Month: May 2021

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Health

Contamination Woes Maintain Again 100 Million Vaccine Doses

Contamination Woes Hold Back 100 Million Vaccine Doses

WASHINGTON – The executive director of Emergent BioSolutions, whose Baltimore facility ruined millions of coronavirus vaccine doses, announced on Wednesday that more than 100 million doses of the vaccine were being put on hold by Johnson & Johnson as regulators screen for possible contamination.

In more than three hours of testimony before a House subcommittee, chief executive Robert G. Kramer calmly acknowledged unsanitary conditions, including mold and peeling paint, at the Baltimore plant. He acknowledged that Johnson & Johnson had discovered – not emergent – contaminated cans and fought off aggressive questions from the Democrats about his stock sales and hundreds of thousands of dollars in bonuses for company executives.

Emergent’s Bayview Baltimore facility shut down a month ago after contamination spoiled the equivalent of 15 million cans. However, Mr. Kramer told the legislature that he expected the plant to resume production “in a few days”. He said he took “very seriously” a report from federal regulators that identified manufacturing defects and assumed “full responsibility”.

“Nobody is more disappointed than us that we had to stop manufacturing new vaccines around the clock,” Kramer told the panel, adding: “I apologize for the failure of our controls.”

Mr Kramer’s appearance before the House Select Coronavirus Crisis Subcommittee, which has launched a full investigation into his company, provided the public with an initial glimpse into the men who run Emergent, a politically affiliated federal entrepreneur who has a niche market for the Biological Defense Preparation dominates with the US government as the main customer.

Mr. Kramer, who testified virtually, was assisted by Fuad El-Hibri, the company’s founder and chairman, who has grown from a small biotech company to a $ 1.5 billion company in annual sales over the past two decades has expanded. Executive compensation documents released by the subcommittee show that the company’s board of directors praised Mr. El-Hibri, who cashed in more than $ 42 million in stock and options last year, for “his critical relationships with important customers, Congress and other stakeholders. ”

Those members of Congress include Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 Republican in the House, and the Chief Republican on the House subcommittee. Federal campaign records indicate that Mr. El-Hibri and his wife have donated more than $ 150,000 to groups associated with Mr. Scalise since 2018. The company’s Political Action Committee has donated approximately $ 1.4 million to members of both parties over the past 10 years.

Mr El-Hibri expressed his remorse on Wednesday. “The cross-contamination incident is unacceptable,” he said.

Mr. Kramer’s estimate of 100 million cans held increased the number of Johnson & Johnson cans effectively quarantined due to regulatory concerns about contamination by 30 million. Federal officials had previously estimated that the equivalent of about 70 million cans – most of them for domestic use – could not be released until purity was tested.

The House Democrats began their investigation into Emergent after the New York Times documented months of problems at the Baltimore plant, including failure to properly disinfect equipment and protect it from viral and bacterial contamination.

Hours before the hearing began, the committee’s staff released confidential audits previously reported by The Times that cited repeated violations of manufacturing standards. A leading federal manufacturing expert reiterated these concerns in a June 2020 report, warning that Emergent did not have trained staff and adequate quality control in place.

“My teenage son’s room gives your facility a run for its money,” Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, Democrat of Illinois, told Mr. Kramer.

Mr. Kramer initially stated that the contamination of the Johnson & Johnson cans “was identified by our quality control procedures and checks and balances.” However, when questioned, he admitted that a Johnson & Johnson laboratory in the Netherlands had picked up the problem. Johnson & Johnson hired Emergent to manufacture its vaccine and is now claiming greater control over the facility at the urging of the Biden government.

The federal government placed a $ 628 million contract with Emergent last year, primarily to reserve space at the Baltimore plant for vaccine manufacturing. The legislature is examining, among other things, whether the company is maintaining its contacts with a leading representative of the Trump administration, Dr. Robert Kadlec, used to secure this mandate and whether federal officials have ignored known shortcomings in placing the work on Emergent.

Mr El-Hibri told lawmakers that the government and Johnson & Johnson are aware of the risks.

“Everyone was open-minded that this is a facility that has never manufactured a licensed product before,” he said. While the Baltimore plant was “not in perfect working order – far from it,” he argued that the plant was “in the highest state of readiness” among the plants that the government had to choose from.

For Republicans, including Mr Scalise, Wednesday’s session became a means of defending Emergent and the Trump administration and raising other virus-related issues: the unproven theory that the coronavirus leaked from a laboratory in China that “Lies of the Communist Party” of China “, mask mandates and the demand of the Biden government for a renunciation of an international agreement on intellectual property.

“You are a reputable company that did Yeoman’s job protecting this bio-defense country,” exclaimed Mark E. Green, Republican of Tennessee, adding, “So you have your people a bonus for their incredible work given. “

Emergent is able to work in Washington. The board of directors is made up of former government officials, and Senate lobbying data shows the company has spent an average of $ 3 million a year on lobbying over the past decade. That’s roughly the equivalent of two pharmaceutical giants, AstraZeneca and Bristol Myers Squibb, whose annual sales are at least 17 times higher.

Democrats urged Mr. Kramer and Mr. El-Hibri to open their contacts with Dr. Kadlec, who had previously consulted for Emergent. Documents indicate that Emergent agreed to pay him $ 120,000 annually for his advisory work between 2012 and 2015 and that he recommended that Emergent be given a “priority rating” so that the contract can be approved quickly. Dr. Kadlec said he didn’t negotiate the deal but signed it.

“Did you or any other Emergent executives speak or make contacts with Dr. Kadlec while these contracts were being issued?” Representative Nydia M. Velázquez, Democrat of New York, asked Mr. Kramer.

“Congressman,” he replied cautiously, “I haven’t had any discussions with Dr. Kadlec about it.”

The government has paid Emergent $ 271 million to date, although American regulators have not yet approved a single dose of vaccine made in the vaccine in Baltimore.

An investigation by the Times found that Emergent was an oversized influence on the Strategic National Stockpile, the country’s emergency medical reserve. In a few years, the company’s anthrax vaccine made up half of the inventory budget.

