Six on History: The 'Rona
panaritisp
Welcome back to Six on History Happy Thanksgiving!
PS: If you like what you find on the "Six on History" blog, please share w/your contacts.
Click here for Detailed Search Help h/t John Elfrank
"In just a few years, Moderna went from stock market dud to moonshot, a prime example of how our state’s life sciences and tech companies, riding a powerful Wall Street wave, can create wealth that ripples through the local economy.
If you weren’t paying attention — and most people outside of the biotech industry weren’t — the Cambridge company’s shares went nowhere after its initial public offering in late 2018. Nowhere, that is, until Moderna jumped into the race to develop a COVID-19 vaccine about a year later.
The stock blasted off and reached a high of $497 in August, compared with $21 in February 2020, when the vaccine was sent to the National Institutes of Health for testing. Even after a punishing sell-off last week on concerns that future vaccine sales won’t be as robust as Moderna had indicated, the stock is trading at $237, giving it a market value of $96 billion. That’s the highest of any of the state’s publicly traded biotech companies.
Moderna’s top executives and early investors have become astoundingly rich, even after last week’s pounding, which illustrated just how transitory stock market wealth can sometimes be. Cofounder Robert Langer holds a stake worth nearly $2.8 billion, while CEO Stephane Bancel controls $5.3 billion of stock, plus options that were valued at $1.2 billion at the end of last year.
But the new wealth doesn’t stop there. A significant swath of Moderna‘s 2,400 employees owns shares through its stock purchase plan. The company also has issued options and share grants to employees and others that have a combined paper profit of $8 billion.
Mullin witnessed the stock wealth effect in action when his former company, Watertown’s Pandion Therapeutics, was acquired by Merck & Co. in April for $1.85 billion. “Lots of people got instantly rich,” he said.
This bonanza is happening at tech and biotech companies across the local landscape: Vertex, HubSpot, Ginkgo Bioworks, Toast, Wayfair, and DraftKings, just to name a few of the big winners. The companies and their employees, many of them in their 30s and 40s, are flush with cash. Their spending is filtering through the economy, boosting everything from housing prices to sales of luxe cars, watches, and wines.
To cite one conspicuous example: Sales at European Watch Company have grown 25 percent a year over the past several years, according to Joshua Ganjei, general manager of the Newbury Street store, where the most expensive timepieces can easily top $100,000. “Demand is in uncharted territory,” he said.
The benefits of this gold rush, however, have not been evenly distributed. They never are. More on this extremely important caveat in a bit.
US household net worth reached $134 trillion in June, up 22 percent since the final three months of 2019, according to the most recent Federal Reserve data. That stretch includes the brief recession and bear market last year caused by the pandemic, as well as several rounds of federal relief payments.
Stocks, as tracked by the Standard & Poor’s 500 index, gained 34 percent in the past year, and single-family home prices, both in Massachusetts and nationally, increased about 15 percent, data from Zillow show.
People tend to spend more when financial markets are doing well; they feel richer, even if they haven’t cashed out yet.
“The stock market has always been a confidence barometer,” said Ernie Boch Jr., whose Boch Exotics auto dealership sells high-end nameplates such as Ferrari, Maserati, and Porsche. After stockpiling cash during the pandemic, many consumers have more discretionary income and feel ready to spend, he said. Even with a spike in car prices due to supply disruptions, the wealthiest are buying very expensive cars.
“Bentley is going to have the best year ever,” Boch said. “So will Rolls Royce. McLaren is up crazy.” Point of reference: McLarens start at about $200,000 and travel all the way up to $2 million.
Money is also pouring into high-end real estate. In the downtown Boston condominium market, sales of units costing $3 million or more set a record for the year through Oct. 29, according to LINK data provided by Douglas Elliman Real Estate. In the past two months, three penthouse units in the Mandarin Oriental on Commonwealth Avenue sold in two separate transactions for a combined $48.8 million.
But it’s not just toney condos in the Back Bay or the Seaport that are being scooped up, said Kevin Ahearn, chief executive of Douglas Elliman’s Boston division. For the first time in his 40-year career, the state’s three big housing markets — Boston, the suburbs inside I-495, and second homes on the Cape — are running hot at the same time, he said. Recent numbers show that the Greater Boston housing market is cooling slightly, but that mostly means prices aren’t rising at the torrid clip of a year ago.
“It’s just been an extraordinary run,” Ahearn said.
One business to feel the impact of a strong economy is the Urban Grape, a wine store in Boston’s South End. Co-owner Hadley Douglas lauds her corporate clients for their commitment to the community, including Black- and women-owned businesses like hers.
