for everything he’s done to establish such a strong foundation for a path forward.”

Shares for Uber climbed by some 4% in pre-market trading Tuesday morning as the company offered rosy guidance. Uber stock has roughly doubled since the start of the year.

In a note Tuesday morning, William Blair analyst Ralph Schackart touted how the strong results this past quarter were “driven by continued execution, robust engagement, and record audience levels using the platform.”

“Uber continues to drive incremental profitability, demonstrating its ability to efficiently run the broader business and drive positive results,” Schackart added.

Uber has so far navigated its pandemic recovery far better than its chief rival, Lyft. Lyft is set to report quarterly earnings next week on Tuesday.

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April 12, 2021
Meta phased out Covid-19 content labels after finding they did little to combat misinformation, Oversight Board says | CNN Business

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Late last year, Facebook-parent Meta quietly phased out certain content labels on its platforms that for much of the pandemic had directed viewers to its central Covid-19 information page, after internal research concluded the labels may be ineffective at changing attitudes or stopping the spread of misinformation, according to a report Thursday by the company’s external oversight board.

Facebook rolled out the labels in early 2021, after coming under criticism for the spread of Covid-19 misinformation on its platforms during the first year of the pandemic. The company applied the labels to a wide range of claims both true and untrue about vaccines, treatments and other topics related to the virus.

But Meta’s use of the labels began slowing on Dec. 19, and ended completely soon after, the report said, following the internal research. Study results provided to the Meta Oversight Board, a quasi-judicial body, showed that the company’s labels appeared to have “no detectable effect on users’ likelihood to read, create or re-share” claims that had previously been rated as false by third-party fact-checkers or that discouraged the use of vaccines, the report said.

The research focused on Meta’s direct labeling interventions as opposed to labels the company applies to content as part of its third-party fact-checking program. The research found that the more frequently a user was exposed to the labels, the less likely they were to visit the Covid-19 information center, which offers authoritative resources and information linked to the pandemic.

“The company reported that initial research showed that these labels may have no effect on user knowledge and vaccine attitudes,” the report said.

Meta’s internal research on the labels has not been previously released, and the Oversight Board on Thursday called for Meta to publish its findings as part of a broader review of the company’s handling of Covid-19 misinformation.

The new details highlight the struggles platforms have faced in fighting misinformation and could raise broader questions about the efficacy of labeling and directing users to more accurate information. It also comes at a time when some of the biggest social media companies, including Twitter and Meta, are either rolling back their Covid-19 misinformation policies or considering doing so.

Meta should not relax its approach to Covid-19 misinformation as the company has proposed, the Oversight Board added. Until the World Health Organization determines that the pandemic has eased, Meta should instead continue to remove misinformation that violates the company’s policies, rather than shifting toward more lenient treatments such as labeling or downranking misleading information, the board said.

Meta said Thursday it will publicly respond to the Oversight Board’s recommendations within 60 days.

“We thank the Oversight Board for its review and recommendations in this case,” a company spokesperson said. “As Covid-19 evolves, we will continue consulting extensively with experts on the most effective ways to help people stay safe on our platforms.”

In the past, Meta has touted its ability to direct users to the Covid-19 information center. Last July, the company said it had connected more than 2 billion people across 189 countries to trustworthy information through the portal.

Some of those visits occurred through labels that Meta referred to internally as “neutral inform treatments,” or NITs, and “facts about ‘X’ informed treatments,” also known as FAXITs.

The labels were automatically applied to content that Meta’s automated tools determined were about Covid-19, the Oversight Board said. The labels never directly addressed the claims within any given post, but they provided a link to the Covid-19 information center as well as more contextual information, including messages saying that vaccines have been proven safe and effective or that unapproved Covid-19 treatments could cause bodily harm. (Meta provided examples of a NIT and a FAXIT in its July 2022 request for Oversight Board guidance on whether it should relax its Covid-19 misinformation policy.)