The investigation found that some federal officials believed the company was undermining taxpayers – an issue that also surfaced at Wednesday’s hearing when New York Democrat Carolyn B. Maloney asked how much it would cost to make the vaccine and what he sells for. Mr. El-Hibri promised to provide the information later.

Company executives also consider their coronavirus work to be one of the “main drivers” of 2020 revenue, according to a memorandum released Wednesday by committee staff. Executives have been rewarded for what the company’s board of directors calls “exemplary overall company performance for 2020 , including a significant overachievement of the sales and earnings targets ”.

Mr Kramer received a $ 1.2 million cash bonus in 2020, the records show, and this year also sold $ 10 million worth of shares in stores that he said were planned in advance and dated Companies have been approved. Three of the company’s executive vice presidents received awards between $ 445,000 and $ 462,000.

Sean Kirk, who is responsible for overseeing development and manufacturing processes at all Emergent production sites, received a special bonus of $ 100,000 last year in addition to his regular bonus of $ 320,611, including for expanding the contract manufacturing capacities of the Company to Covid- 19 show the documents. Mr. Kirk is now on personal vacation.

Aspiring officials “appear to have wasted tax dollars while filling their own pockets,” accused Ms. Maloney.

Mr Krishnamoorthi asked Mr Kramer if he would consider giving his bonus to American taxpayers.

“I will not make this commitment,” replied Mr. Kramer.

“I didn’t think so,” replied Krishnamoorthi-san.

Rebecca R. Ruiz contributed to the coverage.

Categories
Business

Staff at plant that ruined hundreds of thousands of J&J Covid vaccine doses did not bathe, change garments

Employees at plant that ruined millions of J&J Covid vaccine doses failed to shower, change clothes

Employees work in a laboratory at Emergent Biosolutions in Baltimore, Maryland on February 8, 2021.

Michael Robinson Chavez | The Washington Post | Getty Images

Some employees at the Emergent BioSolutions Baltimore plant were unable to shower or change clothes, which is necessary to work at the factory, and it likely helped ruin millions of Covid-19 cans from Johnson & Johnson’s key committee.

Inspections of the Bayview facility carried out last year also revealed mold problems, poor disinfection of facility equipment and inadequate staff training, employees of the selected coronavirus crisis subcommittee said in the memo. The committee is holding a hearing on Wednesday examining the biopharmaceutical company’s role in the destruction of the J&J recordings.

Although inspectors found poor conditions at the plant, top executives received hundreds of thousands of dollars in bonuses last year and were commended for their leadership by the company’s board of directors. This is evident from other documents published by the committee.

According to one document, aspiring CEO Robert Kramer received a bonus of $ 1.2 million last year, while three other executives received payments of more than $ 400,000.

The U.S. government awarded the company a $ 628 million contract to manufacture coronavirus vaccines last year.

Emergent did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

Wednesday’s hearing comes more than a month after the Biden government hired J&J to run the Baltimore plant after US officials learned that Emergent, a federal company that makes key ingredients for J&J and AstraZeneca had produced contaminated contaminated ingredients for the two shots.

During the hearing, Kramer said the FDA is holding over 100 million J&J Covid-19 vaccine doses for further testing.

“There are a significant number of doses that we have manufactured. Here, too, we manufacture the mass drugs,” Kramer told the legislature. “It has been reported by a number of news outlets that there are likely over 100 million doses of the J&J vaccine we make that are now under FDA review for possible release and availability.”

An inspection by the Food and Drug Administration later revealed that the facility was unsanitary and unsuitable for making the shots. In a 13-page report, the inspectors wrote that the facility used to manufacture the vaccine “was not kept in a clean and sanitary condition” and “was not of the appropriate size, design and location for cleaning, maintenance and to facilitate proper operation. “”

FDA inspectors said they observed paint peeling in multiple areas and damaging walls, which could affect “Emergent’s ability to adequately clean and disinfect”. They also found that when handling waste or materials used to make vaccines, employees did not follow standard operating procedures to ensure they were not contaminated.

The facility has not been approved by the FDA to manufacture or distribute Johnson & Johnson’s Covid-19 vaccine, and none of the factory-made doses have been marketed for use in the United States. Emergent has agreed to cease production of materials until the issues identified by the FDA are resolved.

Emergent said at the time it was required to work with the FDA and J&J to resolve the issues.

“While we are never satisfied with defects in our production facilities or processes, these can be corrected and we will take quick action to correct them,” it said in a statement on April 21.

Categories
Health

CDC expects Covid vaccine information on pregnant ladies in summer season, children beneath 12 in fall

CDC expects Covid vaccine data on pregnant women in summer, kids under 12 in fall

Anne Schuchat, director of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), speaks during a Senate Fund Subcommittee hearing on Wednesday May 19, 2021 in Washington, DC, United States.

Greg Nash | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced Wednesday that they were awaiting data from studies testing Covid-19 vaccines on pregnant women this summer and on children 6 months old by the end of the year.

The deputy main director Dr. Anne Schuchat told lawmakers that the CDC has already received “reassuring data” on vaccines given to women in the third trimester. “We expect more data this summer, especially on vaccines given earlier in pregnancy,” she said at a Senate hearing on the agency’s annual budget.

Although the vaccines are not yet approved for use in pregnant women, Schuchat said that pregnant women should have access to the vaccines because Covid can make them sicker than other people.

“Women who are pregnant and get Covid have worse experiences with the infection than non-pregnant women,” said Schuchat. “More time in the intensive care unit, more risk of serious consequences, including those rare deaths. Covid also makes pregnancy difficult by increasing the risk of premature delivery and leading to other types of complications.”

Schuchat also said new data shows vaccinated mothers can transfer their Covid antibodies to their babies while breastfeeding.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases, makes an opening statement during a Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions hearing to discuss the ongoing federal response to COVID-19 at the U.S. Capitol Washington, DC, May 11, 2021.

