fortune--2020-12-28--AstraZeneca-Oxford COVID vaccine could get U.K. approval as soon as this week

The U.K. is poised to approve the COVID-19 vaccine produced by AstraZeneca Plc and the University of Oxford, giving the country another powerful tool to fight the pandemic as concern mounts over rising infections.
Britain’s drug regulator could clear the shot for use as early as this week, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because the deliberations are confidential. AstraZeneca Chief Executive Officer Pascal Soriot and U.K. health officials had previously said they hoped for approval by the end of the year.
The go-ahead would come about three weeks after the U.K. became the first western country to begin vaccinations, using a shot from Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE that’s been administered to more than 600,000 Britons. Still, virus cases have surged in Britain amid concern about a new strain of the coronavirus that officials have said is more contagious.
That prompted the government to reverse plans to ease restrictions over Christmas and tighten lockdowns across large parts of the country. Those measures could be eased at the end of February as the imminent approval of the AstraZeneca-Oxford shot permits the vaccination of as many as 15 million of the country’s most vulnerable people, the Mail on Sunday reported. The country’s health service would no longer be at risk of being overwhelmed by virus cases once that threshold is met, the newspaper said.
The Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency will need time to carry out a review of the vaccine data, the Department of Health and Social Care said by email. Representatives for the MHRA and AstraZeneca declined to comment.
The AstraZeneca vaccine could facilitate a rapid ramp-up of vaccinations because it’s easier to transport and store than the Pfizer-BioNTech shot, requiring only refrigerator temperatures rather than deep freezing. It’s also less expensive to produce, so many developing countries — along with the U.S. and the European Union — have also signed deals for doses. The vaccine could be rolled out across Britain from Jan. 4, the Sunday Telegraph reported.
Trial Questions
U.K. approval would provide vindication for the AstraZeneca-Oxford shot, which has been slowed by questions about discrepancies in the trial results. Overall, these studies showed that the vaccine was less effective than shots from Pfizer and another developer, Moderna Inc. But a subset of the trial that showed better results resulted from a dosing mistake.
The U.K. has more riding on the domestically developed shot than the U.S. and some other countries because it won’t be able to get any of the Moderna vaccine until well into next year.
Soriot told the Sunday Times that new data will show the AstraZeneca vaccine is comparable to the 95% effectiveness rate reported by the rival developers.
“We think we have figured out the winning formula and how to get efficacy that, after two doses, is up there with everybody else,” he told the newspaper. “I can’t tell you more because we will publish at some point.”
Soriot had previously said the vaccine was on track for large-scale vaccinations by the end of the year. England’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, had said he expected the MHRA to act by early next year or perhaps sooner.
Vaccination Sites
Mass vaccination centers at sports stadiums and conference venues are expected to begin in the second week of January, the Telegraph reported. Government officials will hold a meeting on the pandemic Monday after scientists warned that school closures may be necessary to slow the spread of the new Covid-19 variant, the newspaper said.
The country has been one of the hardest hit in Europe with more than 70,000 deaths, the most in the region after Italy. Much of the U.K. has been moved into the harshest Tier 4 restrictions, which prohibit household mixing and forced the closing of pubs, restaurants and many businesses, after the discovery earlier this month of the more contagious strain.
The rate at which the virus is increasing, known as the R number, is estimated at 1.1 to 1.3 as of Dec. 24, according to the latest government data. A reading above 1.0 indicates the spread of the virus is accelerating. The U.K. reported 34,693 more cases and 210 deaths on Dec. 26.


fortune--2020-12-27--Why a key Georgia county flipped from red to blue—and what it means for Democrats

Congress just passed the most important anti-corruption reform in decades , but hardly anyone knows about it

Joe Biden’s victory in Georgia was surely the most surprising red state flip in the 2020 presidential election. Exploring the strikingly rapid transformation of Gwinnett County, the state’s largest suburban county, shows how this upset happened, while offering insights into the state’s upcoming U.S. Senate runoffs.
At the midpoint of the 20th century, Gwinnett, 30 miles northeast of Atlanta, was largely rural, with just 32,000 inhabitants, more than 95% of them white. Scarcely 2% of the residents had completed four years of college, and only 25% of the workforce held professional or managerial jobs. Who could have imagined that today, Gwinnett County would be home to nearly 950,000 people and one of the most diverse counties in the country?
Gwinnett’s path would be shaped by nearby Atlanta, which lost 162,000 white residents between 1960 and 1980. Gwinnett saw its white population swell by 102,000 over the same period. The county also grew with the arrival of thousands of white migrants from elsewhere in the nation, drawn by the dynamic metropolitan Atlanta economy. By 1990, some 357,000 people, more than nine out of 10 of them white, lived in Gwinnett County.
Growth in Gwinnett would accelerate, even as the new arrivals became more diverse. By 1990, metro Atlanta, including suburban counties like Gwinnett, was becoming a top destination for African-Americans on the move from other parts of the U.S. Meanwhile, the allure of the suburbs was accelerating the outmigration of upwardly mobile Black people from Atlanta itself. The share of Gwinnett’s population that was African-American more than doubled in the 1990s, and the Black population grew by 140% in the decade that followed. With this influx continuing, and many Gwinnett whites heading off to the decidedly whiter exurbs like Barrow and Walton counties, by 2020, 30% of Gwinnett residents were Black.
This is only part of the story of Gwinnett’s diversification. The explosion of construction jobs spawned by the 1996 Olympic Games, in combination with a falloff in employment in the Texas and Louisiana oilfields, exerted a push-pull effect on Latino in-migrants, so that today, Latin Americans constitute 20% of the county’s population. The heated pursuit of foreign investment, reflected in a current count of more than 600 foreign-owned companies in the county, also drew a steadily expanding stream of Asian and Asian-American workers, who liked the county’s highly touted schools and relatively low living costs. By 2020, residents of Asian descent accounted for 13% of Gwinnett’s population.
These arrivals made Gwinnett more prosperous and diverse but were not universally welcomed by the non-Hispanic white population. While Gwinnett officially became a majority nonwhite county by around 2007, it wasn’t until 2018 that representatives of other ethnic groups first managed to win seats on the county commission and the board of education.
White resistance had partisan implications. Gwinnett became a Republican stronghold in presidential elections in 1964, and the county voters strayed from the GOP camp only once in the next 50 years, to support fellow Georgian Jimmy Carter for President in 1976.
But as the county’s nonwhite population grew, Democrats gained ground in Gwinnett during presidential elections.
Barack Obama, running only five points behind John McCain in Georgia in 2008, captured Newton, Rockdale, and Douglas, three other metro Atlanta counties whose nonwhite populations were on the rise. Obama maintained this suburban beachhead in 2012, and four years later, Hillary Clinton picked up Gwinnett and two other diversifying counties.
With Democratic hopes buoyed by Clinton’s showing, state legislator Stacey Abrams, who is African-American, ran for governor in 2018. She narrowly lost to Republican opponent Brian Kemp—but bested him in Gwinnett by more than 14 percentage points. Abrams’s performance persuaded the national Democratic Party to mount a serious presidential effort in Georgia.
But instead of persisting in futile efforts to bring blue-collar whites back into the fold, the Democrats would concentrate on molding a growing and more politically engaged nonwhite population into a potent political force in the state. To that end, Abrams and her allies fought voter suppression, expanded registration, and boosted turnout. The effort was decisive for Biden, who carried essentially the same counties as Abrams two years ago, while besting her number of votes statewide by more than 550,000.
This was the culmination of a speedy political reversal in Gwinnett. Obama lost the county by nine points in 2012 only to see Biden win it by 18 points just eight years later.
This swing is not explained by the “hot take” that Biden owes his victory nationwide to disgusted white establishment Republicans in the suburbs, who crossed party lines rather than vote for Donald Trump but otherwise stuck with GOP candidates down-ballot. Trump certainly lost some support among white suburban voters in Georgia. But ultimately, it was a racially and culturally diverse group of relative newcomers to the burbs who put Democrats over the top.
Sure, the pundits are right that Biden won in the suburbs—the state’s three most populous suburban counties (DeKalb, Cobb, and Gwinnett), along with Fulton, where Atlanta is located, accounted for over half of Biden’s vote gains over Hillary Clinton’s totals from four years ago. But it’s also true that of those counties, Cobb is the only one where nonwhites are not the majority. (And Cobb misses being majority nonwhite by a single percentage point.)
There are limits to what may be inferred from comparing voter registration percentages to shares of the actual vote, but in Gwinnett County the correlation is too close to ignore: Whites now account for 40% of the county’s registered voters, and Trump won 40% of the vote. Likewise, in Georgia’s Seventh District, the only House seat in the state that Democrats flipped, Carolyn Bourdeaux’s vanquished Republican adversary garnered the same share of the vote in Gwinnett as Trump.
Moreover, the perceived national pattern of white suburban Republicans voting for Biden but for the GOP in other races certainly did not play out in Gwinnett. Instead, Democrats racked up large margins in the two senatorial contests, while local matchups saw more ousters of white Republicans by nonwhite candidates, including the election of Gwinnett’s first Black sheriff. Here Democrats didn’t raid the traditional Republican base, but simply overwhelmed it.
Despite this, Republicans in January’s U.S. Senate runoffs are doubling down on their presidential election strategy of tailoring their message to the die-hard Trumpers and casting Democratic challengers Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock as America-hating socialists, communists, or anarchists.
The Republicans are gambling that the traditional wisdom that nonwhite turnout fades badly in runoff elections will hold true yet again. But much has changed in the nonwhite population, especially in the suburbs.
Should Georgia Democrats prevail in these two races, they will have managed an even greater feat than the one they pulled off on Nov. 3. They will also have shown the rest of the country that the demographic forces transforming Georgia’s politics could fuel further Democratic success in rapidly diversifying suburban areas nationwide.
James C. Cobb is a contributing editor at Zócalo Public Square and the Spalding Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Georgia. His latest book is The South and America Since World War II. This piece was written for Zócalo Public Square.