The decision to begin phasing out the labels came after Meta’s product and integrity teams ran an experiment studying Meta’s global userbase, the report said. The study found that users who were shown the labels approximately once a month were more likely on average to click through to the Covid-19 information center than users who were shown the labels both more and less frequently.

In light of the results, Meta later told the Oversight Board it would stop using the labels altogether, to ensure they could remain effective in other public health emergencies, according to the report.

While the Oversight Board’s report Thursday did not pass judgment on Meta’s decision to stop using the labels, it urged the company to reevaluate the 80 distinct types of claims that the company considers to be Covid-19 misinformation and therefore subject to removal from its platforms.

Meta should perform the reassessments regularly, the Oversight Board said, consulting with public health officials to determine which claims on Meta’s banned list continue to be false or misleading and worthy of removal. Meta should also publish a record of when and how it updates that list, the board added.

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April 12, 2021
Senate votes to end Covid-19 emergency, 3 years after initial declaration | CNN Politics

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The Senate on Wednesday passed a bill that would end the national Covid-19 emergency declared by then-President Donald Trump on March 13, 2020.

The final vote was overwhelmingly bipartisan, 68-23. The joint resolution, which cleared the House earlier this year, now heads to President Joe Biden’s desk.

The vote comes on the heels of two other successful efforts led by Republicans in approving legislation rescinding Biden administration policies.

A White House official said in a statement to CNN that while the President “strongly opposes” this bill, the administration is already winding down the emergency by May 11, the date previously announced for the end of the authority.

Still, the official noted, if the Senate passed the measure and it heads to Biden’s desk, “he will sign it, and the administration will continue working with agencies to wind down the national emergency with as much notice as possible to Americans who could potentially be impacted.”

The White House said in January that Biden “strongly opposes” the GOP resolution to end the Covid-19 emergency, according to its statement of administration policy, but did not threaten a veto.

While the lack of an explicit veto threat left the possibility of Biden signing the measure a clear, if not likely, option, Biden’s ultimate decision to sign the bill marked another moment where House Democrats have privately voiced frustration that the lack of clarity – or outright messaging mishap – from the White House left lawmakers in a lurch.

House Democrats largely voted against the bill when it was brought to the floor in February except for 11 Democrats who joined Republicans in support. A separate White House official noted that the Senate vote comes after several weeks when the Biden administration has had time to accelerate its wind-down efforts – and just a little over a month before they’d announced the emergency would end.

But it also comes after the administration drew blowback from House Democrats after sending what lawmakers viewed as mixed signals over how the president planned to respond to a Republican-led resolution that would block a controversial Washington, DC, crime bill, which opponents criticized as weak on crime. The president ultimately did not veto the measure.

The measure was able to succeed in the Senate by a simple majority through the Congressional Review Act, which allows a vote to repeal regulations from the executive branch without breaking a filibuster at a 60-vote threshold that is required for most legislation in the chamber.

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April 12, 2021
Ron DeSantis praised Anthony Fauci for Covid response in spring 2020 for ‘really doing a good job’ | CNN Politics

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Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis is attacking former President Donald Trump for “turning the country over to [Dr. Anthony] Fauci in March 2020” but DeSantis was praising the chief public health official at the same time in previously unreported quotes, saying Fauci was “really, really good and really, really helpful” and “really doing a good job.”

In other comments, the Florida governor said he deferred to Fauci’s guidance on COVID-19 restrictions and later cited his guidance when communicating the policies he was putting in place early in the pandemic in the state of Florida.

“You have a lot of people there who are working very, very hard, and they’re not getting a lot of sleep,” DeSantis said on March 25, 2020, at a briefing on Florida’s response. “And they’re really focusing on a big country that we have. And from Dr. Birx to Dr. Fauci to the vice president who’s worked very hard, the surgeon general, they’re really doing a good job. It’s a tough, tough situation, but they’re working hard.”

