Month: May 2021

Health

Doximity recordsdata for IPO and says docs will get allocation

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Post date May 29, 2021

Uber offered it to the drivers. Airbnb did it for hosts. Now Doximity is making it available to doctors, but in a much bigger way.

In its IPO prospectus on Friday, health tech company Doximity – often referred to as LinkedIn for Doctors – announced that it will allocate up to 15% of the shares in the Doctors offering through a “reserved share program”.

This means eligible doctors can get shares at the same price as the select group of institutional investors who so often benefit from the IPO pop because they get an early allocation and don’t have to wait for trading to start. Doximity hasn’t yet said how many shares it plans to issue or at what price. In order to qualify for the program, members must meet certain activity thresholds.

“We strive to be the world’s largest physician-owned technology company, and our reserved stock IPO program is designed to both thank our members and help the process,” wrote co-founders Jeff Tangney, Nate Gross and Shari Buck in the Founder’s Letter section of the prospectus.

Airbnb, which went public in December, has reserved up to 7% of the shares in its IPO for hosts on the platform. After the stock fell 112% on its debut, hosts who bought the maximum number of shares posted a paper profit of over $ 15,000 on day one.

There is no guarantee that the stock will rally like this. When Uber went public in 2019, the hailship company made up to 3% of its offering available to drivers. IPO buyers are only up 14% while the Nasdaq Composite is up 74% over that stretch. Meanwhile, trading app Robinhood announced last week that it was launching a product called IPO Access to give retail investors more opportunities to get into deals at asking price.

Founded in 2011, Doximity is largely under the radar, despite being based in San Francisco. The company has not borrowed since 2014, only raised around $ 80 million in venture finance in its decade as a private company, and spent very little on marketing. The company is also profitable: net income rose 69% to $ 50.2 million last fiscal year.

Doximity has grown rapidly as doctors have become the standard location across the country to connect with each other and stay up to date on new research. It was also a very valuable tool for medical recruiters. The service is now used by 1.8 million medical professionals in all top 20 hospitals and health systems, according to the prospectus.

Revenue rose 78% last year to $ 206.9 million. Sales and marketing accounted for 30% of total sales. Most of that is “staff expenses, sales commissions, travel expenses, and other event expenses,” with a little bit spent on Google and Facebook ads. Only $ 2.6 million went into advertising last year.

While Doximity doesn’t do a lot for advertising, it generates a healthy amount of revenue from medical and pharmaceutical companies that use the app to reach out to doctors. All top 20 drug manufacturers use the service to educate medical professionals about their products. The company said its subscription paid marketing solutions product represented over 80% of sales in the past fiscal year.

Most of the remaining revenue comes from hiring solutions used by healthcare systems and medical recruitment firms to connect with Doximity’s doctors.

Doximity said it has more than 600 subscription customers, including 200 who spent $ 100,000 in fiscal 2021. Of those, 29 spent at least $ 1 million. Subscriptions made up 93% of total sales.

Doximity also launched a telemedicine product last year when Covid-19 forced patients to stay at home and communicate with their doctors remotely. The company only started charging for the telehealth service in early January.

“We have seen rapid adoption of our telehealth solutions by our healthcare customers as Doximity members who have used our productivity tools in the past have used organically,” the company said.

Doximity said it is competing with LinkedIn for members. It competes against recruiting companies in hiring and recruiting, while in the telemedicine market it faces competition from Teladoc and American Well and the universal video chat app Zoom.

CLOCK: Robinhood to allow users to get involved in IPOs

Tags allocation, Doctors, Doximity, files, IPO

Business

Biden finances would give CDC greatest funding increase in practically 20 years

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Post date May 29, 2021

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris receive an update on the fight against the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic as they visit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S., March 19, 2021.

Carlos Barria | Reuters

President Joe Biden’s first budget proposal would give the largest funding boost in nearly two decades to the agency most closely tracking the coronavirus pandemic, his administration said Friday.

The budget blueprint for fiscal 2022 would include $8.7 billion in discretionary funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to budget documents shared by the Office of Management and Budget.