Greg Nash | Pool | Reuters

Dr. White House chief medical officer Anthony Fauci said separately on Wednesday that “the baby would get antibodies to the virus through the placenta during pregnancy,” which persist for a few months after birth, he said. Fauci also said in an interview with Axios that mothers can transmit their Covid antibodies while breastfeeding, which extends their babies’ immunity.

Children under the age of 12 “could likely be vaccinated by the end of calendar year 2021 and no later than the first quarter of 2022,” he said.

CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told lawmakers that “Vaccines are coming for adolescents, they are doing dose de-escalation studies that are now up to 9 years old, soon after that up to 6, then up to 3, then up to 6 months. I hope until to have more by late autumn and the end of the year. “

Rochelle Walensky, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), listens during a Senate Fund Subcommittee hearing on Wednesday May 19, 2021 in Washington, DC, United States.

Greg Nash | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Categories
Politics

Over 100 Million Johnson & Johnson Covid Vaccine Doses on Maintain

Over 100 Million Johnson & Johnson Covid Vaccine Doses on Hold

The House Democrats launched a full investigation into Emergent after the New York Times documented months of problems at the plant, including a failure to properly disinfect equipment and protect it from viral and bacterial contamination. The committee released a series of confidential audits previously reported by The Times that identified a number of violations of manufacturing standards, as well as a June 2020 report from a leading federal manufacturing expert stating that Emergent did not have had trained staff and adequate quality control systems.

Lawmakers are looking to see if corporate officials used ties with the Trump administration to win a $ 628 million federal contract and whether Emergent executives accepted the award despite known shortcomings. You’ll also see Mr. Kramer’s sale of $ 10 million worth of Emergent stock this year and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash awards made by Emergent’s board of directors to its top executives.

New York Democrat Representative Carolyn Maloney complained that aspiring officials “appeared to have wasted tax dollars while filling their own pockets”. Mr Krishnamoorthi sharply asked Mr Kramer if he would consider handing over his $ 1.2 million bonus to American taxpayers from 2020 onwards.

“Congressman, I will not make that commitment,” replied Mr. Kramer evenly.

“I didn’t think so,” replied Krishnamoorthi-san.

Regarding his stock deals, Mr. Kramer said they were “done according to a plan approved by the company” and in “a quiet time that was also approved by the company”. He added, “My participation has been completely removed from these stores.”

At the beginning of the hearing, Mr. Kramer testified that possible contamination of the Johnson & Johnson cans “has been identified by our quality control procedures, as well as by controls and deliberations. However, when questioned, he later admitted that it was picked up from a Johnson & Johnson laboratory in the Netherlands.

While the Democrats were pushing Mr Kramer for information about how vaccines are made, the Republicans tried to defend the company and tried to change the subject by talking about the unproven theory that the coronavirus emerged from a laboratory in China, the “Lies of the Communist Party of China” and masked mandates as well as the demand of the Biden government for a renunciation of an international agreement on intellectual property, which is strongly rejected by the pharmaceutical industry.

“You are a reputable company that did Yeoman’s job protecting this land on biological defense!” Tennessee Republican Representative Mark Green once exclaimed, adding, “So you gave your people a bonus for their incredible work.”

Categories
Business

Fed Minutes April 2021: Officers Trace They Would possibly Quickly Speak About Slowing Bond-Shopping for

Fed Minutes April 2021: Officials Hint They Might Soon Talk About Slowing Bond-Buying

Federal Reserve officials were optimistic about the economy at their April political meeting and tiptoed to talk about recall support for the economy as government support and the reopening of stores fueled consumer spending and paved the way for one Paved recovery.

Fed policymakers have said they need to see “significant” further progress toward their inflation targets, which averaged 2 percent and full employment over time, before slowing monthly bond purchases by $ 120 billion. The purchase is said to continue to borrow and support demand, accelerating the recovery from the pandemic recession.

Officials said “it would likely take some time” to meet their desired standard, minutes of the April 27-28 meeting of the central bank released Wednesday showed. However, they noted that “a number” of officials said “if the economy continues to make rapid progress towards the committee’s objectives, it may be appropriate in upcoming meetings, at some point to discuss a plan to adjust the pace of purchases.” to start from assets. “

Confusing and sometimes conflicting data released since the April 27-28 meeting could make it difficult for the Fed to assess when to withdraw support or even speak seriously about it. A report on the labor market showed that employers created far fewer jobs than expected. At the same time, an inflation report showed that expected price increases will occur faster than many economists had expected.

In addition to its bond purchases, the Fed has also kept interest rates close to zero since March 2020.

It was clear to officials that they wanted to slow down bond purchases first, while interest rates remained at rock bottom until annual inflation fell sustained above 2 percent and the labor market returned to full employment.

Markets are extremely aligned with the Fed’s plans for bond purchases, which tend to keep asset prices high by allowing money to flow through the financial system. Central bankers are therefore very cautious when discussing their plans to curtail these purchases. They want to give a lot of signal before changing policies to avoid stocks or bonds spinning.

Stocks lashed in the moments after the 2pm release and fell in the moments after before rebounding. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note rose to 1.68 percent.

Even before the latest labor market report showed a slowdown in employment growth, Fed officials thought it would take some time to reach full employment, the minutes showed.

“Participants judged the economy to be far from meeting the Committee’s broad and comprehensive objective for maximum employment,” the minutes read. Officials also noted that business leaders reported recruitment problems that have since been blamed for the slowdown in employment growth in April. This is “likely due to factors such as early retirement, health concerns, responsibility for childcare and extended unemployment insurance benefits”.

Regarding inflation, Fed officials have repeatedly stated that they expect prices to continue falling temporarily. It makes sense that data is very volatile, they said: the economy has never opened again after a pandemic. This message was repeated throughout the April Protocol and has been repeated by officials since then.

“We expect inflationary pressures to likely rise over the course of next year – certainly in the coming months,” said Randal K. Quarles, Fed vice chairman for oversight, during a statement in Congress on Wednesday. “Our best analysis is that these pressures will be temporary, even if significant.”

“But if it turns out that’s not the case, we can respond to them,” added Quarles.