fortune--2020-12-28--Everything jobless Americans need to know about the $300 unemployment benefit

Everything jobless Americans need to know about the $ 300 unemployment benefit

President Donald Trump on Sunday backed off his veto threat and signed the $900 billion stimulus bill—a move that should immediately benefit millions of unemployed Americans, even if its $600 checks have been roundly criticized as insufficient relief for the economic damage wrought by the coronavirus pandemic.
For starters, the package will bring back weekly enhanced federal unemployment benefits for the more than 19 million Americans still on unemployment benefit rolls. These enhanced benefits will pay out $300 per week, on top of state benefits, for up to 11 weeks. That’s down from the $600 weekly payment that the CARES Act sent jobless Americans through late July.
The stimulus package will also extend pandemic unemployment benefits, which currently provide benefits to around 14 million jobless Americans. Those out-of-work Americans, covered by programs like Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA), would have lost their benefits entirely had the stimulus bill not passed.
To help jobless Americans better understand how the latest stimulus package will impact their benefits, read on.
How does the weekly $300 unemployment benefit work?
The stimulus bill passed in March provided an additional $600 weekly in unemployment insurance benefits to everyone who qualified for a state program. But those enhanced payments ran out in late July. After the $600 benefit was exhausted, President Trump signed a memorandum in August to send a $300 enhanced unemployment benefit to those receiving at least $100 per week in state unemployment benefits. However, in most states, that money ran out months ago.
The $300 enhanced unemployment benefit signed into law by Trump is similar to the $600 CARES Act benefit, meaning it would go to everyone who qualifies for a state unemployment program or Pandemic Unemployment Assistance—regardless of state benefit levels.
Once applicants are approved for unemployment insurance by their state, they will automatically get the additional $300 weekly federal money. All they have to do is continue to certify their benefits weekly with their state.
Who is eligible for the $300 pandemic unemployment benefit?
The CARES Act, which was passed in March, expanded eligibility for unemployment benefits to include jobless part-timers, self-employed workers, freelancers, and independent contractors. These unemployed Americans covered through Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, along with anyone on traditional state unemployment rolls, will automatically get the new $300 weekly federal benefit.
And those who qualify will get the additional $300 weekly, regardless of their previous wages. This is on top of their state unemployment insurance benefit. For example, a worker in New York who gets the maximum state benefit of $504 per week would receive a total of $804 per week.
When will the $300 checks start going out?
The $300 enhanced unemployment checks will be issued for the week ended Dec. 27 through the week ending March 13. It remains unclear when the enhanced benefit will start depositing: The timeline for receiving that first enhanced payment will vary by state. If states delay, the benefit will be back paid.
Can my unemployment benefits be greater than my income?
The additional weekly $300 in unemployment benefits is available to those who qualify for unemployment insurance, regardless of their income level before losing their job. The $300 extra weekly benefit works out to $7.50 per hour for a 40-hour workweek—slightly above the federal minimum wage for 2020. When combined with state benefits, some low-earning Americans could see a pay jump.
If I apply via my state, will I automatically get the $300 federal benefits as part of the stimulus?
Yes. Once you have been approved by your state for unemployment insurance, you will automatically get the additional weekly federal money. All you have to do is to continue to certify your benefits weekly with your state.
What about benefits like PUA and PEUC?
The stimulus bill extends benefit dates for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA)—which expands who is eligible for unemployment benefits including gig workers and self-employed Americans—and Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC), which grants 13 weeks of additional benefits to qualified individuals after they exhaust 26 weeks of standard unemployment insurance.
The passage of the bill means PUA and PEUC will run through March 13, 2021, and PEUC will climb from 13 weeks to a maximum of 24 weeks.


fortune--2020-12-28--8 ways wine will change in 2021

8 ways wine will change in 2021

Where to start? COVID-19 upended all our oenophile habits, shifting how we buy wine (online more than ever), how we taste and learn about it (virtually), and where we end up drinking it. (Not at parties, bars, and restaurants.)
Thankfully, many cities considered wine shops to be essential businesses. Vino has been a great connector this year, as we’ve shared glasses with friends virtually and traveled by proxy to regions we can’t visit.
Surprisingly, the pandemic didn’t shift what we put in our glasses all that much. Rosé is still hot. So is hard seltzer, which, along with canned cocktails (both, ugh!), grew 43% during 2020. Bubbly is still going strong, with more countries than ever producing great examples (read: Brazil).
The earliest harvest ever in Burgundy and devastating fires in California wine country for the fourth year in a row reminded people that climate change is a truly serious issue, and inspired new wine initiatives to save the planet.
Expect many of 2020’s trends to evolve in 2021—the health and wellness alcohol-free drinks boom, the canned and boxed wine movement, vino from extreme regions—helped along by new digital and A.I. technology innovations, even if everyone really dreams of returning to sharing wine with others outside their homes.
Here’s what else I see in my crystal glass:
Pink prosecco is the new new thing
Rosé. Just. Doesn’t. Stop. Retailer Wineaccess.com sold seven (!) times more bottles of rosé wine in 2020 than in summer 2019.
I’m betting 2021’s big pink drink will be prosecco rosé. At the end of November, the approved category launched in Italy, which already has a boom in big-value pink wines. John Gillespie, founder and chief executive officer of market research firm Wine Opinions, says that combining the prosecco trend with the rosé trend is as close to a sure thing for success in the U.S. as he’s seen.
More than 100 labels have sought U.S. approval. A couple are already on shelves, and more are coming in 2021. I’ll be reporting on which are worth drinking.
Online wine access will get way better
Online sales are booming with growth in the three digits. Rob McMillan, founder of Silicon Valley Bank Wine Division, reports that for small producers, it’s 153%. Expect new and expanded shopping sites and search engines in 2021.
I have my eye on Pix.wine, from wine tech platform Emetry. Led by industry veterans Paul Mabray and Erica Duecy, it aims to be the ultimate one-stop online finding and buying spot, with plenty of deep data to help you decide what to pick. (Pix, get it?) In an exclusive sneak preview, I found it impressively comprehensive and easy to navigate, with a design and information to appeal to everyone from newbies to connoisseurs. A daily newsletter? Yes. Hot picks from diverse critics? Ditto. Collectors can even sign up to receive texts when rare bottles they’re hunting are available at a good price. It launches in April with links for more than 200,000 wines.
The wine country of 2021 will be…Portugal
The thirst for discovery rolls on, and Portugal is becoming the latest hot spot. Why did sales of the country’s wines surge 35.1% in September alone in the U.S.?
It’s simple: quality-price ratio. They’re delicious, food-friendly, inexpensive, and more than worth the cost. Douro Valley reds are stunning, but for 2021 I’m also betting on newcomer region Alentejo, with its fresh, aromatic, savory whites and juicy, plush, smoky red blends, all from unusual varieties (antao vas, argonez), and some fermented in clay amphora. The region boasts rock-star winemakers, a fantastic sustainability program and one third of the world’s cork forests.
Wine seltzer will be the new hard seltzer
I remain mystified by the massive appeal of bland flavored sparkling water with an alcohol kick from malt or spirits. In 2021, expect more craft breweries and celebrities to offer their own interpretations of these dry, low-alcohol drinks. Yes, I’ll be sampling chef Gordon Ramsay’s brand-new Hell’s Seltzer line, with flavors inspired by dishes in his Hell’s Kitchen restaurants and names such as “Knicker Twist” (passionfruit, pineapple, and orange flavor notes).
But wine seltzers are more my style. In their annual predictions, U.K.-based market research firm Wine Intelligence sees a coming push by wine producers “to ride the hard seltzer wave.” Mass-market wine brand Barefoot launched four last spring made from white wine, seltzer water, and natural flavors, with a mere 4% alcohol, as Napa’s Trinchero did with its Del Mar wine seltzer. They’re lighter and crisper than canned wine-based spritzers, which, well, contain more wine. Please let new ones be better.
Virtual tastings will be the new company perks
Winery tasting room visits took a huge hit in 2020, and winemakers quickly pivoted to virtual tastings that allowed drinkers to get up close and personal with brands they love. These are not going away. But to me the more interesting development is the way corporations, which couldn’t lavish travel and entertainment money on reward retreats to Napa, tapped wineries to host special sessions for employee team-building and perks, a trend that’s also here to stay. (No, it’s not day drinking.) Each employee gets mailed a specific set of bottles (snacks, too, sometimes) to sample at home while participating.
Recently launched Virtual With Us hired unemployed sommeliers to conduct tastings for such companies as Johnson & Johnson—as well as for private birthday parties. The strangest request? A Santa Claus-costumed somm to present the vino. Virtual with Us is now going global.
And for the harder stuff, the Cocktail Guru is leading virtual mixology classes for companies ranging from the London Stock Exchange to Pfizer. (A break from vaccine development?)
Sustainability will be the big eco-word
Once just a meaningless feel-good term in the wine industry, “sustainability” is starting to reflect serious commitment to organic vines, green winery design, carbon neutrality, and more.
But wineries are expanding sustainability to mean economic and social accountability, too, which includes promoting racial and gender diversity and taking care of workers—concerns especially important to younger drinkers.
In 2021, more wineries, including luxury wine giants, will promote new “ethical wine” initiatives such as the certified regenerative farming program, started by eco-warrioring clothier Patagonia Inc. In 2020, California’s Tablas Creek winery became the first winery to adopt its principles and get certified. International Wineries for Climate Action, which was founded last year by Spain’s Torres Family and California’s Jackson Family Wines, will also continue its mission.
Streaming live experiences will be the new oenotourism
Oenotourism, now shut down, won’t be back for a while. Count on being transported to wine regions virtually, as new wine experiences vie with Netflix.
Silicon Valley entrepreneur Michael Baum created an innovative tourism hub in Burgundy after buying his wine estate Château de Pommard. Now he’s launching Vivant, a platform streaming live wine experiences from wine regions around the world, with professional production values and a community of organic wine producers.
Expect master-classes, music and wine pairing, and interactive “visits” to 12 new wine regions in 2021.
The rise of the Champagne robot sommelier
With restaurants closing and the Court of Master Sommeliers organization rocked by #MeToo scandals, the somm community has had a bad year.
And now: robots. This month, in cooperation with Veuve Clicquot and Dom Perignon, two M group restaurants in London unleashed Bailey and Sage, which ferry bottles and glasses of bubbly to customers. Hotel Trio in Healdsburg, Calif., sends out Rosé the Robot butler (not as cute as Bailey) to deliver room service wines. “She” is sanitized after each delivery.
Yet, I still have plenty of questions. Which NBA stars will debut wines next year? What bottles should wine lovers pour with lab-grown meat? Where are all those airline wines from planes no longer flying? And last: President-elect Biden is a teetotaler, but Vice President-elect Kamala Harris is not. What wines will she be drinking in 2021?
I’ll be covering those stories, and many more, in the year ahead.


