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Asia dominates world field workplace, reveals U.S. has a path to restoration

Asia dominates global box office, shows U.S. has a path to recovery

Moviegoers wear face masks in a projection hall of a movie theater almost six months after they closed due to a coronavirus pandemic on July 24, 2020 in Beijing, China.

China News Service | China News Service | Getty Images

In a year marked by a deadly global pandemic, Japan’s box office set a new record.

An animated film based on a popular manga called “Demon Slayer” became the top grossing film in the country’s history, beating the record for Hayao Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away” in 2001. It has ticket sales of more than US $ 322 million Dollars earned.

Japan, an island nation in East Asia of more than 126 million people, has had fewer than 300,000 coronavirus cases and only saw box office revenues drop by 46% in 2020 to $ 1.27 billion.

By comparison, the domestic box office slumped 80% to $ 2.28 billion as U.S. coronavirus cases have topped 21.6 million since the pandemic began. Canada, a box office employee, has seen fewer than 645,000 cases, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Japan is just one of many countries in the Asia-Pacific region that have managed to manage the coronavirus pandemic in such a way that case numbers have remained low and consumer confidence has remained high.

In countries like China, Australia and South Korea, where cases of Covid have dropped significantly, analysts and operators are seeing box offices rebound and thrive.

In fact, its market share in the Asia-Pacific region increased in 2020. While the global box office was significantly lower last year – about 70% of its 2019 value, or about $ 12.4 billion – the Asia-Pacific region accounts for 51% of the Ticket sales. In 2019, these countries accounted for 41%, according to data from Comscore and analysis from Gower Street.

By comparison, in 2019 the US and Canadian box offices accounted for 30% of global ticket sales. In 2020 this market share fell to just 18%.

The Asia-Pacific region has gone to great lengths to fight the coronavirus, including breaking travel, setting up extensive testing and tracing of contacts, hiring masks, and implementing strict social distancing rules. Regardless of the approach taken by each country, its ability to reduce coronavirus cases and reopen their economies shows that if the US is able to do the same, similar results can be achieved.

So far, the response to coronavirus in America has been slow, and cases continue to climb to historic levels, with hospital stays and deaths increasing too.

As of August, when the majority of the world’s theaters reopened, the Asia-Pacific region has nearly 78% of the world’s total box office.

Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore, said these countries have bounced back after widespread theater closings.

First, these countries have been able to control their outbreaks by banning their outbreaks, introducing contact tracing and enforcing mask mandates. The reduction in the number of cases and strict preventive measures have increased the confidence of potential moviegoers.

Second, these countries had new non-Hollywood films to release. Domestically, the box office stalled because there was no new product for the audience to see. Even when theaters reopened with limited capacity, most of the films were legacy titles such as Star Wars, Jaws, and Goonies.

In the Asia-Pacific region, there was always new content in the studios to get people off their couches. And moviegoers turned out in droves.

In China, two films have generated more than $ 400 million at the local box office: “The Eight Hundred,” a war drama from the 1930s, and “My People, My Homeland,” a comedy film made up of five short stories . Both films were released in the second half of the year.

By comparison, the top grossing film in the US and Canada in 2020 was Sony’s “Bad Boys for Life”. The action film, starring Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, is the third in the Bad Boys franchise and was released in January before the virus spread to the United States. It raised $ 204 million during its theatrical release.

No film released domestically in the second half of the year reached nearly $ 100 million.

Universal’s family animated film “The Croods: A New Age” and Warner Bros.’s superhero sequel “Wonder Woman 1984” both made less than $ 30 million domestically. Another Warner Bros title, Tenet, was released on Labor Day weekend and did not exceed $ 60 million in its theatrical release.

“There is no doubt that going back to a normal big screen market will take a lot of time and patience,” said Dergarabedian. “However, the lessons of the example of countries that have rallied strongly in recent months show that a well-managed Covid response and engaging new films can work together to spark box office prosperity now and in the future kindle. “

Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal and CNBC. “The Croods: A New Age” is an NBCUniversal film.