Categories
Entertainment

Georgia Anne Muldrow Builds a Musical World of Her Personal

Georgia Anne Muldrow Builds a Musical World of Her Own

Muldrow, 37, grew up in a family of jazz musicians in Los Angeles. Her father, Ronald Muldrow, was a guitarist and worked for decades with the soul jazz saxophonist Eddie Harris. Her mother, Rickie Byars-Beckwith, sang with saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and pianist Roland Hanna.

Alice Coltrane, a friend of the family, gave Muldrow the spiritual name Jyoti, which can mean “light” or “heavenly flame”. Muldrow has been billed as Jyoti for her most jazz-influenced albums, including last year’s critically acclaimed “Mama, You Can Bet!” Which featured daring remakes of Charles Mingus compositions in addition to her own songs.

In the early 2000s, Muldrow came to New York City to study jazz at the New School with a focus on singing. But she got out, she said, because, “I didn’t like the boxes they have for people. I feel like we’re stepping out of the box to survive emotionally as black people. We do this for our emotional uplift. The search for your own inner strength, your own property and your own language – that is what drives this music forward. “

The teenager Muldrow was into electronic music, building beats and developing abstract sounds on drum machines, synthesizers and computers. “The appeal of technology, sound design and sound generation with computers has been my experience as a composer of hearing,” she said. “Regardless of how I look, regardless of my gender, regardless of race, the computer was listening to me.”

One of her mentors and collaborators was Don Preston, who had played keyboards for Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention in the 1960s and 1970s and was the musical director of Meredith Monk. He encouraged her to work with the experimental synthesis that she now regards as the “cornerstone” of her music. On “Fifth Shield”, a manifesto from her 2015 album “A Thoughtiverse Unmarred”, she knocked: “I know I’m abstract – it’s not for everyone.”

For Muldrow, the parameters that control the synthesizer tones – attack, decay, sustain, and release – provide lessons outside of the recording studio. “I’ll turn everything into a metaphor,” she said with a laugh. “The way we attack things shapes our lives, the way we hold onto things shapes our lives, the way we let go of things shapes our lives. This is what makes me dig deeper every time I make music. “

Categories
Business

Emergent CEO says FDA is holding over 100 million J&J Covid vaccine doses for additional testing after botched doses

Emergent CEO says FDA is holding over 100 million J&J Covid vaccine doses for further testing after botched doses

Robert Kramer, CEO of Emergent BioSolutions

Scott Mlyn | CNBC

The FDA is holding over 100 million vaccine doses of Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 for further testing after the agency found multiple security breaches at the Emergent BioSolutions facility that helped make the gunshots, said Robert Kramer, CEO of Emergent, on Wednesday to lawmakers.

The US hired J&J to run the Baltimore facility last month after learning that Emergent, a federal company that made key ingredients for J&J and AstraZeneca, contaminated the two shots. Kramer testified before House lawmakers Wednesday that the conditions at the Baltimore plant allegedly were responsible for the destruction of millions of J&J Covid-19 shots.

During the hearing before the House Select Coronavirus Crisis Subcommittee, Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., Kramer asked how many doses of J&J vaccine are held by the Food and Drug Administration but are not contaminated.

“There are a significant number of doses that we have made. Again we are making the mass drugs,” Kramer told lawmakers. “It has been reported by a number of news outlets that there are likely over 100 million doses of the J&J vaccine we make that are now under FDA review for possible release and availability.”

Kramer later stated that the regulator requested additional testing of the cans.

“The FDA, to the best of my knowledge, evaluates the doses made for mass drug use, most of which were provided to J&J,” Kramer said. “As far as I know, there was a request for additional testing on all of these lots and doses that J&J had made available to the FDA. And they are currently being evaluated.”

J&J declined to comment on the number of doses. The FDA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This is a developing story. Please try again.

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Health

Dr. Aaron Stern, Who Enforced the Film Rankings Code, Dies at 96

Dr. Aaron Stern, Who Enforced the Movie Ratings Code, Dies at 96

Dr. Aaron Stern, a psychiatrist who established himself as the director of Hollywood’s film ratings agency in the early 1970s as a sentry to moviegoers against carnal imagery and violence, died in Manhattan on April 13th. He was 96 years old.

His death in a hospital was confirmed by his step daughter Jennifer Klein.

As an author, professor and management consultant who has always been fascinated by climbing the corporate ladder, he competed against self-centered studio managers, producers, directors and actors – and provided plenty of content for his 1979 book “Me: The Narcissistic American”.

From 1971 to 1974, Dr. Stern director of self-regulatory classification and scoring administration for the Motion Picture Association of America founded just a few years earlier. It replaced the strictly moralistic production code introduced in the early 1930s and administered censored by Will H. Hays, a Presbyterian deacon and former leader of the National Republican Party.

The new judging panel, which initially struggled to gain credibility, rated films by letter to let moviegoers know in advance how much violence, sexuality and swear words to expect on the screen.

The board’s decision that a film deserves an R rating or is restricted could attract more adults, but would immediately eliminate the pool of unaccompanied moviegoers under the age of 17. An X rating would exclude anyone under the age of 17.

Dr. Stern has rewritten the PG (Parental Guidance) category to include a warning that “some materials may not be suitable for teenagers”. He also tried, but failed, to get rid of the X rating – for the reason, he told the Los Angeles Times in 1972, that it was not the job of the Motion Picture Association to keep people out of theaters. (The X rating was changed to NC-17 in 1990, but its meaning remained unchanged.)

It wasn’t until last year, with the release of Three Christs, a film about hospital patients who believed they were Jesus, that Dr. Stern a film credit (he was one of the 17 producers on the film). However, the lack of on-screen recognition belied the power he wielded as director of the board of directors who screened films privately and then voted on the letter rating to be given.

Even some critics gave the new letter-coded classification the benefit of the doubt in the early 1970s, agreeing that their decisions, unlike those of the old Production Code, were based more on sociology than theology. Still, two young members of the Rating Board, appointed on a one-year scholarship, wrote a scathing criticism of their methodology, published in the New York Times in 1972.