“There is a lot of great company-building going on here,” said Douglas, who started the store with her husband, TJ, who is Black. And spending by business customers — primarily for wine-tasting events and gifts — has been a key source of growth.
“That really moves the needle for small businesses in a huge way,” said Hadley Douglas. “It allows us to hire people, to give people raises.”
Now to the caveat I teased earlier: Even with all the lavish spending we’re seeing, the gains from a roaring stock market stay mostly with the rich. No surprise, I know. But it’s often glossed over when we marvel at the market’s latest record high.
The wealthiest 1 percent of Americans owned 54 percent of corporate stock and mutual fund assets as of June 30, according to the Fed. The share for the top 10 percent is 89 percent.
Stock market profits are driving a widening wedge between the rich and the rest of us, with the top 10 percent controlling 70 percent of the nation’s total wealth, compared with 61 percent at the start of 1990.
The thriving tech and life sciences sectors make the Massachusetts and national economies more vibrant. The pie is growing, and that’s the good news.
But for half the country — the bottom 50 percent by net worth — its slice of the pie is shrinking.
It’s a trend that can only end badly."
"As debate over a proposal to temporarily waive intellectual property protections for COVID vaccines and treatments continues to stall at the World Trade Organization (WTO), members that remain opposed — including the United Kingdom, Switzerland and the European Union — are increasingly being accused of violating human rights on an international scale.
Calls for the WTO to approve the so-called TRIPS waiver for vaccine patents and manufacturing technology is reaching a fever pitch with the emergence of the Omicron variant that was first identified in South Africa. Omicron has prompted travel bans across the world and inflamed tensions over massive global disparities in vaccine access, which experts and advocates have warned for months would allow the virus to mutate and spread outward from lower-income countries where vaccines remain out of reach for most people.
Yet Moderna and other pharmaceutical companies are not sharing “recipes” for COVID vaccines with a South African biotech firm and a World Health Organization (WHO) effort to transfer the technology necessary for making mRNA vaccines to African nations,
where only about 1 in 10 people have received at least one dose of the vaccine. In the United States and Europe, monopolies on the crucial technology and know-how needed to make vaccines largely remains controlled by private pharmaceutical companies that received billions of dollars from wealthy governments to develop vaccines — and are now pulling in billions in global profit.“The spread of new variants is the direct result of the staggering inequitable access to vaccines, therapeutics, diagnostics and other products needed to treat and contain the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Sangeeta Shashikant, a policy advisor for the Third World Network, in a call with reporters last week. “Intellectual property monopolies are causing the inequity.”
Leaders of the Global Nurses Union, which represents 2.5 million health care workers in 28 countries, and the left coalition Progressive International sent a letter to the UN Human Rights Council on Monday
“It is now clear: Continued opposition to the patent waiver is resulting in the violation of human rights of peoples across the world,” they wrote.
Last week, human rights attorneys threatened to take legal action under international human rights law if the governments of Norway, Germany, the U.K. and Canada refuse to support the waiver.The Council of Global Unions, which represents some 200 million workers worldwide, also released a statement on Monday urging the U.K., Switzerland, the European Union and Germany to drop their opposition. Critics and U.S. lawmakers have said the EU is representing Germany and the interests of its entrenched pharmaceutical industry by opposing the TRIPS waiver. Last week, human rights attorneys threatened to take legal action under international human rights law if the governments of Norway, Germany, the U.K. and Canada refuse to support the waiver.
“Not only is Switzerland blocking the waiver, but our government is being very non-transparent about its contracts with Big Pharma, such as Moderna,” said Stefanie Prezioso, a progressive Swiss lawmaker and associate professor at Lausanne University, during a press conference on Monday.
In what observers call an ironic twist, a meeting of WTO trade ministers with vaccines on the agenda was postponed this week due to Omicron and new travel restrictions in Switzerland, which hosts WTO meetings in Geneva. Advocacy groups demanded the meeting be postponed because trade ministers from countries in need of vaccines are unable to attend. WTO leaders said negotiations would continue, and the WTO council on intellectual property rights met on Monday.
The conditions in which variants such as Omicron can flourish could have been avoided if the WTO adopted the waiver when it was introduced back in 2020, according to Deborah James, an international trade expert at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. By now, manufacturers would have scaled up the production of generic jabs for distribution in lower-income countries, if a waiver were in place. Still, a ministerial meeting is not needed to approve the waiver, and James said the WTO General Council could do so “this week.”