The agency said that budget bump would build on the CDC investments doled out in the American Rescue Plan, the $1.9 trillion Covid relief plan that Biden signed into law in March.

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The new funding would be used to “support core public health capacity improvements in States and Territories, modernize public health data collection nationwide, train new epidemiologists and other public health experts, and rebuild international capacity to detect, prepare for, and respond to emerging global threats,” the OMB said.

While the CDC funding request is a big increase from recent years, it comprises just a small slice of Biden’s $6 trillion budget proposal for 2022. The request wraps in funding for a double-barreled, multitrillion-dollar economic overhaul plan that the president unveiled earlier this year.

More than 33 million Covid infections, and at least 593,466 deaths, have been reported in the U.S., according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

From before Covid was even officially labeled a pandemic, the CDC has issued guidance on how to slow or prevent the spread of the virus in different environments, from summer camps to nursing homes. The agency has now issued and updated more than 200 guidance documents, its website shows.

But the budget proposal would go beyond funding the agency’s disease-focused work.

The budget materials say $153 million would be allocated for the CDC’s Social Determinants of Health program to work on “improving health equity and data collection for racial and ethnic populations.”

The government would also provide $100 million for the CDC’s Climate and Health program as part of a $1.2 billion investment in strengthening resilience to wildfires, floods, droughts and other climate-related disasters.

The budget request for the Health and Human Services Department would double firearm violence prevention research at the CDC and the National Institutes of Health.

Overall, HHS is requesting $133.7 billion in discretionary funding — a $25.3 billion, or 23.4%, bump from the enacted budget of fiscal 2021.

Tags Biden, Biggest, boost, budget, CDC, funding, Give, years

World News

U.S. to Reimpose Sanctions on Belarus Over Pressured Airplane Touchdown

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Post date May 29, 2021

The Biden government said late Friday that it would impose economic sanctions on certain state-owned companies in Belarus, the latest diplomatic backlash by a Western government after the country’s authoritarian leader knocked down a European passenger jet last weekend.

The plane, a Ryanair Boeing 737 flying from Greece to Lithuania, was flying through Belarusian airspace on Sunday when it was diverted and forced to land in the capital Minsk with a fighter escort. Roman Protasevich, a Belarusian opposition journalist who lived in exile abroad, was arrested with his girlfriend after the plane landed.

Belarusian President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko, a brutal and eccentric strong man, has alleged that he diverted the plane because of a bomb threat sent by email in order not to arrest Mr. Protasevich. However, a Swiss email provider said that the email quoted by the Belarusian authorities was sent after the plane had already been diverted.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement Friday evening that sanctions against nine Belarusian state-owned companies that had been lifted by the Treasury Department would be reinstated on June 3.

The United States, together with the European Union and other allies, is developing a list of sanctions against members of Mr. Lukashenko’s government linked to “ongoing human rights violations and corruption, the 2020 election fraud and the events of May 23”, added her.

The allegation of electoral fraud referred to last summer when Mr. Lukashenko, who has been in power since 1994, claimed to have won 80 percent of the vote in a sham election. His claim led to mass demonstrations where the police cracked down on them.

The spokesman for the government of Mr. Lukashenko could not be reached immediately on Saturday for a statement.

Mr Protasevich, the imprisoned journalist, co-founded a telegram channel that is a popular opposition center in Belarus and was used to mobilize protests last year. Mr Biden has called for the 26-year-old’s release, stating that his arrest and a video he recently shot while in state custody – apparently under duress – were “shameful attacks on both political disagreement and freedom of the press. ”

In addition to the sanctions announced on Friday, the United States will also suspend the application of an aviation agreement with Belarus for 2019 and recently advised American citizens not to travel to the country, Ms Psaki said in the statement.

“We are taking these measures together with our partners and allies to hold the regime accountable for its actions and to demonstrate our commitment to the aspirations of the Belarusian people,” she said.