They accused Dr. Stern, for having meddled megalomaniacally, editing scripts before scenes were filmed and then edited, and tolerating gratuitous violence but being puritanical about sex. They alleged, among other things, that he warned Ernest Lehman, director of Portnoy’s Complaint (1972), that the focus on masturbation in the film version of Philip Roth’s novel risked an X rating.

“You can have a love scene But as soon as you start unbuttoning or unzipping you have to cut, ”Dr. Star quoted in The Hollywood Reporter about sex in movies.

The Times article prompted letters in which Dr. Stern has been commended by several directors, including Mr. Lehman, who said that Dr. Stern’s advice actually improved his final cut of “Portnoy’s Complaint”. The Times film critic Vincent Canby sniffed, “If Mr. Lehman was really influenced by Dr. Stern’s advice two years ago, he should sue the doctor for wrongdoing.”

Dr. Stern argued that the scoring system, while imperfect, served multiple goals. Among other things, he said it had repelled even more restrictive definitions of profanity by Congress, the courts and the local authorities; and it warned people of what they found intrusive as mores developed and society became more acceptable.

“Social growth should make the rating system obsolete,” he told the Los Angeles Times.

Aaron Stern was born in Brooklyn on March 26, 1925, to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father, Benjamin Israel Stern, was a carpenter and his mother, Anna (Fishader) Stern, was a housewife. He grew up in Bensonhurst and Sheepshead Bay and was the youngest of three children and the only one born in the United States.

After graduating from Brooklyn College in 1947, he earned a master’s degree in psychological services and a doctorate in child development from Columbia University and a medical degree from Downstate Health Sciences University, State University of New York.

In addition to his stepdaughter Mrs. Klein, his wife Betty Lee (Baum) Stern survived; two children, Debra Marrone and Scott Stern, from his first marriage, which was divorced; two other stepchildren, Lauren Rosenkranz and Jonathan Otto; and 13 grandchildren.

Dr. Stern was introduced to Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association, by a Great Neck, NY neighbor, Robert Benjamin, a United Artists executive. He first began to review films for the club and was hired by Mr. Valenti in mid-1971 as head of rating administration.

He left the country in early 1974 to join Columbia Pictures Industries and eventually returned from Los Angeles to New York, where he revived his private practice. He has also taught at Yale, Columbia, New York University, and the University of California, Los Angeles, and was chief operating officer of Tiger Management, a hedge fund and trustee of the Robertson Foundation.

Dr. Stern, a senior educator at Irving Medical Center, New York Presbyterian / Columbia University, and his wife donated $ 5 million in 2019 to award a professorship and fellowship at Weill Cornell Medicine to treat patients with pathological personality disorders. The gift was in gratitude for the care he received during a medical emergency.

Dr. Stern had been interested in narcissism before his trip to Hollywood, but his experience there proved inspiring.

In Me: The Narcissistic American, he wrote that babies are born narcissistic without caring about who they wake up in the middle of the night and that they need to be disciplined as they mature to take others into account.

“When narcissism is about survival, like infancy and country founding,” he wrote, “it’s not as destructive as when one is established, successful and wealthy.”

In 1981, Valenti told The Times that he had “made the mistake of blaming a psychiatrist for the rating system.” Dr. Stern replied, “I am unable to answer that.”

But he had admitted when he was still on the job: “There is no way to sit in this chair and be loved.” He was constantly questioned.

Why should “The Exorcist” (1973) get an R-Rating? (“I think it’s a great movie,” he told director Richard Friedkin. “I’m not going to ask you to cut a frame.”) Why did you originally give Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange” (1971) an X for a ménage à trois filmed at high speed? (“If we did that, any hardcore pornographer could speed up their scenes and rightly ask for an R on the same basis.”) He later helped edit Mr. Friedkin’s “Cruising” as a private consultant for $ 1,000 a day. (1980), on a gay male serial killer for getting an R instead of an X.

“You can only evaluate the explicit elements on the screen – never the morals or the thought problems behind them,” said Dr. Stern 1972. “That is the province of religion, the leaders, the critics and each individual.”

Categories
World News

Bitcoin (BTC) worth plunges to $30,000, hits lowest stage since January

Bitcoin (BTC) price plunges to $30,000, hits lowest level since January

Bitcoin fell to nearly $ 30,000 at one point on Wednesday morning, continuing a major sell-off in cryptocurrency markets that began a week ago.

On the day just before noon ET, the digital currency fell 13% to $ 37,490, according to Coin Metrics. It only hit $ 30,001.51 as sales increased on Wednesday morning before some of those losses were reduced. The cryptocurrency has not traded below $ 30,000 since the end of January.

At its intraday lows, Bitcoin lost more than 40% over the past week.

That means that after Tesla announced it would buy $ 1.5 billion in cryptocurrency, Bitcoin has now wiped out all profits. It’s also down more than 50% since it hit a record high of $ 64,829 in mid-April.

Other cryptocurrencies also fell on Wednesday. According to Coin Metrics, ether, the digital currency that powers the Ethereum blockchain, fell more than 20% to $ 2,699. Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency that started as a hoax and was raised by Musk, fell more than 18% to around 39 cents.

Additionally, the Coinbase cryptocurrency exchange was temporarily unavailable for some users as the coins fell on Monday morning.

Bitcoin prices fell sharply amid the global sell-off of stocks.

Luke MacGregor | Bloomberg | Getty Images

The announcement that it would suspend Bitcoin payments came just three months after Tesla announced it had bought $ 1.5 billion in Bitcoin and would accept Bitcoin in exchange for its products.

Earlier this week, the Tesla CEO suggested that the company may have sold its Bitcoin holdings, but later clarified that it “did not sell Bitcoin”.

On Tuesday, three Chinese banking and payment companies issued a statement warning financial institutions not to engage in any virtual currency-related business, including trading or exchanging fiat currency for cryptocurrency.

China’s hard line on digital currencies isn’t new. In 2017, the authorities closed the local cryptocurrency exchanges and banned so-called ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings), a way for companies in this area to raise money by issuing new digital tokens.

Traders in China once had a large stake in the Bitcoin market, but after the crackdown, their influence was significantly reduced. Chinese cryptocurrency operations have been relocated abroad.