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Business

Twitter’s Ban on Trump Exhibits The place Energy Now Lies

Twitter's Ban on Trump Shows Where Power Now Lies

It was a perfect match, and Mr. Trump soon began refining the free-running style of the stream of consciousness that would become its signature. For years he used the platform to weigh everything from wind turbines (ugly) to President Barack Obama’s birth certificate (fake) to Jon Stewart’s comedy (overrated). Mr. Trump’s no-filter considerations turned out to be engagement gold for Twitter, which recommended his tweets to millions of new users through its algorithms.

Social media became an even more powerful asset for Mr. Trump when he turned to politics. And after being elected president, thanks in large part to his dominance on Twitter and Facebook, he used his accounts in ways no world leader ever had: to announce key policies, harass foreign governments, raise votes in Congress, seniors hire and fire officials and interact with a colorful crew of racists and cranks.

Over time, we learned that the version of President Trump we saw on our feeds was in many ways more real than the flesh and blood person who occupied the Oval Office. People who wanted to know what Mr. Trump actually thought of a kneeling NFL player or spokeswoman Nancy Pelosi didn’t watch him read a prepared speech or hold a press conference. They looked at @realDonaldTrump, the most honest representation of who he was.

The most predictable outcome of Mr Trump’s dismissal from Twitter – and most likely a similar ban he will receive from Facebook after the day of inauguration – is that it will become a rallying call for conservatives who see themselves as victims of Silicon Valley censorship .

“We live Orwell’s 1984,” raged the President’s son, Donald Trump Jr., on his Twitter account (still working, 6.5 million followers). “In America there is no longer any free speech. It died with great technology. “

No serious thinker believes that Twitter and Facebook, as private companies, are obliged to provide a platform for every user, just as no one doubts that a restaurant owner can start an unruly dinner to create a scene. However, there are legitimate questions about whether a small handful of unelected technical executives who are accountable only to their boards of directors and shareholders (and in the case of Mr. Zuckerberg, none) should wield such enormous power. These measures also raise longer-term questions such as: B. whether the business models of social media companies are fundamentally compatible with a healthy democracy or whether a generation of Twitter-addicted politicians can ever learn the lesson that collecting retweets is a safer way to power than to govern responsibly.

Mr Trump’s ban will have a noticeable impact on the spread of disinformation about the 2020 election, much of which can be attributed to his accounts. It will also likely hasten the fragmentation of the American Internet by partisan standards, a process that was already underway, and reinforce calls for the repeal of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which puts social media companies from legal liability for their Internet protects user contributions.

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Business

This chart exhibits how the restaurant trade’s restoration stumbled in December

This chart shows how the restaurant industry's recovery stumbled in December

The hospitality industry spent most of 2020 recovering from the coronavirus pandemic, but poor sales worsened in the final month of the year.

According to the NPD Group, US restaurant chain transactions declined 10% in December compared to the same period last year. The company tracks transactions in 75 restaurant chains that together account for more than half of the commercial restaurant traffic in the United States. By December, the monthly decline in restaurant transactions had been improving steadily since April. Transactions in November were only down 8%.

However, the industry’s recovery has been hampered by a renewed spike in new Covid-19 cases, which led government officials to reintroduce strict food restrictions, and winter weather that has kept customers from dining outside.

The full-service restaurant segment is hardest hit by the pandemic. The sector, which includes Darden Restaurants’ Olden Garden and The Cheesecake Factory, found it harder to focus on delivery and takeaway as indoor eating was banned. Unlike fast food chains, full-service restaurants are not known for their convenience, and their food is not designed for travel.

At its low point in April, transactions in the full-service segment fell by 70%. In December, transactions were only down 30%. A new wave of indoor food bans has hit personal sales. And take-out and delivery sales aren’t enough to offset the decline in sales that resulted from fewer dine-in customers, according to the UBS Evidence Lab.

On the other hand, the fast food sector has recovered much faster. Until July, weekly transaction declines were in single digits. The segment benefited from previous investments in drive-through lanes, digital ordering and acceleration of service. And its great deals appeal to budget-conscious consumers who grow in numbers during a recession.