fortune--2020-12-28--Will working women recover in 2021? Six experts share their predictions

In 2020, working women suffered unprecedented losses, facing both disproportionate job loss and a mushrooming of caregiving responsibilities—a combination that could ultimately roll back much of the progress women have made in the workforce over the past years and decades.
But, with a new year, a new presidential administration, and a coronavirus vaccine on the horizon, do women stand a chance of recovering in 2021?
Six experts—from Melinda Gates to Time’s Up CEO Tina Tchen—weighed in on the question. All emphasized the critical importance of addressing key gaps like accessible childcare and paid family leave. But from unique perches—lobbying Congress on these issues, working with businesses to better serve female workers, and analyzing economic data—each has a different outlook for the new year.
Read their predictions, hopes, and goals for 2021 below:
Kimberly Churches, CEO, American Association of University Women
Courtesy of AAUW
We really learned this year that it’s not work-life balance—it’s work-life blend. Increased flexibility in the workplace is going to be a real top trend we’re going to see in 2021. Getting through this crisis and looking at true recovery means we have to center helping women getting through this too.
As we enter the 117th Congress, we’re going to see even more bills coming forward around transparency: on pay equity, on practices in the workplace on flexibility, and on access to care—like the Paycheck Fairness Act and the FAMILY Act.
These bills, though, were written prior to the pandemic. So I think you’ll see a lot of organizations, elected officials, and policymakers working to make sure that they get it right for a post-COVID-19 world. I think we’re going to see those those bills come forward with with a few edits and tweaks that can better meet where workplaces should be going as they fully embrace diversity, equity, and inclusion—especially given what we’ve learned this year.
Melinda Gates, cochair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, founder of Pivotal Ventures, and author of The Moment of Lift
Michael Short—Bloomberg/Getty Images
Women have suffered the worst of the 2020 recession. They could suffer the worst of the 2021 recovery, too.
A big reason is caregiving. Even before COVID-19, women were nearly three times as likely as men to quit their jobs to take care of a family member. Now, they’re leaving the workforce in record numbers. A recent survey found that a staggering one in four women is considering downshifting her career or quitting her job because of increased caregiving responsibilities during the pandemic.
It keeps me up at night to think that when businesses reopen, there could be a lot of empty desks where women used to sit. That’s the path we’re headed on unless lawmakers finally give the caregiving crisis the attention it deserves. To start, we need a national paid family and medical leave policy—now. We’re the only industrialized nation without one. We also need federal action to stabilize the teetering childcare industry and to direct additional resources to long-term-care services and supports so that ill and aging adults have options besides relying on a mother or a daughter.
If we ignore these needs, it’ll deepen the recession and slow recovery for everyone. If we recognize that caregiving is infrastructure and invest in it accordingly, women may just save our economy.
C. Nicole Mason, president and CEO, Institute for Women’s Policy Research
Courtesy of Institute of Women’s Policy Research
In the short term of the first quarter of the year, I expect to see more women exiting the workforce, especially if schools remain closed and day cares remain closed. I expect to see some women having to make that choice. In the second quarter of the year, we’ll see women being able to return to the workforce because of the stability that predictable care provides. I think we have a long road ahead of us.
I don’t think recovery is going to be swift. I just don’t. I think that it’ll be slow. And it might seem accelerated at the beginning when stay-at-home orders are 100% lifted. But some of the jobs that we’ve lost will not be coming back. I think we’re still a couple years out for full recovery, in terms of pre-pandemic levels of employment for women. But I believe there’s going to be a robust recovery plan similar to the one in 2008. Hopefully, that’ll give the economy a boost, but also help women workers who were most impacted.
Tina Tchen, president and CEO, Time’s Up
Courtesy of Tina Tchen
When I was in the White House 12 years ago, we came out of the gate with a Recovery Act to try to stimulate the economy—that was very much job one for us. Vice President Biden, at the time, led that recovery effort. And I expect that now–President-elect Biden will do the same—and that the economic team he has put in place understands this.
I’m hopeful that, even more than we saw 12 years ago, individual companies will respond with their own policies and their own investment in the workforce—so that we can actually see change take place in how we invest in our workforce, like building a caregiving infrastructure.
I really do think that 2021 can be the year in which we make that kind of generational, transformational change.
Rachel Thomas, cofounder and CEO, LeanIn.org
Patrick T. Fallon—Bloomberg/Getty Images
When experts talk about the “future of work,” we’re often talking about artificial intelligence or automation or robotics. COVID-19 has pushed us in a different direction: the future of work for women. It’s really clear that remote work is here to stay; 90% of companies think more work will be done remotely after COVID-19.
On the positive side, women, particularly mothers and caregivers, are highly likely to take advantage of this option. But it’s going to be critically important that we create a culture that embraces and doesn’t stigmatize remote work.
If we’re not thoughtful about the long-term shift to remote work, it may end up creating two classes of employees: those that don’t have a lot of caregiving responsibilities and will get lots of face time with managers, and those who do have caregiving responsibilities—predominantly women—who may end up paying for working remotely with fewer opportunities, less face time with senior leaders, and fewer chances to advance.
Jasmine Tucker, director of research, National Women’s Law Center
Courtesy of National Women’s Law Center
If this recession is anything like past ones, women are going to be experiencing unemployment in 2021; Black women after the Great Recession experienced double-digit unemployment rates for about 60 consecutive months; meanwhile, white men never reached double digits.
We’ve seen 2.2 million women completely drop out of the workforce. We wiped out a decade of gains in terms of employment for women in one month; we are now 30-plus years back in our labor force participation rate.
Now there are two people looking for work for every job opening—so employers are going to be choosy about who they’re hiring. I hate to think that this is true, but we’ve seen it over and over: Employers are racist and sexist and ageist. They’re not going to hire the women of color, or they’re going to hire them for the lower-paying job. Older women might not come back to the labor force at all.
For Black women and Latinas, the wage gap has robbed them of their ability to have savings; when they reenter the workforce, they’re going to be more likely to just take the first thing that comes along—often at a lower level than where they were before. Whereas a white man who has more savings and more resources might be able to wait a little longer.
The impact is going to be long and hard. Without any action now, there’s just no way that women are going to claw back and recoup the losses.


fortune--2020-12-29--The fate of $2,000 stimulus checks gains momentum, increasing the pressure on Senate Republicans

Ripple says it will be sued by the SEC , in what the company calls a parting shot at the @ @