“You couldn’t make this up if it were a novel,” James said in an interview. “It just shouldn’t be a trade organization that is deciding these things. You know the WTO has a default of always making decisions in favor of corporations.”
As Omicron appeared with its many mutations, the World Health Organization, a South African biotech firm and Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention were already rushing to create an mRNA vaccine technology “transfer hub” as part of an effort to replicate Moderna’s vaccine and allow African countries to create their own supply of shots. South Africa’s vaccination rate, just under 25 percent of the population, lags behind most wealthy nations but is still among the highest in Africa.
The biotech company working with the WHO, Afrigen Biotech, hopes to create a vaccine that is less expensive than Moderna’s, which does not require freezers for storage, making doses easier to distribute in lower-income countries, according to the Washington Post. Citing intellectual property protections, Moderna is not sharing its vaccine recipe and other know-how with Afrigen and the WHO technology hub, which would allow Afrigen to develop a generic vaccine much faster. Afrigen would also compete with Moderna in largely untapped markets in lower-income nations. A spokesperson for Moderna did not respond to a request for comment by the time this article was published.
In October 2020, India and South Africa introduced a WTO resolution that would temporarily waive international intellectual property rules for COVID vaccines and treatments. That resolution is now supported by about 100 countries. Proponents say the waiver would allow manufacturers in both countries to create a broad supply of generic vaccines and help lower-income countries negotiate with existing manufacturers.
Earlier this year, Moderna projected up to $18 billion in sales for 2021 of its mRNA vaccine as billions of people continue to wait for access.Wealthy nations have procured nearly 7 billion vaccines while low-income countries have access to about 300 million, according to the Duke Global Health Innovation Center.
Currently, South African and Indian vaccine makers operate under strict licensing agreements with pharmaceutical companies from wealthy nations that invested heavily in development. In some cases, these agreements forced both countries to export doses to wealthier countries instead of serving their own populations.
Facing criticism from activists and health groups across the globe, the EU has responded by emphasizing existing flexibilities in the WTO’s international patent rules such as compulsory licensing, which allows a country to issue licenses for making vaccines without permission from patent holders. However, health experts say the EU’s COVID proposals at the WTO do not go far enough, and a blanket waiver is needed for countries to move quickly in making generic vaccines and other supplies without facing legal and regulatory roadblocks in acquiring technology and know-how along the way.
Moderna, for example, has said it won’t prosecute intellectual property violations during the pandemic and plans to build its own vaccine plant somewhere in Africa, but critics say these pledges still fall short of openly sharing the vaccine recipe and other trade secrets with independent efforts to boost manufacturing capacity. Earlier this year, Moderna projected up to $18 billion in sales for 2021 of its mRNA vaccine as billions of people continue to wait for access, according to Doctors Without Borders. Moderna’s vaccine also benefited from a nearly $10 billion investment from the U.S. government, and the company is currently haggling with scientists at the National Institutes of Health over who can take credit for the vaccine.
Opinion | Will Moderna Ever Learn to Share?
The company's dispute with NIH over who invented the COVID vaccine has huge implications
Opponents of the waiver say intellectual property rules are needed to protect investments in research and development and streamline vaccine production, but supporters say much of the world now agrees that patent monopolies are driving the disparities in vaccine access that allow variants like Omicron to emerge and spread.
“It’s like everybody against [a few] WTO members — EU, Switzerland, Norway and the U.K. — representing the interests of billionaires to become multibillionaires, and so that billionaires can become multibillionaires, millions of people are going to die,” James said in an interview."
"For the past 20 years, I have been engaged in efforts to end the opioid epidemic, as a public health official, researcher and clinician. And for every one of those years I have looked on as the number of deaths from drug overdoses has set a new record high.
Yet even knowing that trend I was surprised by the latest tally from the CDC showing that for the first time ever, the number of Americans who fatally overdosed over the course of a year surpassed 100,000. In a 12-month period ending at the end of April 2021, some 100,306 died in the U.S., up 28.5% over the same period a year earlier.
The soaring death toll has been fueled by a much more dangerous black market opioid supply. Illicitly synthesized fentanyl – a potent and inexpensive opioid that has driven the rise in overdoses since it emerged in 2014 – is increasingly replacing heroin. Fentanyl and fentanyl analogs were responsible for almost two-thirds of the overdose deaths recorded in the 12 months period ending in April 2021.
America's drug epidemic is the deadliest it has ever been, new federal data suggests.