“The crypto markets are currently processing a cascade of messages fueling the bear for price developments,” said Ulrik Lykke, executive director of the crypto hedge fund ARK36.

In the Bitcoin market alone, more than $ 250 billion evaporated last week, Lykke said. While that number seems “astronomical,” such moves are not uncommon in the volatile crypto market, he added.

“In terms of Bitcoin’s outlook, things may look bleak right now, but historically this is just one more hurdle Bitcoin has to overcome and a small one compared to what it has done in the past,” said Lykke.

Bitcoin is still up over 30% since the start of the year and around 300% in the last 12 months.

Categories
Business

Companies Search to Assist Feminine Caregivers Return to Workforce: Stay Updates

A homebound resident in the Bronx receives a dose of coronavirus vaccine. A new initiative is pushing for federally funded family and medical leave, and affordable child care and elder care.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…James Estrin/The New York Times

JPMorgan Chase, Spotify, Uber, McDonald’s and almost 200 other businesses have formed a coalition focused on ensuring that women are not held back in the labor force because they bear the brunt of caregiving in the United States.

The new Care Economy Business Council, the creation of which was announced on Wednesday, portrays the effort in stark economic terms, arguing that fixing the crumbling child and elder care systems is essential to the economic recovery.

Led by Time’s Up, the advocacy organization founded by powerful women in Hollywood, the council aims to bring executives together to share ways to improve workplace policies and to pressure Congress to pass policy changes that would help people — particularly women — get back to work. The council will push for federally funded family and medical leave, affordable child care and elder care, and elevated wages for caregiving workers.

“What I’m seeing now that I have not seen in the many years I’ve been working on this constellation of issues is a realization by employers that they have a stake in this,” Tina Tchen, the chief executive of Time’s Up, said.

The pandemic laid bare the faults in caregiving in the United States, particularly the problems with child care. Many child-care centers either shuttered or cut back on hours to save on costs, leaving parents without reliable and safe places for their children while they worked. The lack of child care support was a major reason that hundreds of thousands of women left the work force in the past year, bringing female labor participation rate to its lowest level since 1986.

Companies scrambled to cobble together solutions, from flexible work hours to additional child care stipends. But for many executives, the crisis made it clear that the entire system needed an overhaul.

The issue is “bigger than something we can solve on our own,” said Christy M. Pambianchi, the chief human resources officer at Verizon, which is part of the council.

President Biden’s two-part infrastructure plan proposes pumping $425 billion into expanding and strengthening child-care services and an additional $400 billion to help expand access for in-home care for older adults and those with disabilities. His plan also offers businesses a tax credit for building child-care centers in their workplaces.

Members of Congress have also introduced three separate but similar child-care bills.

Jack Dorsey, the chief executive of Twitter gave $12.8 million in cryptocurrency to GiveDirectly, a global aid group.Credit…Anushree Fadnavis/Reuters

Charities have an inherent interest in cryptocurrencies because, increasingly, their fates are intertwined. Nonprofit groups benefit from financial windfalls and people have recently been getting rich with crypto, the DealBook newsletter reports.

“There’s no question” that the price of cryptocurrency is linked to the volume of giving, said Joe Huston, the managing director of GiveDirectly, a global aid group. Crypto is volatile, especially in the past few days, but philanthropies have seen consistent growth in digital asset donations over time. (Bitcoin is still up 30 percent for the year, even after a torrid few trading sessions). Donations in crypto to Fidelity Charitable went from $13 million in 2019 to $28 million in 2020.

GiveDirectly has seen a “big uptick,” Mr. Huston said. The Twitter founder Jack Dorsey gave the group $12.8 million, the co-founder of the Ethereum platform Vitalik Buterin donated $4.8 million and Elon Musk of Tesla gave “some.” The cryptocurrency exchange FTX donates 1 percent of its fees and encourages traders to channel returns to charity.

But newfound riches donated in novel ways also raise questions. Mr. Buterin recently gave $1.2 billion to fund pandemic relief efforts in India. The gift was in SHIB, a crypto token named after a Shiba Inu dog that’s a derivative of the onetime joke crypto Dogecoin. These tokens were sent unbidden to Mr. Buterin to bolster their value. (To stop promoters from sending him free crypto with uncertain motives, he “burned” $6 billion worth of the tokens, taking them out of circulation permanently.)

His approach in donating tokens was “impressively lightweight and fast,” Mr. Huston said, showing how frictionless crypto-based philanthropy can be. Previously, it was unimaginable to transfer such an enormous sum without an institutional intermediary. This lack of friction also makes crypto giving prime territory for fraudsters.

“There are a lot of young people with stupid amounts of money,” said Austin Detwiler, a consultant at American Philanthropic, a consulting firm. Fund-raisers should make giving from this new generation easier, mindful that “it’s easy to start accepting crypto, but it’s volatile, so have a policy,” he said. Some donors place conditions on token gifts and some charities simply can’t tolerate the risk of holding assets that rise and fall so rapidly.

Modern Fertility’s flagship product is a $159 finger prick test that can estimate how many eggs a woman may have left, which can help determine which fertility method might be best.Credit…Modern Fertility

Ro, the parent company of Roman, the brand that is best known for delivering erectile dysfunction and hair loss medication to consumers, announced on Wednesday that it would acquire Modern Fertility, a start-up that offers at-home fertility tests for women.

The deal is priced at more than $225 million, according to people with knowledge of the acquisition who spoke on condition of anonymity because the information was not public. It is one of the largest investments in the women’s health care technology space, known as femtech, which attracted $592 million in venture capital in 2019, according to an analysis by PitchBook.

Modern Fertility was founded in 2017 with its flagship product: a $159 finger prick test that can estimate how many eggs a woman may have left, which can help determine which fertility method might be best.

“We essentially took the same laboratory tests that women would take in an infertility clinic and made them available to women at a fraction of the cost,” said Afton Vechery, a founder and chief executive of Modern Fertility, noting that her own test at a clinic set her back $1,500.