Tags Belarus, forced, landing, Plane, Reimpose, Sanctions

Health

C.D.C. Says Vaccinated Camps Can Cease Masking and Distancing

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Post date May 29, 2021

Federal health officials are encouraging young people aged 12 and over who are heading to camp this summer to get vaccinated against the coronavirus as soon as possible, saying on Friday that camps where all staff and campers are vaccinated can drop many Covid restrictions, including masks, and return to full capacity. Unvaccinated children can also go without masks most of the time when they are outside because the risk of transmission outdoors is low.

“For camps where everyone is fully vaccinated prior to the start of camp, it is safe to return to full capacity, without masking and without physical distancing,” the new guidance says.

In camps where not everyone is fully vaccinated, mask recommendations for all have been relaxed for most outdoor activities, unless the setting is crowded and involves sustained close contact. But other prevention strategies should be maintained, including physical distancing, grouping youngsters in cohorts or pods that don’t mix with one another; encouraging frequent hand washing; avoiding crowded settings and poorly ventilated indoor areas.

The guidance, issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says that if campers prefer to wear masks despite being fully vaccinated, camps should be supportive of their choice. Staff members and campers with compromised immune systems are urged to talk to their providers, and continue practicing precautions, like wearing masks.

Individuals are considered fully vaccinated by the C.D.C. two weeks after receiving the one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine or the second dose of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines.

“We’re going to start to see more and more adolescents fully vaccinated by mid summer, so it is possible that camps could provide a camp experience for children who are fully vaccinated, and you could get back to the camp experience that was pre-pandemic: no masking, no distancing, and all the activities you would normally do,” said Erin Sauber-Schatz, who leads the C.D.C. task force for community interventions and critical populations.

She noted that 2.5 million children aged 12 to 15 have received the first dose of a Pfizer vaccine in the last 18 days alone.

Individual camps will have the flexibility to determine both how they go about verifying the vaccination status of campers and how they run programs where not everyone is fully vaccinated, she said. They could mix vaccinated and unvaccinated campers or group them in separate cohorts with different rules, she said, or decide that in order “to keep non-vaccinated campers as safe as possible, they may have standard rules across the camp regardless of vaccination status.”

The guidance to campers comes after the agency’s recent recommendation that fully vaccinated people can choose to go maskless in most situations.

Though there is still no vaccine for children under the age of 12, the Food and Drug Administration authorized the use of the Pfizer vaccine in children aged 12 to 15 earlier this month. Younger children will probably be eligible for vaccination in the fall.

Tom Rosenberg, president and chief executive of the American Camp Association, a nonprofit that accredits camps, said the new guidance was issued just in time, as many camps in the southern United States start as early as next week.

But, he said, “The reality is that the majority of camps are for kids six years old to 17, so a good portion of the kids attending camp, by virtue of their age alone, will not be vaccinated. So camps are preparing to manage another Covid summer with a layered mitigation strategy, like last year.”

Federal health officials urged camps where campers are vaccinated to continue with other precautions, including making sure there is good ventilation in indoor spaces by keeping windows open, using fans and air filters; practicing good hand hygiene and respiratory etiquette; and cleaning and disinfecting high-touch areas frequently.

Tags camps, CDC, Distancing, masking, stop, Vaccinated

Business

Fox Information Intensifies Its Professional-Trump Politics as Dissenters Depart

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Post date May 29, 2021

Fox News once devoted its 7 p.m. and 11 p.m. time slots to relatively straightforward newscasts. Now those hours are filled by opinion shows led by hosts who denounce Democrats and defend the worldview of former President Donald J. Trump.

For seven years, Juan Williams was the lone liberal voice on “The Five,” the network’s popular afternoon chat show. On Wednesday, he announced that he was leaving the program, after months of harsh on-air blowback from his conservative co-hosts. Many Fox News viewers cheered his exit on social media.

Donna Brazile, the former Democratic Party chairwoman, was hired by Fox News with great fanfare in 2019 as a dissenting voice for its political coverage. She criticized Mr. Trump and spoke passionately about the Black Lives Matter movement, which other hosts on the network often demonized. Ms. Brazile has now left Fox News; last week, she quietly started a new job at ABC.