The NPD group only pursues restaurant chains. Bank of America consumer data shows that chain restaurants recover much faster than independent restaurants. Independent institutions typically do not have the same access to capital as chains. And while the federal government’s Paycheck Protection Program was created to help small businesses through the crisis, big chains like PF Chang’s and TGI Friday’s have devoured millions of dollars.

The catering industry is pushing for more relief for bars and restaurants. Before the latest stimulus package was drafted, President-elect Joe Biden said he would support grants for restaurant loans. The House of Representatives passed a similar bill in October that gave the industry a $ 120 billion lifeline. After the Democrats took two Senate seats in Georgia this week, it’s more likely than ever that restaurants could see this kind of help.

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World News

Elon Musk-backed OpenAI reveals off Dall-E picture generator after GPT-3

Elon Musk-backed OpenAI shows off Dall-E image generator after GPT-3

SpaceX founder Elon Musk attends a post-launch press conference after the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida on an unscrewed test flight to the International Space Station on the Crew Dragon spacecraft on March 2, 2019 .

Mike Blake | Reuters

Armchairs in the shape of avocados and baby daikon radishes with tutus are among the quirky images created with new software from OpenAI, an Elon Musk-supported artificial intelligence laboratory in San Francisco.

OpenAI trained the software known as Dall-E to generate images from short text captions. Specifically, it used a data set of 12 billion images and their captions found on the Internet.

The lab said Dall-E – a portmanteau by Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dali and Wall-E, a small animated robot from the Pixar movie of the same name – learned to create images for a variety of concepts.

OpenAI showed some of the results in a blog post published on Tuesday. “We found that [Dall-E] has a number of capabilities, including creating anthropomorphized versions of animals and objects, plausibly combining unrelated concepts, rendering text, and applying transformations to existing images, “the company wrote.

Dall-E is based on a neural network, a computer system vaguely inspired by the human brain that can recognize patterns and identify relationships between huge amounts of data.

While neural networks have previously generated images and videos, Dall-E is unusual in that it relies on text input while the others don’t.

Synthetic videos and images have become more complex in recent years as it has become difficult for humans to distinguish between the real and the computer generated. For example, General Adversarial Networks (GANs), which use two neural networks, have been used to create fake videos of politicians.

OpenAI acknowledged that Dall-E has “the potential for significant broad societal impacts” and plans to analyze how models such as Dall-E “relate to societal issues such as economic impact on certain work processes and occupations, and the potential for bias the model results and the longer term ethical challenges this technology poses. “

GPT-3 successor

Dall-E comes just a few months after OpenAI announced that they have built a text generator called GPT-3 (Generative Pre-Training), which is also supported by a neural network.

The speech generation tool is able to produce human-like text if necessary. It became relatively famous for an AI program when people realized it could write its own poems, news articles, and short stories.

“Dall-E is a Text2Image system that is based on GPT-3, but is trained on text and images,” said Mark Riedl, associate professor at Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing, told CNBC.

“Text2image isn’t new, but the Dall-E demo is remarkable for producing illustrations that are much more coherent than other Text2Image systems I’ve seen over the years.”

OpenAI has competed with companies like DeepMind and the Facebook AI Research Group to develop general-purpose algorithms that can perform a wide range of tasks at the human level and beyond.

Researchers have developed AIs that can play complex games like chess and the Chinese board game Go, translate one human language into another, and detect tumors on a mammogram. However, getting an AI system to show real “creativity” is a major challenge in the industry.

Riedl said the Dall-E results showed it had learned to mix concepts coherently, adding that “the ability to mix concepts coherently is seen as a key form of creativity in humans”.

“From a creativity standpoint, this is a big step forward,” added Riedl. “While there isn’t much agreement on what it means for an AI system to ‘understand’ something, the ability to use concepts in new ways is an important part of creativity and intelligence.”

Neil Lawrence, former director of machine learning at Amazon Cambridge, told CNBC that Dall-E looks “very impressive.”

Lawrence, who is now a professor of machine learning at Cambridge University, described it as “an inspiring demonstration of the ability of these models to store and generalize information about our world in ways that people find very natural”.

He said, “I assume there will be all kinds of uses of this type of technology that I can’t even imagine. But it’s also interesting to be another pretty mind-blowing technology that solves the problems that we have have not resolved. ” I even know that we actually had it. “

“Doesn’t improve the state of the AI”

Not everyone is that impressed with Dall-E, however.