In one of his first appearances as a candidate for the Republican nomination for president, DeSantis attacked Trump for following Fauci’s guidance during the Covid pandemic. Fauci served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases until retiring in 2022. He played a key early role in crafting the administration’s response to the pandemic, but often was criticized and sidelined by then-President Trump.

“I think [Trump] did great for three years, but when he turned the country over to Fauci in March of 2020 that destroyed millions of people’s lives,” DeSantis said last Thursday. “And in Florida, we were one of the few that stood up, cut against the grain, took incoming fire from media, bureaucracy, the left, even a lot of Republicans, had schools open, preserved businesses.”

“If you are faced with a destructive bureaucrat in your midst like a Fauci, you do not empower somebody like Fauci. You bring him into the office and you tell him to pack his bags: You are fired,” DeSantis said Tuesday at one of his first campaign events in Iowa.

Bryan Griffin, a spokesman for DeSantis, told CNN he initially followed guidance from Fauci but changed course and didn’t look back.

“Like most Americans, the governor initially assumed medical officials were going to serve the interests of the people and keep politics out of their decision making. When it became clear that this wasn’t the case, the governor charted his own course and never looked back,” Griffin told CNN in an email. “Governor DeSantis would’ve fired Anthony Fauci.”

In a news conference on Tuesday, DeSantis also acknowledged mistakes early in the pandemic.

“And what I’ve said about it is it was a difficult situation and we didn’t know a lot,” he said. “So I think people could do things that they regret. I mean I’ve said there are things we did in those first few weeks that I pivoted from.”

Though Fauci did help craft the administration’s Covid response, Trump was often critical of Fauci as he attacked his own administration’s pandemic guidelines. Trump began criticizing Fauci early in spring 2020, retweeting calls to fire him in April of that year and in May blasting comments Fauci made against reopening schools. In July 2020, the White House’s deputy chief of staff for communications, Dan Scavino, posted a cartoon on Facebook that showed Fauci as a faucet flushing the American economy for his COVID guidance.

In spring 2020, Fauci was provided with around-the-clock security after he began receiving escalating threats after his providing guidance to Trump for the country to remain as locked down as possible to help control the spread of the virus, which to date has claimed more than a million lives in the US.

DeSantis, like Trump, later broke with Fauci over reopening Florida in July 2020, but he didn’t begin regularly harshly criticizing Fauci until spring 2021.

Trump urged reopenings by May 2020 and DeSantis was one of the first to put in place plans to do so – for which Trump praised the Florida governor at an October 2020 rally.

Last week, DeSantis’ campaign’s rapid response account and a spokesperson also shared a video from a Republican congressman that attacked Trump for praising Fauci, which used comments from March and February 2020, the same time DeSantis himself was praising Fauci.

But DeSantis’ attacks rewrite history, according to a CNN KFile review of public appearances by DeSantis in 2020 as Trump began harshly criticizing Fauci much earlier than DeSantis. And in at least 10 different instances at press briefings in April and March, DeSantis cited Fauci or mentioned his guidance when discussing his own support for restrictive policies like closing beaches and putting in place curfews.

Speaking at a news briefing on March 21, 2020, DeSantis made similar comments praising Fauci.

“The president’s task force has been great,” DeSantis said. “I mean, you’ve called, you know, we’ve talked Dr. Fauci number of times, talked to, you know, the surgeon, US surgeon general number of times, VP, you know, they’ve been really, really good and really, really helpful.”

At other press briefings in March 2020, DeSantis also cited Fauci’s guidance on mobile testing, individual testing, and how long the timeline on COVID might be.

“I would defer to people like Dr. Fauci,” DeSantis said on March 14, 2020. “I think Dr. Fauci has said nationwide, you’re looking at six to eight weeks of where we’re really gonna be having to dig in here.”

On March 25, 2020, DeSantis cited Fauci’s guidance on isolating.