Onscreen and off, in ways subtle and overt, Fox News has adapted to the post-Trump era by moving in a single direction: Trumpward.

The network has rewarded pro-Trump pundits like Greg Gutfeld and Dan Bongino with prize time slots. Some opinion hosts who ventured on-air criticism of the former president have been replaced. And within the Fox News reporting ranks, journalists have privately expressed concern that the network is less committed to straight-ahead news coverage than it was in the past.

The shifts at Fox News, which is controlled by the father-and-son moguls Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, have come in the wake of what amounted to an existential moment for a cable channel that is home to Trump cheerleaders like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham: the 2020 election.

Fox News’s ratings fell sharply after the network made an early call on election night that Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic presidential nominee, would carry Arizona and later declared him the winner, even as Mr. Trump advanced lies about fraud. With viewers in revolt, the network moved out dissenting voices and put a new emphasis on right-wing commentary.

In January, the network fired its veteran politics editor, Chris Stirewalt, who had been an onscreen face of the early call in Arizona for Mr. Biden. This month, it brought on a new editor in the Washington bureau: Kerri Kupec, a former spokeswoman for Mr. Trump’s attorney general William P. Barr. She had no journalistic experience.

Financially, the Murdochs’ formula has produced results: After a rare loss to archrivals CNN and MSNBC in January, Fox News’s ratings strength has recovered; the channel is again the Nielsen leader in cable news. In May, Fox News is on track to more than double CNN’s prime-time viewership.

Its new opinion shows at 7 and 11 — with segments that lament “cancel culture” and attack Mr. Biden — are attracting bigger audiences than the newscasts they replaced. And the niche right-wing network Newsmax has failed to sustain its postelection audience gains.

Partisanship plays well on cable news, an insight not lost on programmers at other networks who are chasing fatigued viewers. Liberal-leaning MSNBC has expanded the show hosted by the anti-Trump commentator Nicolle Wallace; it also replaced the moderate Chris Matthews at 7 p.m. with the partisan commentator Joy Reid. Last week, CNN dropped one of its chief conservative commentators, Rick Santorum, after he was criticized for remarks about Native Americans.

“Conservatives have a long-held suspicion of the mainstream media being in the tank for Democrats and for the left,” said Ryan Williams, a Republican strategist and longtime aide to Mitt Romney who has occasionally appeared on the network as a guest. “Fox News for many years was viewed as the only outlet that wasn’t shilling for the other side. Liberals may doubt the power of Fox News, but it still draws a considerable audience for a reason.”

Fox News says its news coverage remains robust. And in some ways, the Murdochs are making a rational business decision by following the conservatives who have made up the heart of the Fox News audience; recent surveys show that more than three-quarters of Republicans want Mr. Trump to run in 2024.

But under Roger Ailes, the network’s founder, who shaped its look and feel, Fox News elevated liberal foils like Alan Colmes, a Democrat who shared equal billing in prime time with Mr. Hannity until the end of 2008, and moderates like Mr. Williams.

Credit…Andrew Toth/FilmMagic

“Roger’s view was you had to have some unpredictability and you had to challenge the audience; you couldn’t just be reading Republican talking points every night,” said Susan R. Estrich, a Democratic lawyer and former commentator on Fox News who negotiated Mr. Ailes’s exit from the network amid his sexual misconduct scandal.

Ms. Estrich recalled that Mr. Ailes had defended Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News host, when Mr. Trump, then a presidential candidate, attacked her in misogynist terms. Now, she said, “instead of trying to broaden their audience, Fox News is narrowing it and digging in.”

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May 28, 2021, 12:54 p.m. ET

Ms. Brazile said she had left Fox News of her own accord.

“Fox never censored my views in any way,” she wrote in an email. “Everyone treated me courteously as a colleague.” Ms. Brazile added: “I believe it’s important for all media to expose their audiences to both progressive and conservative viewpoints. With the election and President Biden’s first 100 days behind us, I’ve accomplished what I wanted at Fox News.”