It is especially tragic that these deaths are mainly occurring in people with a disease – opioid addiction – that is both preventable and treatable. Most heroin users want to avoid fentanyl. But increasingly, the heroin they seek is mixed with fentanyl or what they purchase is just fentanyl without any heroin in the mix.
While the spread of fentanyl is the primary cause of the spike in overdose deaths, the coronavirus pandemic also made the crisis worse.
The geographical distribution of opioid deaths makes it clear that there has been a change during the pandemic months.
Before the COVID-19 health crisis, the skyrocketing increase in fentanyl-related overdose deaths in America was mainly affecting the eastern half of the U.S., and hit especially hard in urban areas like Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York City. A possible reason behind this was that in the eastern half of the U.S., heroin has mainly been available in powder form rather than the black tar heroin more common in the West. It is easier to mix fentanyl with powdered heroin.
COVID-19 resulted in less cross-national traffic, which made it harder to smuggle illegal drugs across borders. Border restrictions make it harder to move bulkier drugs, resulting in smugglers’ increased reliance on fentanyl – which is more potent and easier to transport in small quantities and as pills, making it easier to traffic by mail. This may have helped fentanyl spread to areas that escaped the earlier surge in fentanyl deaths.
Opioid-addicted individuals seeking prescription opioids instead of heroin have also been affected, because counterfeit pills made with fentanyl have become more common. This may explain why public health officials in Seattle and elsewhere are reporting many fatalities resulting from use of counterfeit pills.
Another factor that may have contributed to the soaring death toll is that the pandemic made it harder for those dependent on opioids to get in-person treatment.
More than anything else, what drives opioid-addicted individuals to continue using is that without opioids they will experience severe symptoms of withdrawal. Treatment, especially with buprenorphine and methadone, has to be easy to access or addicted individuals will continue using heroin, prescription opioids or illict fentanyl to stave off withdrawal. Some treatment centers innovated in the face of lockdowns, for example, by allowing more patients to take methadone unsupervised at home, but this may not have been enough to offset the disruption to treatment services.
And maintaining access to treatment is crucial to avoid relapse, especially during the pandemic. Research has shown that social isolation and stress – which became more common during the pandemic – increase the chances of a relapse in someone in recovery.
All spring and summer, Republicans cried bloody murder about how too-generous unemployment benefits were supposedly discouraging Americans from returning to work. Expanded jobless benefits were creating welfare queens, they argued, and driving labor shortages and hurting small businesses.
As I wrote at the time, it seemed reasonable to believe that at least for some workers, jobless benefits were a factor weighed when deciding whether to accept or reject available jobs. But lots of other factors mattered, too — including child-care availability, fear of getting ill, transit problems, changing family priorities, the wages offered and burnout.
Debate has been raging about whether there are too few workers willing to accept the jobs on offer.
Ultimately, those other factors seemed to matter more. Expanded pandemic benefits ended, first in a few GOP-controlled states (over the summer) and eventually nationwide (in September). Their lapse appeared to have little impact on job growth.
That didn’t stop some Republican politicians from continuing to blame labor shortages on unemployment benefits even after the offending federal programs had expired nationwide. Their talking point long outlasted its plausible relevance.
Now, Republicans are expanding these laziness-inducing benefits once again — but only for workers who refuse shots.
At least four states — Florida, Iowa, Kansas and Tennessee — have recently extended benefits to workers who are fired or quit over their employers’ vaccine requirements.
Incentivizing Americans to refuse coronavirus vaccines is not pro-life. It’s not small-government. It’s not pro-growth. And it’s not pro-personal responsibility.
So why are Republicans doing it?
A recent report from Axios argues that these policy changes are primarily about building “loyalty with unvaccinated Americans”: “Republicans see a prime opportunity to rally their base ahead of the midterms,” Axios reports.
Maybe that’s true. Maybe this is about showing important political constituencies that Republicans have their backs. There have also been some examples of officials in bluer areas refusing to confront their anti-vaccine allies, and sometimes even effectively paying them not to get shots, as well. A Nevada school district, for example, paid public workers overtime to get tested regularly if they refused coronavirus vaccines.
But building solidarity with fellow culture warriors isn’t the only benefit for Republicans.
These policies also undermine federal efforts to get the pandemic under control, which the right then blames Biden for not controlling. They also might help sabotage the economic recovery, which the right will also blame Biden for not sufficiently juicing.
Opinion | Biden’s Covid Death Milestone
More Americans have died of the virus in 2021 than in all of 2020.
And remember, these unemployment benefit expansions are just one among many anti-vaccine actions Republicans have taken.