President Donald Trump’s push for $2,000 COVID-19 relief checks now rests with the Senate after the House voted overwhelmingly to meet the president’s demand to increase the $600 stipends, but Republicans have shown little interest in boosting spending.
The outcome is highly uncertain heading into Tuesday’s session. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has declined to publicly address how he plans to handle the issue. But Democrats, sharing a rare priority with Trump, have seized on the opportunity to force Republicans into a difficult vote of either backing or defying the outgoing president.
After bipartisan approval by the House, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer warned, “There is no good reason for Senate Republicans to stand in the way.”
“There’s strong support for these $2,000 emergency checks from every corner of the country,” Schumer said in a statement late Monday. He called on McConnell to make sure the Senate helps “meet the needs of American workers and families who are crying out for help.”
The House tally was a stunning turn of events. Just days ago Republicans blocked Trump’s sudden demands for bigger checks during a brief Christmas Eve session as he defiantly refused to sign the broader COVID-19 aid and year-end funding bill into law.
As Trump spent days fuming from his private club in Florida, where he is spending the holidays, dozens of Republicans calculated it was better to link with Democrats to increase the pandemic stipend rather than buck the outgoing president and constituents counting on the money. Democrats led passage, 275-134, but 44 Republicans joined almost all Democrats in approval.
Senators were set to return to session Tuesday amid similar, stark GOP divisions between those who align with Trump’s populist instincts and others who adhere to what had been more traditional conservative views against government spending. Congress had settled on smaller $600 payments in a compromise over the big year-end relief bill Trump reluctantly signed into law.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared, “Republicans have a choice: Vote for this legislation or vote to deny the American people the bigger paychecks they need.”
The showdown could end up as more symbol than substance if Trump’s effort fizzles out in the Senate.
The legislative action during the rare holiday week session may do little to change the $2 trillion-plus COVID-19 relief and federal spending package Trump signed into law Sunday, one of the biggest bills of its kind providing relief for millions of Americans.
Fund the government
That package — $900 billion in COVID-19 aid and $1.4 trillion to fund government agencies — will deliver long-sought cash to businesses and individuals and avert a federal government shutdown that otherwise would have started Tuesday, in the midst of the public health crisis.
But the outcome will define Trump’s GOP, putting a spotlight on the Georgia runoff election Jan. 5 where two Republican senators are in the fights of their political lives against Democrats in a pair of races that will determine which party controls the Senate next year.
Together with votes Monday and Tuesday to override Trump’s veto of a sweeping defense bill, it’s potentially one last confrontation between the president and the Republican Party he leads as he imposes fresh demands and disputes the results of the presidential election. The new Congress is set to be sworn in Sunday.
Rep. Kevin Brady of Texas, the ranking Republican on the Ways and Means Committee, acknowledged the division and said Congress had already approved ample funds during the COVID-19 crisis. “Nothing in this bill helps anybody get back to work,” he said.
Aside from the direct $600 checks to most Americans, the COVID-19 portion of the bill revives a weekly pandemic jobless benefit boost — this time $300, through March 14 — as well as a popular Paycheck Protection Program of grants to businesses to keep workers on payrolls. It extends eviction protections, adding a new rental assistance fund.
The COVID-19 package draws and expands on an earlier effort from Washington. It offers billions of dollars for vaccine purchases and distribution, for virus contact tracing, public health departments, schools, universities, farmers, food pantry programs and other institutions and groups facing hardship in the pandemic.
Who qualifies for stimulus checks?
Americans earning up to $75,000 will qualify for the direct $600 payments, which are phased out at higher income levels, and there’s an additional $600 payment per dependent child.
Meantime the government funding portion of the bill keeps federal agencies nationwide running without dramatic changes until Sept. 30.
President-elect Joe Biden told reporters at an event in Wilmington, Delaware, that he supported the $2,000 checks.
Trump’s sudden decision to sign the bill came as he faced escalating criticism from lawmakers on all sides over his eleventh-hour demands. The bipartisan bill negotiated by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had already passed the House and Senate by wide margins. Lawmakers had thought they had Trump’s blessing after months of negotiations with his administration.
The president’s defiant refusal to act, publicized with a heated video he tweeted just before the Christmas holiday, sparked chaos, a lapse in unemployment benefits for millions and the threat of a government shutdown in the pandemic. It was another crisis of his own making, resolved when he ultimately signed the bill into law.
In his statement about the signing, Trump repeated his frustrations with the COVID-19 relief bill for providing only $600 checks to most Americans and complained about what he considered unnecessary spending, particularly on foreign aid — much of it proposed by his own budget.
While the president insisted he would send Congress “a redlined version” with spending items he wants removed, those are merely suggestions to Congress. Democrats said they would resist such cuts.
For now, the administration can only begin work sending out the $600 payments.
Most House Republicans simply shrugged off Trump’s push, 130 of them voting to reject the higher checks that would pile $467 billion in additional costs. Another 20 House Republicans — including Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, a Trump confidant — skipped the vote, despite pandemic procedures that allow lawmakers to vote by proxy to avoid travel to the Capitol. McCarthy was recovering at home from elbow surgery, his office said.
A day after the signing, Trump was back at the golf course in Florida, the state where he is expected to move after Biden is sworn in on Jan. 20.


fortune--2020-12-30--Stimulus check update: $600 checks will hit some bank accounts Tuesday night, says the Treasury

After days of will-he-or-won’t-he turmoil, President Trump signed the $900 billion COVID-19 relief bill Sunday evening. Now, $600 stimulus checks will begin to be deposited into Americans’ bank accounts on Tuesday night, and physical checks will be mailed Wednesday, according to Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.
The President previously said—after the relief bill had been passed—that he would veto any bill that did not include a $2,000 check for individual Americans. The resulting delay threatened a lapse in unemployment benefits, while endangering nearly $1 trillion in aid; it also put the government at risk of shutting down, since the relief was tied to a measure to fund the government through September.
Secretary Mnuchin, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, and Sen. Lindsey Graham worked together to get the President to acquiesce and sign the bill, according to Axios. Eventually, they convinced him that he would be able to play the bill as a win.
Mnuchin said on Twitter Tuesday evening that the Treasury had delivered a payment file to the Federal Reserve, and that payments would begin to arrive in some accounts by direct deposit as early as tonight and would continue into next week. Paper checks will be mailed starting tomorrow, Mnuchin added.
.@USTreasury has delivered a payment file to the @FederalReserve for Americans’ Economic Impact Payments. These payments may begin to arrive in some accounts by direct deposit as early as tonight and will continue into next week (1/2) — Steven Mnuchin (@stevenmnuchin1) December 29, 2020
Paper checks will begin to be mailed tomorrow. Later this week, you can check the status of your payment at https://t.co/pFBzGzK8mD. (2/2) — Steven Mnuchin (@stevenmnuchin1) December 29, 2020
“Treasury and the IRS are working with unprecedented speed to issue a second round of Economic Impact Payments to eligible Americans and their families,” said Mnuchin in a separate statement. “These payments are an integral part of our commitment to providing vital additional economic relief to the American people during this unprecedented time.”
Individuals will receive an Economic Impact Payment of up to $600, or $1,200 for married couples, and up to $600 for qualifying children. The payments will be sent automatically, and status updates will be available online.
The announcement comes as the Senate begins considering a separate measure to increase stimulus checks to $2,000. Trump and other GOP leaders have demanded that the Senate combine the increased-payment provision with legislation that would repeal Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which protects tech companies from being held liable for what users post on their platforms.
“The Senate will start the process for a vote that increases checks to $2,000, repeals Section 230, and starts an investigation into voter fraud,” the President said in an official statement Sunday.


fortune--2020-12-29--Only 2.1 million Americans have received their first dose of the COVID vaccine

President-elect Joe Biden criticized the Trump administration Tuesday for the pace of distributing COVID-19 vaccines and predicted that “things will get worse before they get better” when it comes to the pandemic.
“We need to be honest — the next few weeks and months are going to be very tough, very tough for our nation. Maybe the toughest during this entire pandemic,” Biden said during remarks in Wilmington, Delaware on Tuesday.
His comments come as the coronavirus pandemic has killed more than 336,000 Americans, with experts warning holiday travel and gatherings could precipitate yet another spike in virus cases even as the virus has already been surging in states nationwide.
Biden encouraged Americans to “steel our spines” for challenges to come and predicted that “things are going to get worse before they get better.”
He also went after the Trump Administration over their vaccination efforts, warning that the project, dubbed Operation Warp Speed, is moving at a slower pace than needed.
“As I long feared and warned the effort to distribute and administer the vaccine is not progressing as it should,” he said.
Earlier this month, Trump administration officials said they planned to have 20 million doses of the vaccine distributed by the end of the year. But according to data provided by the Centers for Disease Control, just over 11.4 million doses have been distributed and only 2.1 million people have received their first dose.
At the current pace, Biden said “it’s gonna take years, not months, to vaccinate the American people.”
The president-elect, who takes office Jan. 20, said he has directed his team to prepare a “much more aggressive effort, with more federal involvement and leadership, to get things back on track.”
Biden said he would “move heaven and earth to get us going in the right direction.”
He set a goal of administering 100 million shots of the vaccine within his first 100 days in office, but said to accomplish that, the pace of vaccinations would have to increase five to six times to 1 million shots a day. Even with that pace, however, Biden acknowledged it “will still take months to have the majority of Americans vaccinated.”
Biden has made combating the coronavirus pandemic a central focus of his transition work. He has pledged that one of his first acts as president will be to release a comprehensive coronavirus aid bill to Congress that will include funding for expanded vaccinations and testing, among other things. He also has a COVID-19 task force working on ways to better streamline the government response to the pandemic and help turn the tide of infections.
Still, Biden warned that it would take months after he’s in office for Americans to see positive change in the course of the virus.
“Turning this around is going to take time. We might not see improvement until we’re well into March, as it will take time for our COVID response plan to produce visible progress,” he said.


fortune--2020-12-29--First reported U.S. case of COVID-19 variant found in Colorado

The first reported U.S. case of the COVID-19 variant that’s been seen in the United Kingdom has been discovered in Colorado, Gov. Jared Polis announced Tuesday.
The coronavirus variant was found in a man in his 20s who is in isolation southeast of Denver and has no travel history, state health officials said.
The Colorado State Laboratory confirmed the virus variant, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was notified.
Scientists in the U.K. believe the new virus variant is more contagious than previously identified strains of the SARS-CoV-2. The vaccines being given now are thought to be effective against the variant, Colorado health officials said in a news release.
Public health officials are investigating other potential cases and performing contract tracing to determine the spread of the variant throughout the state.
“There is a lot we don’t know about this new COVID-19 variant, but scientists in the United Kingdom are warning the world that it is significantly more contagious. The health and safety of Coloradans is our top priority, and we will closely monitor this case, as well as all COVID-19 indicators, very closely,” Polis said.
Polis and state health officials are expected to address the public Wednesday.
The discovery of the new variant lead the CDC to issue new rules on Christmas Day for travelers arriving to the U.S. from the U.K., requiring they show proof of a negative COVID-19 test.


fortune--2020-12-29--Trump hyped Verily’s coronavirus testing tool. It led to less than 1% of all tests in 2020