Mr. Williams will remain at Fox News as a senior political analyst; the network said in a statement that he had requested to be closer to his family in Washington rather than commute to New York, where “The Five” is taped. Fox News said another liberal host would replace him. Among those in contention is a newly hired contributor to the Fox stable, the former Democratic congressman Harold Ford Jr.

Mr. Williams departed after a harder edge had crept into his exchanges with colleagues like Mr. Gutfeld and Jesse Watters. “The Five” had long been a venue for heated, if friendly debate, but Mr. Williams was repeatedly mocked and shouted down when he accused Mr. Trump of lying about the election and fueling the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Mr. Williams also noted, on-air, a Fox News report about Mr. Biden that falsely claimed he wanted to restrict Americans’ consumption of hamburgers. (Fox News later issued a correction.)

Credit…Fox News

His prime antagonist, Mr. Gutfeld, started an 11 p.m. show last month that is meant to compete with late-night fare like “The Daily Show.” “Gutfeld!” has attracted a bigger viewership than the previous 11 p.m. offering, a newscast anchored by Shannon Bream that was shifted to midnight.

Fox News is still determining a permanent host for its new 7 p.m. opinion hour, which is now a reliable venue for pro-Trump commentary. It was where Tucker Carlson, the network’s 8 p.m. host, made his remarks about white replacement theory that prompted an outcry from the Anti-Defamation League.

A pro-Trump drift at Fox News is not new: George Will, a traditional conservative who opposed Mr. Trump’s candidacy, lost his contributor contract in 2017. Shepard Smith, a news anchor who was tough on Mr. Trump, left in 2019.

Some Fox News journalists, though, say privately that they are increasingly concerned with the network’s direction. Kristin Fisher, one of the network’s rising stars in Washington and a White House correspondent, left Fox News earlier this month despite the network’s effort to keep her. She had faced criticism from viewers in November after a segment in which she aggressively debunked lies about election fraud advanced by Mr. Trump’s lawyers.

The longtime Washington bureau chief, Bill Sammon, resigned in January after internal criticism over his handling of election coverage, around the time that Mr. Stirewalt was fired. (Mr. Stirewalt was let go along with roughly 20 digital journalists at Fox News, which the network attributed to a realignment of “business and reporting structure to meet the demands of this new era.”)

Mr. Sammon has effectively been replaced by Doug Rohrbeck, a producer with extensive news experience on Bret Baier’s newscast and Chris Wallace’s Sunday show. Still, some Fox journalists were surprised when the network hired Ms. Kupec, the former Barr spokeswoman, to work under Mr. Rohrbeck.

A Fox News spokesperson said the network was proud of the journalism from its reporting ranks, listing examples including the foreign correspondent Trey Yingst’s coverage of Israel, Jennifer Griffin’s coverage of the Pentagon, and reporting on the crisis at the Mexican border by Bill Melugin and Aishah Hasnie.

Mr. Baier, the network’s chief political anchor, announced in May that he had extended his contract through 2025. Along with Mr. Wallace of “Fox News Sunday,” he regularly lands newsy interviews; a recent conversation with Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming grew testy when she faulted Fox News for perpetuating Mr. Trump’s lies about the election and Mr. Baier responded that he had made clear to viewers that Mr. Biden was the legitimate victor.

Fox News has a smaller international footprint than rivals like CNN, but it maintains several foreign bureaus and has had reporters in Israel covering the recent violence there. On Wednesday, the network announced an expansion of Fox News International, a streaming service available in 37 countries in Asia and Europe.

Despite continuing criticism from liberals, Fox News remains a financial juggernaut for the Murdoch empire; it is expected to earn record advertising revenues this year, the network said.

Even as its programming decisions seem aimed at attracting Trump supporters, Fox News does face one roadblock: Mr. Trump. The former president has maintained his stinging criticism of Fox News, which, he has claimed, betrayed him by calling the election for Mr. Biden.