“So please, please if you’re one of those people who’ve come from the hot zone, Dr. Fauci said yesterday, you know, you have a much higher chance being infected coming out of that region than anywhere else in the country right now. So please, you need to self-isolate. That’s the requirement in Florida.”

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April 12, 2021
With Robert F. Kennedy Jr. interview, Musk again uses Twitter to promote candidates aligned with his views | CNN Business

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Twitter owner Elon Musk has proposed hosting Twitter Spaces interviews with political candidates of all stripes, reflecting the billionaire’s supposed commitment to ideological neutrality and to promoting Twitter as a true “public square.”

So far, however, Musk appears to be more interested in platforming candidates that align with his own views rather than those who might challenge them. On Monday, Musk is set to share an audio chatroom with Robert Kennedy Jr., the anti-vaccine activist and Democratic candidate for president.

The decision to host Kennedy again highlights, for the second time in as many weeks, Musk’s unique potential to shape public opinion through a combination of his own personal celebrity and his private control of a social media megaphone. But this time, it also deepens doubts about Musk’s claims to open-mindedness — and his willingness to use Twitter as anything other than a tool for his own activism.

Musk, who built much of his early reputation as an entrepreneur on a concern for ensuring humanity’s survival, has opposed the Covid-19 vaccine and spent much of the pandemic railing against Anthony Fauci, the government’s former top infectious disease expert. Musk has claimed as recently as January that he is “pro vaccines in general” but that they risk doing more harm than good “if administered to the whole population.”

Medical experts widely agree that the broad application of vaccines helps prevent the spread of disease not only by making it less likely for an individual to get sick, but also by creating herd immunity at the societal level. In other words, part of the purpose of vaccines is to administer them as universally as possible so that even if one person falls ill, the infection cannot find other suitable hosts nearby.

For years, Kennedy has pushed back on that consensus, including by invoking Nazi Germany in an anti-vaccine speech in Washington last year. Instagram shut down his account in 2021 for “repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines,” though the company announced Sunday it has restored Kennedy’s account because he is now running for office. Instagram’s parent, Meta, has also banned accounts belonging to Kennedy’s anti-vaccine advocacy group.

Kennedy has also attacked the closing of churches, social distancing and government track-and-trace surveillance. At the start of the pandemic, churches were closed and social distancing was enforced across the country to contain the spread of coronavirus, while the government used methods to track cases. (Musk, for his part, also objected to state lockdown orders earlier in the pandemic.)

It’s unclear if Musk has reached out to other candidates. Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

According to a CNN poll published last month, 60% of Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters say they back President Joe Biden for the top of next year’s Democratic ticket, 20% favor Kennedy and 8% back Williamson. Another 8% say they would support an unnamed “someone else.”

With the national profile and visibility that comes with running for high office, Kennedy’s anti-vaccine ideology and vocal stances against prior Covid policies were already primed to become a topic of the 2024 presidential race. But by putting Kennedy center stage on Twitter, Musk appears poised to promote these views further to his millions of followers.

Musk took a similar tack in sharing a stage with Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who announced his White House bid with Musk during a Twitter Spaces event last month plagued by technical glitches. Musk declined to endorse a candidate but has previously tweeted that he would support DeSantis if he ran for president.

As Twitter’s owner, Musk has shared conspiracy theories and welcomed extreme voices back to the platform who had been suspended for violating Twitter’s rules in the past. He has also laid off more than 80% of Twitter’s staff, including many who had previously been responsible for content moderation.

All of that, combined now with his direct association with Kennedy, could have significant ramifications both for Twitter as a platform and for Musk’s credibility.

DeSantis at least has the plausible distinction of being a top challenger to former President Donald Trump. But as a marginal candidate who espouses debunked medical claims, Kennedy and his appearance with Musk could further cement the perception that Twitter actively mainstreams extremism.

That could be the very thing that drives away more moderate candidates from accepting Musk’s “invitation” to appear alongside him.

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April 12, 2021