Touted by President Donald Trump in March as the company that would connect Americans to coronavirus testing facilities across the country, Alphabet’s life sciences company Verily ended up being far from that. Though the Google corporate sibling did provide testing on a very small scale this year—as it had warned in the wake of the President’s surprise announcement—the coronavirus was never the focus of its larger business strategy.
“The reason we raised our hand for screening and testing is because we thought we had a platform that could be helpful,” said Jessica Mega, Verily’s cofounder and chief medical and scientific officer. But it’s only “part of our work” and a small part at that.
Verily, which started as one of Google X’s “moonshot” projects, has helped nearly 1.6 million people get tested for the coronavirus at more than 350 sites in 15 states. But that figure represents less than 1% of total tests given in the U.S. this year.
Testing, which has been mostly funded by state and federal governments, isn’t the primary revenue generator for the company, according to Verily, which declined to disclose revenue figures. Instead, Verily makes money from three parts of its business: health innovation for new devices and tools, clinical research, and virtual care for diseases like diabetes. The pandemic, according to Verily, has helped accelerate all three of those businesses.
“We’ve never seen [health data] be as relevant as it is,” Mega said. “In some ways our bets…have only proven out in the pandemic.”
Though most of Verily’s work is not pandemic-related, the company said it intends to continue exploring how it can aid with the coronavirus.
For example, its testing sites will continue as long as they are needed, Mega said. Further, through testing, Verily has lured nearly 100,000 people to sign up for its COVID-19 research registry and be contacted for a vaccine trial, two antibody trials, and a proprietary antibody research study. The company has also partnered with Pfizer and the Duke Clinical Research Institution on a study aimed at monitoring health care workers who have received the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to better understand how different people react to the drug.
Verily also expects a relatively new program it calls Healthy at Work to accelerate as employers bring their workers back to the office. The program, piloted during summer, gives employers access to a symptom tracker for workers, onsite testing capabilities with assistance from trained professionals, and guidance on how often people should be tested in different circumstances. The cost varies depending on the services companies request, Verily said, declining to comment further on the price.
Verily has 19 customers enrolled in Healthy at Work, including Brown University, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and Alphabet-owned Waymo. “There’s definitely been no pausing since we’ve started,” said Vivian Lee, Verily’s president of health platforms.
The public’s interest in Verily, a company relatively unknown outside of the health and tech industries, surged after President Trump gave a March press conference at which he erroneously said that Google had tasked 1,700 engineers with developing a website “very quickly” to help facilitate testing across the country. The comments caught Verily, the company that was actually doing the work on an exceptionally smaller scale, by surprise.
Though it scrambled to debut its coronavirus screening website and quickly set up its first few testing sites in California, it has spent the last 10 months focusing on small-scale, measured progress as it relates to coronavirus testing.
Even those efforts have come under scrutiny. Some people complained that they needed a Gmail account, the email service provided by Google, to use Verily’s website for screening and testing.
County officials San Francisco and Alameda ended testing with Verily earlier this year, citing privacy concerns that people had to provide sensitive health information using an email account from Google. Verily said those sites were always intended to be short-term testing operations. In response to privacy concerns, Verily has said that it follows all state and federal privacy regulations, including the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, more commonly known as HIPAA. The company also said it doesn’t share information with Google without user consent.
But Verily got another vote of confidence earlier this month after raising $700 million from investors including Silver Lake, Temasek, the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, and parent Alphabet. Verily said it planned to use the funds to expand its work on health data as well as its care and disease management offerings like Healthy at Work.
“We started this company—we’re coming up to five-plus years—with two or three ideas of where we were going to go,” Mega said. “If anything, the pandemic has only given us more conviction around the areas we’ve chosen.”


fortune--2020-12-29--Trump’s delayed signing of the new relief bill won’t create a loss of unemployment payments after al

Trump’s delayed signing of the new relief bill won’t create a loss of unemployment payments after all

A $900 billion stimulus bill passed into law on Sunday will, along with other programs, provide extended and enhanced unemployment benefits to millions of Americans. But leading up to the bill’s passage, state agencies and labor experts believed that President Donald Trump’s delay in signing the bill would create a one-week gap in benefits for many recipients.
Now, the U.S. Labor Department and several states have indicated that there should be no gap in those benefits. The Labor Department said that it “does not anticipate that eligible claimants will miss a week of benefits due to the timing of the law’s enactment” in a statement to CNBC.
So far Rhode Island, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, California, and Washington State have said there will be no gap week for their unemployment recipients. More states are expected to make the same confirmation. Those payments may still arrive late because of the time needed to update state systems, but late payments will include retroactive payments for prior weeks.
This will be particularly good news for the millions of Americans receiving unemployment benefits under the emergency Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) and Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) programs, both first implemented by the March CARES Act. The PUA program targets freelance or gig workers who do not normally qualify for unemployment, yet for much of the pandemic-driven recession it has served nearly as many Americans as traditional unemployment insurance. The PEUC program provides an additional 13 weeks of benefits to recipients who exhausted their state’s time limit for receiving unemployment.
Policy experts had warned that by approving the new relief package after Dec. 26, Trump would create a “gap week” for recipients of PUA and PEUC because states could not pay benefits for weeks that began after the bill was signed. It’s not currently clear what changes have been made to circumvent that obstacle.
Trump’s delay in signing the relief bill was one of the more shocking political twists in an already chaotic 2020. The bill was the result of months of negotiations between Republican and Democratic legislators, and Trump’s treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, also played a significant role. Yet after the bill had passed both branches of Congress, Trump refused to sign the bill for nearly a week, saying he wanted $2,000 direct stimulus payments instead of the $600 payments in the bill.
Trump, who has reportedly taken little interest in the work of governing since losing the presidential election, ultimately signed the relief bill, yet continued via Twitter to press for the larger relief payments. An amendment to expand the payments passed the Democratic-controlled House on Monday, Dec. 28, but a vote on the payments was blocked the next day by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. The gulf between McConnell and Trump’s positions is providing ammunition for Democratic attacks in a key Georgia senatorial runoff election scheduled early next month.


fortune--2020-12-29--The challenges of 2020 are making corporate boards stronger and better

The past year has been a time of extraordinary disruption. The world has seen immense upheaval—in public health, in the economy, across our societies, and in the way we live, work, and support one another.
As we look ahead to 2021 and the world embarks on the largest-ever vaccination effort to fight COVID-19, talk is beginning to shift to the return of “normal.” At Diligent, we’re seeing that conversation play out among the more than 700,000 board members and C-suite executives at organizations around the world with whom we partner to provide insights and technology. They are taking stock of the last year and making plans for the year to come.
One thing is abundantly clear: When it comes to governance and how corporations interact with the communities and societies they serve, the old normal simply will not suffice.
We have seen this paradigm shift in national conversations around racial justice; in the connective technology that has become a lifeline for our businesses and communities; and in the challenges facing working parents, a category that includes me and my wife, a Fortune 1000 CFO. Like millions of others, we’re working from home while also making time for family matters—collisions of personal and professional lives that have meant stepping away from board meetings to put kids down for a nap, or run to the pharmacy, or start dinner for the family.
The massive disruptions of 2020 have accelerated, augmented, and amplified several ongoing changes in corporate culture. These are changes we need to embrace and build on—among them, a shift toward greater leadership diversity, expanded use of technology to drive transparency and connection, and an increasing turn toward stakeholder capitalism.
One of the most obvious changes is the recognition that more perspectives must be embedded in decision-making at the highest levels. In boardrooms and C-suites around the world, diversity and inclusion are being transformed from buzzwords and pledges to reality. For example, more than 80% of executives surveyed by the Diligent Institute this fall in partnership with the NYSE indicated they are or soon will be planning to increase board diversity. The result is both more opportunity for extraordinary individuals and stronger, more effective, and more impactful companies.
At Diligent, we are proudly playing a role in that effort. To combat the tired excuse that there’s insufficient diverse talent, and to break old patterns that kept leadership searches within closed, homogenous social groups, earlier this year we leveraged our technology and our network to form the Modern Leadership initiative. This program taps into and expands the pool of board-ready talent from diverse backgrounds in order to make equity and inclusion a reality at the top, helping companies and boardrooms engage the skills and lived experiences of a broader leadership community.
The forced, sudden digitization experienced in 2020 has also fundamentally changed how corporate leaders view themselves and their relationship to their organizations. Businesses are flatter than ever in the work-from-home environment and boardrooms have simultaneously become more integrated with their companies. In perhaps the greatest paradox of 2020, the forced physical separation triggered by the pandemic has accelerated a move toward connectivity and transparency—and in turn, empathy. We have been inescapably reminded by a global health emergency that we are all connected, that we are in this together, and that the only way to make progress is to put our knowledge and skills to work for each other.
That’s something that I have felt firsthand—in the camaraderie of our team, in the way we approach problem-solving, and in the support we show for all members of our organization as we navigate this moment together.
That sense of connectivity can be felt not only within our organizations, but also in the way our companies operate on the global stage. The pandemic, its economic impacts, and the social and racial awakening that marked this year have driven corporate leaders to seek a more just form of capitalism. It has become undeniable that leaders must open the aperture when it comes to stakeholders, and irrefutable that they must strive for positive impact with customers, employees, partners, and the community writ large. Nearly 75% of the 400 corporate leaders we surveyed earlier this year now expect to discuss impacts of their decisions on non-shareholder stakeholders at least quarterly.
From PayPal’s recent commitment to raising employee wages, to Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s decision to reduce energy consumption, to Apple’s push for customer privacy protections, leaders are adjusting to this new reality in order to benefit workers, customers, and society.
But this is just the start. Leaders must keep pushing the envelope and shift the way they think about costs, benefits, overall purpose, and how they define and measure their commitments beyond the bottom line.
All these transformations were underway, to differing degrees, before the pandemic began, and many are still in early stages. But it is clear this moment of reckoning has catalyzed a greater sense of possibility and a more pronounced push for action that we should not abandon.
Large organizations are oftentimes slow to change, offering a lagging indicator of social innovation. But like a boulder beginning to roll downhill, those slow beginnings can presage gathering speed and momentum.
As we close the books on 2020 and as I look out across boardrooms and C-suites around the globe, I am heartened that even as the most acute effects of the pandemic on boardrooms and businesses draw to a close, the most impactful changes are just starting to unfold.
Brian Stafford is the CEO of Diligent Corp. and coauthor of Governance in the Digital Age.