On Friday, Mr. Trump renewed his criticism in a statement that he issued in response to a critical speech by the former House speaker Paul D. Ryan, a member of the Fox Corporation board since 2019.

“Fox totally lost its way and became a much different place” after Mr. Ryan joined the board, the former president wrote. Mr. Trump added: “Fox will never be the same!”

Tags depart, Dissenters, Fox, intensifies, News, Politics, proTrump

Politics

Texas Gov. Abbott defends resolution to finish Covid unemployment enhance

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Post date May 29, 2021

Texas governor Greg Abbott on Friday defended his decision to end the state’s unemployment surge after thousands of people signed a petition urging the Republican official to reverse his step.

“We have the demand for a workforce that people can return to work and the numbers in our state are safe enough for people to return to work,” Abbott said on CNBC’s Squawk on the Street.

“It’s time for America to get back to work,” said the Republican governor.

Abbott announced earlier this month that effective June 26, the state would reject the federally signed federal unemployment assistance programs in an effort to ease the economic burden of the Covid-19 pandemic.

These programs included a weekly $ 300 supplement to state unemployment benefits. At least 23 states have restricted use of federal unemployment programs.

Abbott said he had “the math behind this reasoning”.

“We have more vacancies than people in unemployment insurance, according to the Texas Workforce Commission. In addition, 18% of jobless claims submitted have been found to be fraudulent,” Abbott said.

A majority of Americans support the state’s efforts to end the rise in unemployment at the federal level, a recent Quinnipiac University poll found.

In Texas, the decision has caused some setbacks among those who say stopping the extra help will cause more pain to those already suffering. A petition asking Abbott to reverse his move has received approximately 8,000 signatures.

Abbott said Friday that ending the federal boost was critical to opening the state fully.

“The biggest challenge I hear from employers is that Texas is 100% open, employers are trying to hire, but restaurants and shops and other types of businesses can’t open as much as they want because they can’t win Access to the staff who need to open them, “he said.

“One of the biggest challenges is making sure employers can get workers there so we can truly be a fully open economy,” said Abbott.

Economists are unsure whether the rise in federal unemployment is causing potential workers to remain unemployed longer.

A working paper released earlier this month by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco suggested that the $ 300 increase could have little impact on job seekers’ willingness to take up jobs.

President Joe Biden, a Democrat, said he doesn’t think the $ 300 surge is causing individuals to turn down jobs.

“Americans want to work,” he said earlier this month.

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Tags Abbott, boost, Covid, decision, defends, Gov, Texas, Unemployment

Business

Girls participation in Asia ecommerce is a $280 billion alternative

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Post date May 29, 2021

Southeast Asia’s e-commerce market could grow by more than $280 billion by 2030 if major online shopping marketplaces do more to encourage and enable women entrepreneurs, a new report from the International Finance Corporation found.

The “anonymity” of e-commerce has reduced many of the barriers to entry traditionally faced by women and afforded them the opportunity to thrive in new sectors, Amy Luinstra, the IFC’s gender program manager for East Asia and Pacific, told CNBC Thursday.

Still, many of the inequalities faced by women in the traditional retail space “bleed into the online world,” she said, such as securing access to funding.

Luinstra called on big e-commerce players to do more to support women vendors and capture the market opportunity.

For platforms that have financing options, that is an excellent way to bring more women in and help them thrive.

Amy Luinstra

gender program manager (East Asia and Pacific), IFC

That includes extending financing for women, providing training, and encouraging them to participate in higher value sectors like electronics, she said.

“For platforms that have financing options, that is an excellent way to bring more women in and help them thrive by making sure they’re aware of the financing offers and they’re able to take advantage of them,” Luinstra told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia.”

A woman wears a protective face mask as she waits for customers inside her shop in Jakarta, Indonesia on Tuesday, March 31, 2020.

NurPhoto | Getty Images

Her comments come against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic, which is said to have disproportionately put women at a disadvantage.