The company now also sells an at-home test, available at Walmart, to help track ovulation, as well as standard pregnancy tests and prenatal vitamins.

Ro, which was founded in 2017 with a focus on men’s health and was valued in March at about $5 billion, has in recent years expanded into telehealth, including delivering generic drugs by mail. In December, Ro acquired Workpath, which connects patients with in-home care providers, like nurses.

The global digital health market, which includes telemedicine, online pharmacies and wearable devices, could reach $600 billion by 2024, according to the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. And yet, by one estimate, only 1.4 percent of the money that flows into health care goes to the femtech industry, mirroring a pattern in the medical industry, which has historically overlooked women’s health research.

“Gender bias in health care research methods and funding has really contributed to sexism in medicine and health care,” said Sonya Borrero, director of the Center for Women’s Health Research and Innovation at the University of Pittsburgh. “I think we’re seeing again — gender bias in the venture capital sector is going to exactly shape what gets developed.”

That underinvestment was part of the reasoning behind the acquisition, said Zachariah Reitano, Ro’s chief executive. The company developed a female-focused online service in 2019 called Rory.

“We’re going to continue to invest hundreds of millions of dollars over the next five years into women’s health,” Mr. Reitano said, “because ultimately I think women’s health has the potential to be much larger than men’s health.”

A new management setup at JPMorgan Chase creates an unusual situation in which two executives competing for the top job are sharing a leadership role. Credit…Mike Segar/Reuters

The major management shuffle announced Tuesday by JPMorgan Chase renewed chatter about who will succeed Jamie Dimon as chief executive.

Marianne Lake, the bank’s head of consumer lending, and Jennifer Piepszak, its chief financial officer, were made joint heads of the consumer and community bank. The promotions solidify both women’s positions as contenders for chief executive.

The new setup also creates an unusual situation in which two executives competing for the top job are sharing a leadership role. That may be tricky to navigate, management experts say, and whether it’s a good test of leadership skills is debatable.

In a 2012 paper, Ryan Krause of the Neeley School of Business at Texas Christian University, examined how sharing power affected the performance of public companies. Estimating the relative power of co-chief executives using proxies such as tenure and stock ownership, he and his co-authors concluded that executives who had more equal levels of power performed worse than those with disproportionate power.

“We interpret this as being evidence that, basically, having co-C.E.O.s really only works if they’re not really co-C.E.O.s,” Mr. Krause said. Co-leaders of a division, he said, may be more successful because they can more easily divide responsibilities instead of sharing authority. Such setups are not uncommon at JPMorgan.

It could highlight the ability to work collaboratively, said Steve Odland, the head of the Conference Board and the former chief executive of Office Depot and AutoZone.

“Whenever you’re in a C.E.O. successor position, it’s difficult because there are a lot of things that have to go right and you’re under the microscope,” Mr. Odland said. “But to do so with your competitor, and have to compete with your co-head, at the same time you’re making it work is especially stressful. Which is why it’s an interesting test, because the person who succeeds at this should be amply able to succeed in the C.E.O. role.”

But is it a good idea? Dan Ciampa, an adviser to chief executives and directors during leadership transitions, said that he generally would not recommend such a test.

“It may make sense to have co-division leaders or co-unit leaders and maybe even co-C.E.O.s,” Mr. Ciampa said. “But to use that as a way to determine who the next person should be to run the entire organization, to me it says that the board and the sitting C.E.O. and the head of H.R. have probably not done their homework.”

Handy Kennedy, a farmer in Cobbtown, Ga., and founder of a cooperative of Black farmers. Debt relief approved by Congress in March aims to make amends for decades of financial discrimination against Black and other nonwhite farmers.Credit…Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

The Biden administration’s efforts to provide $4 billion in debt relief to minority farmers is encountering stiff resistance from banks, which are complaining that the government initiative to pay off the loans of borrowers who have faced decades of financial discrimination will cut into their profits and hurt investors.

The debt relief was approved as part of the stimulus package that Congress passed in March and was intended to make amends for the discrimination that Black and other nonwhite farmers have faced from lenders and the Department of Agriculture over the years.

But no money has yet gone out the door.

Instead, the program has become mired in controversy and lawsuits. In April, white farmers who claim that they are victims of discrimination sued the U.S.D.A. over the initiative, writes The New York Times’s Alan Rappeport.

Now, three of the biggest banking groups are waging their own fight and complaining about the cost of being repaid early. Their argument stems from the way banks make money from loans and how they decide where to extend credit.

By allowing borrowers to repay their debts early, the lenders are being denied income they have long expected, they argue. The banks want the federal government to pay money beyond the outstanding loan amount so that banks and investors will not miss out on interest income that they were expecting or money that they would have made reselling the loans to other investors.

Bank lobbyists have been asking the Agriculture Department to make changes to the repayment program, a U.S.D.A. official said. They are pressing the U.S.D.A. to simply make the loan payments, rather than wipe out the debt all at once. And they are warning of other repercussions.

In a letter sent last month to the agriculture secretary, the banks suggested that they might be more reluctant to extend credit if the loans were quickly repaid, leaving minority farmers worse off in the long run. The intimation was viewed as a threat by some organizations that represent Black farmers.

The U.S.D.A. has shown no inclination to reverse course.

Stocks on Wall Street extended the week’s losses on Wednesday, following a slump in Europe, as traders weighed fresh data on inflation and concerns from central banks about the recovery.

The S&P 500 fell 1.2 percent in early trading, after dropping 0.9 percent on Tuesday. Technology stocks led the declines, with the Nasdaq composite falling more than 1.5 percent in early trading.

The Stoxx Europe 600 index was 1.8 percent lower, while the FTSE 100 in Britain lost 1.5 percent. Stock markets in Asia ended the day mainly lower, with the Nikkei in Japan down by 1.3 percent.

Volatility in stock markets lately has been driven by sentiment about inflation. Investors are nervous that a jump in prices —  coming as global economies reopen and while the government continues to pump stimulus funds to spur growth — could push the Federal Reserve and other central banks to raise interest rates or take other measures to cool growth. That would be bad news for riskier investments like stocks.