fortune--2020-12-29--Digital patient vaccination records could be the foundation for a ‘vaccine passport’

Patient health information platform Healthvana has partnered with Los Angeles County to provide COVID-19 vaccination tracking to recipients. Primarily, the system will send patients follow-up reminders to return for the required second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines.
But Healthvana also says its records create a verifiable proof of vaccination. That proof, sometimes discussed as a “vaccine passport,” could allow safer protocols for public gatherings or other settings where transmission risk is high as the vaccine becomes more widely available.
In Los Angeles, where the spread of the novel coronavirus has reached crisis levels, the Healthvana records will supplement paper reminder cards given to recipients of a first vaccine dose. Though vaccine records are also kept by medical facilities, county officials tell Bloomberg that medical administrators don’t have the capacity to track the timing of millions of necessary follow-up doses and inform patients directly.
That matters because the two COVID-19 vaccines currently approved for emergency use in the U.S. are only fully effective after a second dose. Studies based on other multi-dose vaccines show that a large proportion of patients, particularly the elderly, disabled, and members of minority groups, do not return for a second dose. That could slow the progress to the vaccination threshold of roughly 80% that health authorities say is needed to control the pandemic in the U.S.
The Healthvana system also creates proof of a completed vaccination sequence that can be stored digitally in an Apple Wallet or similar systems. Those systems already provide authenticated and secure storage of official records such as student IDs, airline boarding passes, and event tickets.
Secure digital vaccine records could in theory be used to safely allow access to places or activities, such as airlines or public events, where there is a high risk of coronavirus transmission. Healthvana says it is in discussions with such facilities about using its certifications for that purpose. However, there is currently no official state or national U.S. policy—or broad private-sector consensus—about how such a system might work.


fortune--2020-12-29--Novavax’s COVID vaccine candidate is the fifth to reach final-stage testing in the U.S.

A huge U.S. study of another COVID-19 vaccine candidate got underway Monday as states continue to roll out scarce supplies of the first shots to a nation anxiously awaiting relief from the catastrophic outbreak.
Public health experts say more options in addition to the two vaccines now being dispensed — one made by Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, the other by Moderna — are critical to amassing enough shots for the country and the world.
The candidate made by Novavax Inc. is the fifth to reach final-stage testing in the United States. Some 30,000 volunteers are needed to prove if the shot — a different kind than its Pfizer and Moderna competitors — really works and is safe.
“If you want to have enough vaccine to vaccinate all the people in the U.S. who you’d like to vaccinate — up to 85% or more of the population — you’re going to need more than two companies,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease expert, told The Associated Press on Monday.
The coronavirus is blamed for about 1.8 million deaths worldwide, including more than 330,000 in the U.S. This has been the deadliest month of the outbreak in the U.S. yet, with about 65,000 deaths in December so far, according to the COVID Tracking Project. The nation has repeatedly recorded more than 3,000 dead per day over the past few weeks.
And the U.S. could be facing a terrible winter: Despite warnings to stay home and avoid others over Christmastime, nearly 1.3 million people went through the nation’s airports on Sunday, the highest one-day total since the crisis took hold in the U.S. nine months ago.
The Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed expects to have shipped 20 million doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines to states by the beginning of January, fewer than originally estimated to the frustration of states and health officials trying to schedule the shots.
There is no real-time tracking of how quickly people are getting the first of the two required doses. As of Monday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had reports of more than 2.1 million vaccinations out of 11.4 million doses shipped — but the agency knows that count is outdated. It can take days for reports from vaccine providers to trickle in and get added to the site.
“Just because a vaccine arrives doesn’t mean we can put an on-the-spot clinic up and running,” said Jenny Barta, a public health official in Carlton County, Minnesota.
But Tuesday, her agency aims to vaccinate 100 people in a drive-thru clinic for emergency medical workers that Barta hopes could become a model for larger attempts at mass vaccination. Nurses will wheel vaccine to cars lined up in a county-owned snowplow garage. Once the drivers get their shots, they will wait in parking spaces to be sure they don’t have an allergic reaction before heading home.
“Vaccinating one individual at a time is how we’re going to work our way out of this pandemic,” she said.
Yet another worry hanging over the vaccine scramble: Will shots block a new variant of the coronavirus that emerged in Britain and might spread more easily? Fauci said that data from Britain indicates the vaccines still will protect against the virus but that National Institutes of Health researchers will be “looking at it very intensively” to be sure.
A look at the frontrunners in the global vaccine race:
GENETIC CODE VACCINES
The U.S. based its emergency rollout of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and a similar one made by Moderna and the NIH on studies suggesting they are both roughly 95% effective. Europe over the weekend began its first vaccinations with the Pfizer shot, and on Jan. 6 will decide whether to add Moderna’s.
These shots are made with a brand-new technology that injects a piece of genetic code for the spike protein that coats the coronavirus. That messenger RNA, or mRNA, induces the body to produce some harmless spike protein, enough to prime the immune system to react if it later encounters the real virus.
Both vaccines must be kept frozen, the Pfizer shot at ultra-low temperatures that complicate its delivery to poor or rural areas.
Additional companies are working toward their own mRNA candidates, including Germany’s CureVac, which has begun a large study in Europe.
PROTEIN VACCINES
The Novavax candidate is made differently, using what Fauci called a “more tried and true” technology that needs only ordinary refrigeration. The Maryland company grows harmless copies of the coronavirus spike protein in the laboratory and mixes in an immune-boosting chemical.
Novavax already has enrolled 15,000 people in a late-stage study in Britain and 4,000 in South Africa. The newest and largest study, funded by the U.S. government, will recruit volunteers at more than 115 sites in the U.S. and Mexico and target high-risk older adults along with volunteers from Black and Hispanic communities, which have been hit hard by the virus.
“We’ve got to protect our community and our people,” said the Rev. Peter Johnson, 75, a prominent civil rights activist in Dallas who was among the first volunteers.
Two-thirds of participants will receive vaccine and the rest dummy shots, a twist from earlier vaccine studies that gave half their volunteers a placebo. That should help researchers recruit people who wonder whether it’s better to take part in a study or wait their turn for an existing shot, said Dr. Gregory Glenn, research chief at Novavax.
For many people, that would be a long wait: The Pfizer and Moderna shots are slated first for health care workers and nursing home residents, followed by people 75 and older and essential workers.
“If you wanted to hedge your bets, for most people who aren’t in those very high-risk groups, the shortest route to getting the vaccine would be to sign up for a trial,” said NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins.
TROJAN HORSE VACCINES
The next big vaccine news may come from Johnson & Johnson, which is aiming for a one-dose COVID-19 vaccine.
Made in yet another way, it uses a harmless virus – a cold virus called an adenovirus — to carry the spike gene into the body. In mid-December, J&J finished enrolling about 45,000 volunteers in a final-stage study in the U.S. and a half-dozen other countries. Fauci expects early results sometime next month.
In Britain, regulators also are considering clearing a similar vaccine made by AstraZeneca and Oxford University.
Tests of the shots in Britain, South Africa and Brazil suggested they are safe and partially protective — about 70%. But questions remain about how well the vaccine works in people over 55 and how to interpret results from a small number of people given a different set of doses.
A U.S. study of the AstraZeneca shots is still recruiting volunteers; Fauci said researchers hope it will provide a more clear answer.
Companies in China and Russia also are producing adenovirus-based vaccines and began administering them before the results of final testing came in. Argentina is expected to soon use the Russian vaccine.
“KILLED” VACCINES
Spike-focused vaccines aren’t the only option. Making vaccines by growing a disease-causing virus and then killing it is a still older approach that gives the body a sneak peek at the germ itself rather than just that single spike protein.
China has three such “inactivated” COVID-19 vaccines in final testing in several countries and has allowed emergency use in some people ahead of results. An Indian company is testing its own inactivated candidate.


fortune--2020-12-29--Pierre Cardin, legendary fashion designer and licensing genius, dies at 98