The IFC report, which drew on data collated from Southeast Asian e-commerce site Lazada, found that in 2019, women were on course to reach gender parity in e-commerce. But even with the surge in online retail in the past year, the additional caregiving duties and time constraints that women faced caused progress to take a step back.

“Prior to the pandemic, women were holding their own — in some cases outselling men and even … out participating men,” said Luinstra.

In the Philippines for instance, women previously accounted for 64% of sellers on Lazada’s site, but their sales dropped by 27% during the pandemic, the report found.

“That has changed under the pandemic and that’s how we’re starting to get the gap, and the opportunity for closing that gap, that adds up to the big number $280 billion,” she said, referring to the market opportunity referenced in the report.

Correction: This article has been updated to correctly reflect the report’s 2030 growth estimates.

Tags Asia, Billion, ecommerce, opportunity, participation, Women

Health

WHO says Covid origin investigation is being ‘poisoned by politics’

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Post date May 29, 2021

Executive Director of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) emergencies program Mike Ryan speaks at a news conference on the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) in Geneva, Switzerland.

Denis Balibouse | Reuters

A top World Health Organization official said Friday that investigations into the origins of Covid-19 are being “poisoned by politics.”

U.S. President Joe Biden announced Wednesday that he’s ordered intelligence agencies to conduct “a report on their most up-to-date analysis of the origins of Covid-19, including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident.”

The WHO has come under increasing pressure in recent days from U.S. and European officials to take another look at whether the coronavirus could have escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China, after a previously undisclosed U.S. intelligence report came to light, revealing that three researchers sought hospital care after falling ill with Covid-like symptoms in November 2019.

Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO’s Health Emergencies Program, asked if countries could separate the politics from the science.

“Putting WHO in a position like it has been put in is very unfair to the science we’re trying to carry out, and it puts us as an organization, frankly, in an impossible position to deliver the answers that the world wants,” Ryan said at a news briefing.

The WHO has been repeatedly accused of allowing the Chinese government to avoid a thorough investigation into the origins of Covid-19, which was first discovered in Wuhan in late 2019. At a Senate hearing earlier this week Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., pressed White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci on the WHO’s close ties to China.

“Can we agree that if you took (Chinese) President Xi Jinping and turned him upside down and shook him, the World Health Organization would fall out of his pocket?” Fauci responded by saying that he has no way of knowing China’s influence on the agency.

The hypothesis that Covid-19 came from a Wuhan virology lab was initially dismissed as a right-wing conspiracy theory, but it’s been gaining traction in recent weeks.

The majority of the intelligence community believes that it is equally plausible that the virus originated in a lab and in an animal. Federal health officials continue to maintain their position that it is more likely that the virus has zoonotic origins. The CDC’s website still states “we know that it originally came from an animal, likely a bat.”

Tags Covid, investigation, origin, poisoned, Politics

Entertainment

Dove Cameron Discusses Her Sexuality in Homosexual Occasions Interview

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Post date May 29, 2021

Image Source: Getty / Amy Sussman

A few days before Pride Month, Dove Cameron spoke in a touching interview for the summer edition of Gay times. “I have been pointing out my sexuality for years while I was afraid to phrase it for everyone,” said Dove, adding that she refuses to compromise her identity any longer. “I was never confused about who I was. [But] I felt like I wasn’t being accepted and I had this strange story that people wouldn’t believe me. “

After Dove saw that her prominent role models, including Ben Platt, Kristen Stewart, and Cara Delevingne, were her true, authentic selves, she wondered if she could do the same. “It felt like something I could never talk about,” she said. “I feel like the industry has changed a lot as people with platforms have space to be human and not be taken apart. I was very nervous about getting out and one day I dropped it because I behaved like someone who was outside and I realized it wasn’t me. “

“I choose to love myself, to be who I am every day, and not edit myself based on the room I’m in. I don’t apologize for who I am.”

Dove spoke about her sexuality for the first time on an Instagram Live in August 2020. “I went on Instagram Live and said, ‘Guys, I really had to explain something to you. Maybe I didn’t tell you, but I’m super queer. This is something I want to portray through my music because I am”, she remembered. “Since then, I’ve had an amazing relationship with my fans and we have this very safe space that we created.”