The Fed and other central banks have said they see the recent increases as transitory caused partly by supply chain issues as economies revive from lockdowns, and that they have no plans to remove emergency support for the economy.

  • Bitcoin has dropped more than 22 percent in 24 hours, to about $34,000, according to CoinDesk. The cryptocurrency was above $63,000 about a month ago.

  • One factor behind the decline was China’s announcement that it would ban banks and payment companies from providing services related to cryptocurrency transactions.

  • The drop has hit shares of companies in the cryptocurrency industry hard. Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange, fell 10 percent in early trading Wednesday, and Riot Blockchain slid more than 12 percent.

  • Tesla, the electric vehicle maker that recently invested $1.5 billion on bitcoin, was down 4 percent. But Tesla also recently reversed a decision to accept payment for its cars in Bitcoin, a decision that has helped fuel the cryptocurrency’s recent decline.

  • On Wednesday, Britain said its inflation rate more than doubled to an annual rate of 1.5 percent in April. Still the jump was in line with expectations, and reflects an adjustment from slumping prices a year ago.

  • The eurozone is also seeing higher prices. The annualized inflation rate in April was 1.6 percent among countries using the euro, up from a 1.3 percent rate the month before, Eurostat reported. Fuel costs were cited as the main driver.

  • But the European Central Bank issued a warning on Wednesday that, although eurozone economies were improving, “the pandemic will leave a legacy of higher debt and weaker balance sheets, which — if unaddressed — could prompt sharp market corrections and financial stress or lead to a prolonged period of weak economic recovery.”

  • The bank, in its latest Financial Stability Review, also pointed to the “remarkable exuberance” in the stock markets as U.S. Treasury yields have risen amid inflation concerns. “The buoyancy of financial markets has stood in contrast to weaker economic fundamentals,” the report said. The bank called for continued support for hard-hit sectors that remain vulnerable, like hospitality, arts and entertainment.

  • Federal Reserve policymakers will release the minutes from their April meeting on Wednesday.

  • Amazon said Tuesday that it would indefinitely prohibit police departments from using its facial recognition tool, extending a moratorium the company announced last year during nationwide protests over racism and biased policing. When Amazon announced the pause in June, it did not cite a specific reason for the change. The company said it hoped a year was enough time for Congress to create legislation regulating the ethical use of facial recognition technology. Congress has not banned the technology, or issued any significant regulations on it, but some cities have.

  • Google held its I/O developer conference on Tuesday. And, as usual, it was a dizzying two-hour procession of new features, products and services across the company’s vast array of businesses, from its smartphone software to its artificial intelligence systems. Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google’s parent company Alphabet, revealed the company’s next so-called moonshot: Google aims to power the entire company using carbon-free energy by 2030. It will require using artificially intelligent software systems to allocate energy wisely as well as investments to tap into geothermal energy in addition to wind and solar.

Rudolph W. Giuliani, a lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump, disputing the results of the election won by Joseph R. Biden Jr.Credit…Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Fox News Media, the Rupert Murdoch-controlled cable group, filed a motion on Tuesday to dismiss a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit brought against it in March by Dominion Voting Systems, an election technology company that accused Fox News of propagating lies that ruined its reputation after the 2020 presidential election.

The Dominion lawsuit and a similar defamation claim brought in February by another election company, Smartmatic, have been widely viewed as test cases in a growing legal effort to battle disinformation in the news media. And it is another byproduct of former President Donald J. Trump’s baseless attempts to undermine President Biden’s clear victory.

In a 61-page response filed in Delaware Superior Court, the Fox legal team argues that Dominion’s suit threatened the First Amendment powers of a news organization to chronicle and assess newsworthy claims in a high-stakes political contest.

“A free press must be able to report both sides of a story involving claims striking at the core of our democracy,” Fox says in the motion, “especially when those claims prompt numerous lawsuits, government investigations and election recounts.” The motion adds: “The American people deserved to know why President Trump refused to concede despite his apparent loss.”

Dominion’s lawsuit against Fox News presented the circumstances in a different light.

Dominion is among the largest manufacturers of voting machine equipment and its technology was used by more than two dozen states last year. Its lawsuit described the Fox News and Fox Business cable networks as active participants in spreading a false claim, pushed by Mr. Trump’s allies, that the company had covertly modified vote counts to manipulate results in favor of Mr. Biden. Lawyers for Mr. Trump shared those claims during televised interviews on Fox programs.

“Lies have consequences,” Dominion’s lawyers wrote in their initial complaint. “Fox sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process.” The lawsuit cites instances where Fox hosts, including Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo, uncritically repeated false claims about Dominion made by Mr. Trump’s lawyers Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney Powell.

A representative for Dominion, whose founder and employees received threatening messages after the negative coverage, did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday night.

Fox News Media has retained two prominent lawyers to lead its defense: Charles Babcock, who has a background in media law, and Scott Keller, a former chief counsel to Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas. Fox has also filed to dismiss the Smartmatic suit; that defense is being led by Paul D. Clement, a former solicitor general under President George W. Bush.

“There are two sides to every story,” Mr. Babcock and Mr. Keller wrote in a statement on Tuesday. “The press must remain free to cover both sides, or there will be a free press no more.”

The Fox motion on Tuesday argues that its networks “had a free-speech right to interview the president’s lawyers and surrogates even if their claims eventually turned out to be unsubstantiated.” It argues that the security of Dominion’s technology had been debated in prior legal claims and media coverage, and that the lawsuit did not meet the high legal standard of “actual malice,” a reckless disregard for the truth, on the part of Fox News and its hosts.

Media organizations, in general, enjoy strong protections under the First Amendment. Defamation suits are a novel tactic in the battle over disinformation, but proponents say the strategy has shown some early results. The conservative news outlet Newsmax apologized last month after a Dominion employee, in a separate legal case, accused the network of spreading baseless rumors about his role in the election. Fox Business canceled “Lou Dobbs Tonight” a day after Smartmatic sued Fox in February and named Mr. Dobbs as a co-defendant.

Jonah E. Bromwich contributed reporting.