Pierre Cardin, the French designer whose famous name embossed everything from wristwatches to bedsheets after his iconic Space Age styles shot him into the fashion stratosphere in the 1960s, has died, the French Academy of Fine Arts said Tuesday. He was 98.
A licensing maverick, Cardin’s name went on thousands of products and in the brand’s heyday in the 1970s and ’80s, while goods bearing his fancy cursive signature were sold at some 100,000 outlets worldwide.
That number dwindled dramatically in later years, as his products were increasingly regarded as cheaply made and his clothing — which, decades later, remained virtually unchanged from its 60s-era styles — felt almost laughably dated.
A savvy businessman, Cardin used the fabulous wealth that was the fruit of his empire to snap up top-notch properties in Paris, including the Belle Epoque restaurant Maxim’s, which he also frequented.
The Fine Arts Academy announced his death in a tweet Tuesday. He had been among its illustrious members since 1992. The academy did not give a cause of death or say where or when he had died.
Along with fellow Frenchman Andre Courreges and Spain’s Paco Rabanne, two other Paris-based designers known for their Space Age styles, Cardin revolutionized fashion starting in the early 1950s.
STILLS/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images
At a time when other Paris labels were obsessed with flattering the female form, Cardin’s designs cast the wearer as a sort of glorified hanger, there to showcase the clothes’ sharp shapes and graphic patterns. Destined neither for pragmatists nor for wallflowers, his designs were all about making a big entrance — sometimes very literally.
Gowns and bodysuits in fluorescent spandex were fitted with plastic hoops that stood away from the body at the waist, elbows, wrists and knees. Cardin bubble dresses and capes enveloped their wearers in oversized spheres of fabric. Toques were shaped like flying saucers; bucket hats sheathed models’ entire heads, with cutout windshields at the eyes.
“Fashion is always ridiculous, seen from before or after. But in the moment, it’s marvelous,” Cardin said in a 1970 interview with French television.
Cardin was born on July 7, 1922, in a small town near Venice, Italy, to a modest, working-class family. When he was a child, the family moved to Saint Etienne in central France, where Cardin was schooled and became an apprentice to a tailor at age 14.
Cardin would later embrace his status as a self-made man, saying in the same 1970 interview that going it alone “makes you see life in a much more real way and forces you to take decision and to be courageous.
“It’s much more difficult to enter a dark woods alone than when you already know the way through,” he said.
After moving to Paris, he worked as an assistant in the House of Paquin starting in 1945 and also helped design costumes for the likes of Jean Cocteau. He also was involved in creating the costumes for the director’s 1946 hit, “Beauty and the Beast.”
After working briefly with Elsa Schiaparelli and Christian Dior, Cardin opened his own house in Paris’ tony first district, starting with costumes and masks.
Cardin delivered his first real collection in 1953. Success quickly followed, with the 1954 launch of the celebrated “bubble” dress, which put the label on the map.
Cardin staged his first ready-to-wear show in 1959 at Paris’ Printemps department store, a bold initiative that got him temporarily kicked out of the Chambre Syndicale. Cardin’s relationship with the organization — the governing body of French fashion — was rocky, and he later left of his own volition to stage shows on his own terms.
Cardin’s high-profile relationship with French screen siren Jeanne Moreau, the smoky-voiced blond of “Jules and Jim” fame, also helped boost the brand’s profile. Described by both as a “true love,” the relationship lasted about five years and they never married.
Cardin saw the astronomical expense of producing haute couture collections as an investment. Even though the clothing’s pharaonic prices didn’t cover the cost of crafting the made-to-measure garments, the media coverage generated by his couture shows helped sell lower sticker-price items, like hats, belts and hosiery.
As Cardin’s fame and fortune spiked, so did his real estate portfolio. He long lived an austere, almost monastic existence with his sister in a sprawling apartment across from the Elysee presidential palace in Paris. He bought up so much top-flight real estate in the neighborhood that fashion insiders joked he could have mounted a coup d’etat.
In addition to his women’s and men’s clothing boutiques, Cardin opened a children’s shop, a furniture store and the Espace Cardin, a sprawling hall in central Paris where the designer would later stage fashion shows, as well as plays, ballets and other cultural events.
Beyond clothes, Cardin put his stamp on perfumes, makeup, porcelain, chocolates, a resort in the south of France and even the velvet-walled watering hole Maxim’s — where he could often be seen at lunch.
The 1970s saw a huge Cardin expansion that brought his outlets to more than 100,000, with about as many workers producing under the Cardin label worldwide.
Cardin was in the vanguard of recognizing the importance of Asia to the fashion world, both as a manufacturing hub and for its consumer potential.
He was present in Japan starting in the early ’60s and in 1979 became the first Western designer to stage a fashion show in China.
In 1986, he inked a deal with Soviet authorities to open a showroom in the Communist nation to sell clothes locally made under his label.
In his later life, with no heir apparent, Cardin dismantled parts of his vast empire, selling dozens of his Chinese licenses to two local firms in 2009.
Two years later, he told the Wall Street Journal that he’d be willing to sell his entire company — made up at that point of an estimated 500-600 licenses — for $1.4 billion.


fortune--2020-12-29--Will COVID-19 vaccines work on the new coronavirus variant?

Will COVID-19 vaccines work on the new coronavirus variant?
Experts believe so, but they’re working to confirm that.
A coronavirus variant in the United Kingdom has caused alarm because of the possibility that it might spread more easily. But even if that turns out to be true, experts say the COVID-19 vaccines being rolled out will likely still work on the variant.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease expert, said data coming from Britain indicates the vaccines still will block the virus. But the U.S. also will do tests to be sure.
Viruses often undergo small changes as they reproduce and move through a population. In fact, the slight modifications are how scientists track the spread of a virus from one place to another.
But if a virus mutates significantly enough, one worry is that current vaccines might no longer offer as much protection. And although that’s a possibility to watch for over time with the coronavirus, experts say they don’t believe it will be the case with the variant in the U.K.
“My expectation is, this will not be a problem,” said Moncef Slaoui, the chief science adviser for the U.S. government’s COVID-19 vaccine push.


fortune--2020-12-29--Under Biden, expect more scrutiny of Big Tech and mergers

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The Biden administration is expected to take a tougher stance against acquisitions than President Trump’s while continuing a recent flurry of antitrust cases against Big Tech.
“Antitrust law and policy are poised for a course correction,” says Andrew Gavil, an antitrust expert at Howard University School of Law. “The degree of that correction remains to be seen and will be influenced by both politics and the composition of the courts.”
Trump’s antitrust regulators, led by Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim, loudly tried stopping AT&T from acquiring Time Warner in 2017—only to suffer a stinging defeat in court. Overall, however, Trump’s Justice Department made 19% fewer requests for data about mergers—which delay closings to allow regulators to take a closer look—and filed 18% fewer cases to block mergers than the prior administration.
From time to time, the Trump administration even wrote legal opinions opposing antitrust lawsuits from other agencies, like the Federal Trade Commission’s case against Qualcomm. On the other hand, at the end of its tenure, Delrahim’s team did file high-profile antitrust suits against Google and Facebook, signaling that the concentrated power of big tech companies was alarming to Republicans as well as Democrats.
“The approach we took—that this is legitimate, to look at it and not be afraid of the tech companies—opened up the ability of the staff to investigate,” the outgoing assistant AG said at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference earlier this month. Delrahim added that he hopes under the Biden administration the battle against Big Tech “continues, but is not overzealous.”
Biden didn’t make antitrust or cracking down on Big Tech major parts of his campaign, but he has named to his transition a few lawyers who worked on antitrust cases during the Obama administration, notes Stanford Law professor Mark Lemley. Bill Baer, who had Delrahim’s role under Obama, is part of Biden’s transition team for the FTC, along with Laura Moy, a privacy expert and professor at Georgetown Law School. Gene Kimmelman, senior adviser at nonprofit Public Knowledge and an Obama Justice Department veteran, is on Biden’s DOJ transition team.
“Based on these early steps, it looks like they will take a more expansive view of antitrust than the Trump administration,” Lemley says. “But this is not the radical ‘break them all up’ view you might associate with Sen. Elizabeth Warren. This is not the full swing towards populism.”
The Trump administration has done little to slow the wave of tech mergers. Large deals like Intel’s $15 billion Mobileye purchase and IBM’s $34 billion RedHat buy garnered no opposition, and even T-Mobile’s $24 billion merger with Sprint won approval eventually. Similarly, there have been no tough reviews of smaller acquisitions by Microsoft, Adobe, PayPal, Salesforce, and others.
Wall Street expects continued scrutiny of the four or five largest tech companies but not all out warfare, says analyst David Heger, at Edward Jones. “It seems to be the one issue that is bipartisan in nature,” he says. “And at least for now, investors are not anticipating something dramatic out of these cases, which are going to take years to play out.”
For example, Google has been hit with three separate antitrust cases over the past three months, but its stock is up 16% during that period.
Biden taking over from Trump won’t change that calculus much, Heger says. “Both sides feel action needs to be taken, so the flavors may be slightly different in the finer points, but I don’t see a dramatic change,” he says. “Certainly no one is pulling back on these cases.”


fortune--2020-12-30--The top 10 business ebooks and audiobooks checked out from public libraries in 2020

The pandemic forced public libraries to close their doors, but they remained resilient in supporting local communities by moving important programs, tools, and resources online as much as possible. The pandemic also renewed (pardon the pun) people’s relationships with the library, encouraging readers and listeners to download digital services like OverDrive and its digital reading app, Libby, for free access to thousands of ebooks and audiobooks, including new releases and bestsellers.
“Librarians and educators pivoted to provide ebooks and audiobooks to all readers when their doors closed and school became remote,” Steve Potash, founder and CEO of OverDrive, tells Fortune.
At first, juvenile and young adult titles were a priority, Potash explains, followed by readers “seeking to comfort, educate, and delight themselves during their shelter-in-place periods.” He notes this led to a surge in demand for cookbooks, gardening, and other hobbies and crafts.
“Millions of seniors and other first-time users discovered and downloaded their first ebook and audiobook as a result—and they are now trained and sticking with the digital book option, thanks to the investments made by librarians and educators,” Potash says.
For business readers, here’s a rundown of the most downloaded ebooks and audiobooks at public libraries with access to OverDrive in 2020.
Ebooks
Audiobooks


fortune--2020-12-30--U.K. approves AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine

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The U.K. government has approved AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use, becoming the first government to do so.
The decision by the U.K. drugs regulator will clear the way for tens of millions of Britons to be vaccinated in the coming months. Britain had preordered 100 million doses of the vaccine, more than any other vaccine candidate.
It is the second vaccine to be granted emergency use authorization in the U.K., following approval of Pfizer/BioNTech’s vaccine in early December.
“Today is an important day for millions of people in the U.K. who will get access to this new vaccine,” Pascal Soriot, AstraZeneca’s chief executive officer, said in a statement. “It has been shown to be effective, well-tolerated, simple to administer, and is supplied by AstraZeneca at no profit.”
The British approval may also encourage other governments around the world to also authorize the vaccine. Many public health experts see the AstraZeneca vaccine as crucial to the worldwide fight against the coronavirus because it is less expensive and can be stored at much higher temperatures than several of the other vaccines being developed.
AstraZenca has signed agreements to make and provide more than 2 billion doses of its vaccine. In addition to the doses committed to the U.K., this includes an agreement to provide 300 million doses to the U.S., 400 million for the European Union, and 1.3 billion doses specifically designated for lower-income countries.
Cheaper than rival vaccines
The company has promised not to make any profit on the vaccine during the period of the pandemic. Because of this, and because of the simpler manufacturing methods for this vaccine compared to some of the other candidates, AstraZeneca has priced the vaccine at just $3 to $4 per dose, compared to prices at least five times higher for many competing vaccines.
The vaccine, which the Cambridge, England–based AstraZeneca developed with scientists from the University of Oxford, was found to be safe in large clinical trials conducted in the U.K., Brazil, and South Africa. But data also showed the vaccine as potentially less effective than those from biotechnology company Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech.
Both of those vaccines were about 95% effective in clinical trials. By contrast, AstraZeneca’s vaccine was just 62.1% effective when given as two standard doses four weeks apart, according to clinical trial results published in the medical journal The Lancet. But, for a smaller cohort, it proved 90% effective when a half-dose was given initially, followed by a full dose. This smaller cohort, however, did not include any people over the age of 55.
Confusion over those results—and how the smaller cohort came to receive the regimen involving the half-dose—sapped AstraZeneca’s stock price, which had reached all-time highs largely on the company’s status as front-runner in vaccine sweepstakes.
The results have clouded the prospects from AstraZeneca’s vaccine, with some speculating that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration will not authorize it for use in the U.S., at least until more clinical trial data is available. AstraZeneca is currently conducting a 30,000-person trial of the vaccine in the U.S.
It is unclear what dosing regimen will be used in the U.K. under the emergency use authorization, but statements from the government and the company implied it would be one in which people are given two standard doses. The government has said its plan is to give as many at-risk people as possible a first dose of the vaccine, providing some protection, with a second dose given within 12 weeks, rather than the four-week period used in the clinical trial.
The hope, the government said, is that this will allow more people to be inoculated and gain at least some protection from the existing stocks of the vaccine.
AstraZeneca’s vaccine works differently than those approved so far from Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech. Those vaccines use messenger RNA (mRNA) to instruct cells to produce proteins associated with the coronavirus, prompting an immune response from the body. The AstraZeneca vaccine uses a method developed by researchers at Oxford’s Jenner Institute that uses a chimpanzee virus that has been genetically modified to produce the coronavirus spike protein.
The vaccine can be stored at normal refrigerator temperatures, between 2 degrees Celsius and 8 degrees Celsius (32.5 to 46.5 Fahrenheit) as opposed to -70 degrees Celsius (-94 degrees Fahrenheit) for the mRNA vaccines. Those extreme low temperatures have created a logistical problem for distribution of the mRNA vaccines. For instance, in the U.K., where general practice doctors are currently administering the COVID-19 vaccine efforts, many have been unable to participate in the inoculation drive so far because they lack equipment to keep vaccine vials at these ultralow temperatures.


fortune--2020-12-30--A Chinese drugmaker says its COVID-19 vaccine candidate is 79% effective

Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinopharm said on Wednesday that its COVID-19 vaccine candidate is 79.34% effective at preventing people from contracting the coronavirus. The state-controlled firm said it has applied to regulators in China to allow widespread use of the vaccine.
Sinopharm’s Wednesday results are lower than the 86% effectiveness that the United Arab Emirates reported for the vaccine in early December, but much higher than the 50% threshold required for a vaccine to be deemed effective by medical consensus.
The UAE began widespread distribution of Sinopharm’s vaccine this month, and Bahrain, which also participated in Phase III Sinopharm trials, approved Sinopharm’s candidate earlier this month.
Sinopharm didn’t explain the discrepancy between the UAE efficacy figure and its own, which was based on interim analysis of Phase III clinical trial data; the firm told Reuters it would release detailed results at a later date, but didn’t specify when that would be.
The company hasn’t yet received government approval for the widespread use of its vaccine in China, but people in high-risk groups have been receiving shots of the Sinopharm COVID-19 vaccine since July under China’s emergency use program. Sinopharm said in November that around 1 million people in China received shots of its vaccine candidate under the emergency use scheme.
Sinopharm said it will be able to produce 1 billion doses of its vaccine in 2021. Unlike the leading COVID-19 vaccines produced by Pfizer and Moderna, Sinopharm’s vaccine doesn’t require expensive cold-chain shipping networks, meaning storage and distribution of Sinopharm’s vaccine will be cheaper and more accessible to lower- and middle-income countries.
Indonesia, for example—the world’s fourth most populous country—doesn’t have the cold-chain infrastructure required to store and distribute the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, but it does have the technology required to distribute Sinopharm’s vaccine.
The U.K. on Wednesday became the first country in the world to authorize the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, which like Sinopharm’s vaccine, doesn’t require cold-chain storage and so is cheaper and easier to store and distribute than the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.


fortune--2020-12-30--Boeing 737 Max flies again, carrying paying passengers from New York to Miami

American Airlines flew a Boeing 737 Max with paying passengers from Miami to New York on Tuesday, the plane’s first commercial flight in U.S. skies since it was grounded after two deadly crashes.
American flight 718 carried 87 passengers on the 172-seat plane, and the return flight from LaGuardia Airport to Miami International Airport held 151 passengers, according to an airline spokeswoman.
Last month, the Federal Aviation Administration approved changes that Boeing made to an automated flight-control system implicated in crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia that killed 346 people in all. In both crashes, the system pushed the nose down repeatedly based on faulty sensor readings, and pilots were unable to regain control.
The FAA cleared the way for U.S. airlines to resume using the plane if certain changes are made and pilots are provided with additional training including time in a flight simulator.
Brazil’s Gol airlines operated the first passenger flight with a revamped Max on Dec. 9. Since then, Gol and Aeromexico have operated about 600 flights between them with Max jets, according to tracking service Flightradar24 and aviation-data firm Cirium.
American plans to make one round trip a day between Miami and New York with Max jets through Jan. 4 before putting the plane on more routes. United Airlines plans to resume Max flights in February, and Southwest Airlines expects to follow in March.
All three airlines say they will give customers the chance to change flights if they are uncomfortable flying on the Max.
The Max was grounded worldwide in March 2019, days after the second crash. Reports by House and Senate committees faulted Boeing and the FAA for failures in the process of certifying the plane. Congressional investigators uncovered internal Boeing documents in which company employees raised safety concerns and bragged about deceiving regulators.
FAA Administrator Stephen Dickson, a former military and airline pilot, operated a test flight in September and vouched for the reworked plane’s safety, saying he would put his family on it. American Airlines President Robert Isom was on Tuesday’s inaugural U.S. flight, according to the airline.
“Cut corners”
Some relatives of people who died in the second crash, a Max operated by Ethiopian Airlines, contend that the plane is still unsafe. They and their lawyers say that Boeing is refusing to hand over documents about the plane’s design and development.
“The truth is that 346 people are now dead because Boeing cut corners, lied to regulators, and simply considers this the cost of doing business,” Yalena Lopez-Lewis, whose husband died in the crash, said in a statement issued by her lawyers. “It is infuriating that American Airlines is in effect rewarding Boeing for the corrupt and catastrophic process that led to the Max.”
Zipporah Kuria, a British citizen whose father also died in the Ethiopian crash, pointed to the recent disclosure in a Senate committee report that Boeing representatives coached FAA test pilots reviewing Boeing updates to the Max flight-control system.
“Boeing leadership is still riddled with deceit. Their priorities are not on consumer safety,” she said in an interview.
Boeing spokesman Bernard Choi said the company “learned many hard lessons” from the crashes and is committed to safety.
“We continue to work closely with global regulators and our customers to support the safe return of the fleet to service around the world,” Choi said.
The return of the plane to U.S. skies is a huge boost for Boeing, which has lost billions during the Max grounding because it has been unable to deliver new planes to airline customers. Orders for the plane have plunged. Boeing has removed more than 1,000 Max jets from its backlog because airlines canceled orders or the sales are not certain to go through because of the pandemic crisis gripping the travel industry.


fortune--2020-12-30--Louisiana’s newest Republican member of the U.S. House died from COVID-19 before being sworn into of

Louisiana’s newest Republican member of the U.S. House died from COVID-19 before being sworn into office

Luke Letlow, Louisiana’s newest Republican member of the U.S. House, died Tuesday night from complications related to COVID-19 only days before being sworn into office. He was 41 years old.
Letlow spokesman Andrew Bautsch confirmed the congressman-elect’s death at Ochsner-LSU Health Shreveport.
“The family appreciates the numerous prayers and support over the past days but asks for privacy during this difficult and unexpected time,” Bautsch said in a statement. “A statement from the family along with funeral arrangements will be announced at a later time.”
The incoming congressman, elected in a December runoff and set to take office in January, was admitted to a Monroe hospital on Dec. 19 after testing positive for the coronavirus disease. He was later transferred to the Shreveport facility and placed in intensive care.
Letlow is survived by his wife, Julia Barnhill Letlow, and two children.