Ever since Dove came out as queer, she’s hoped her life as her real self will inspire fans in similar situations to do the same. “I’m not a label person, but I’d say I’m queer and that’s probably my most accurate way of representing myself,” she said. “Coming out was more about who I am as a whole than who I date or who I sleep with. I choose to love myself, to be who I am every day and not depend on myself the edit room I’m in. I don’t apologize for who I am. “

Tags Cameron, discusses, Dove, Gay, interview, Sexuality, Times

Business

This is One Factor Lacking from President Biden’s Price range: Booming Progress

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Post date May 29, 2021

“We are a really big economy where really big forces are shaping what happens to G.D.P. growth,” said Wendy Edelberg, director of the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution and a former C.B.O. chief economist.

Even these moderate projections by the Biden administration imply that its policies will lift growth in economic activity by a few tenths of a percent each year over a decade. This is significant when comparing it with the growth that would be expected by simply looking at demographic factors and historical averages of productivity growth. The forecast is more inherently optimistic about Mr. Biden’s policies — and their potential to increase productivity and the size of the work force — than it might seem at first glance.

Biden’s 2022 Budget

- A new year, a new budget: The 2022 fiscal year for the federal government begins on October 1, and President Biden has revealed what he’d like to spend, starting then. But any spending requires approval from both chambers of Congress.
- Ambitious total spending: President Biden would like the federal government to spend $6 trillion in the 2022 fiscal year, and for total spending to rise to $8.2 trillion by 2031. That would take the United States to its highest sustained levels of federal spending since World War II, while running deficits above $1.3 trillion through the next decade.
- Infrastructure plan: The budget outlines the president’s desired first year of investment in his American Jobs Plan, which seeks to fund improvements to roads, bridges, public transit and more with a total of $2.3 billion over eight years.
- Families plan: The budget also addresses the other major spending proposal Biden has already rolled out, his American Families Plan, aimed at bolstering the United States’ social safety net by expanding access to education, reducing the cost of child care and supporting women in the work force.
- Mandatory programs: As usual, mandatory spending on programs like Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare make up a significant portion of the proposed budget. They are growing as America’s population ages.
- Discretionary spending: Funding for the individual budgets of the agencies and programs under the executive branch would reach around $1.5 trillion in 2022, a 16 percent increase from the previous budget.
- How Biden would pay for it: The president would largely fund his agenda by raising taxes on corporations and high earners, which would begin to shrink budget deficits in the 2030s. Administration officials have said tax increases would fully offset the jobs and families plans over the course of 15 years, which the budget request backs up. In the meantime, the budget deficit would remain above $1.3 trillion each year.

“Making the claim that your fiscal policies will boost growth by four-tenths of a point seems optimistic, but I can see how they could get there,” she said.

Jason Furman, the Obama administration’s former top economist, said: “I think there’s a problem that people have in their head — more extravagant ideas about what economic policy can do and how quickly it can do it. When you’re talking about productivity enhancement, you’re talking about compounding that becomes a big deal for a long time.”

In other words, the difference of a few tenths of a percent of G.D.P. growth might not mean much for a single year, but a gap of that size that persists for many years has a big impact on living standards.

Some of the administration’s policies, by design, would focus on the very long-term impact on the nation’s economic potential. For example, additional money for community colleges might actually depress the size of the labor force, and thus G.D.P., in the short run if more adults go back to school. But it would then increase those workers’ productive potential, and thus contribution to growth, for the decades that follow.

Conservatives, for their part, view the Biden agenda as likely to restrain growth, particularly once tax increases and new regulatory action go into effect. Mr. Mulligan, the Trump adviser, said he believed the Biden agenda would reduce the nation’s growth path by around 0.8 percentage points a year compared with its Trump-era trajectory. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, said he thought Mr. Biden’s policies could create faster growth in the short term but slower growth in the long run because of taxes and spending.

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