Gary Marcus, an entrepreneur who sold a machine learning start-up to Uber for an undisclosed sum in 2016, told CNBC that it was interesting but “didn’t advance the state of AI.”

He also pointed out that it is not from open sources and the company has not yet published any paper on the research.

Marcus previously questioned whether some of the research published in recent years by the competitor’s DeepMind lab should be classified as “breakthroughs”.

OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit with a $ 1 billion commitment by a group of founders including Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla. In February 2018, Musk left the OpenAI board, but continues to donate and advise the organization.

OpenAI turned for-profit in 2019, raising an additional $ 1 billion from Microsoft to fund its research. GPT-3 will be OpenAI’s first commercial product and Reddit signed up as one of the first customers.

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Business

Will You Pay to Stream Consolation Reveals? Discovery Is About to Discover Out

Will You Pay to Stream Comfort Shows? Discovery Is About to Find Out

When Disney + debuted there was a “Star Wars” blockbuster, “The Mandalorian”. When AppleTV + went online it featured a large budget original series starring Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston. Another newcomer to streaming, HBO Max, attracted subscribers with a sequel to Wonder Woman.

Discovery takes a completely different approach with the entry into streaming.

“Almost everyone in the business has chosen screenplay series and screenplay films,” said David Zaslav, managing director of Discovery, in an interview. “They went to the big stars and the red carpet. The big shiny object. “

“We’re not that shiny,” he continued, “and we don’t have a lot of red carpets.”

Discovery +, which goes live on Monday, is based on Homier tariffs – cooking shows, nature shows, home improvement shows, and various other non-written programming from HGTV, the Food Network, TLC, ID, Animal Planet, and the company’s flagship, Discovery.

Mr. Zaslav is betting that people are now ready to subscribe to a streaming service that is filled with things that you can see with one eye while you fold the laundry, pay bills, or scroll through social media. And how much is he willing to bet that people will be willing to pay for a platform that promises a more casual viewing experience?

“We bet on the company they do,” he said.

Discovery + is a late participant in a crowded field. The service – which costs US $ 5 per month with advertising or US $ 7 without advertising – offers 55,000 hours of programming, series such as “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives”, “Deadliest Catch”, “Naked & Afraid”, “On.” the case with “Paula Zahn” and “Dr. Pimple popper. “

There will also be many new shows including the American debut of “Judi Dench’s Wild Borneo Adventure” as well as spin-offs from reality standbys such as “90 Day Fiancé”, “Say Yes to the Dress” and “Fixer Upper”. There will also be nature programs from the BBC, the producer of Planet Earth and Blue Planet. And instead of the Kidmans, Streeps, and Baby Yodas that helped create a splash in other new platforms last year, Discovery + has Chip and Joanna Gaines, Guy Fieri, Mike Rowe, and Bobby Flay.

Discovery has grown into a cable giant with this type of programming, series that are suitable for “ambient or genre-based viewing – something to watch when a viewer doesn’t want to see anything special,” said Brian Wieser, a Media analyst and global president for business intelligence at GroupM, a media investment company.

Mr. Zaslav believes that Discovery’s success in the years of channel flipping will be fit for the on-demand era. For much of television history, he noted, network plans have been built on “Passing the Day,” a programming strategy that has fallen somewhat out of favor with media and technology companies in flashy limited-edition series like HBO Max’s “The Undoing” and Netflixs “The Queen’s Gambit.”

“When you wake up and start the ‘Today’ show in the background or on the Food Network, it’s a comfort,” said Zaslav. “You don’t watch ‘The Undoing’ while you’re cooking dinner. But you attract Guy Fieri or ‘Super Soul Sunday’ or ‘Fixer Upper’ or ‘How It’s Made’ or ‘Mythbusters’. “

Mr. Wieser, the analyst, said he was skeptical that a strategy that emphasizes comfort considerations will work for a medium that inspires viewers with one binge-worthy series after another.

“People can stay and watch them randomly flip through the channels and they can enjoy it too,” he said, “but that won’t necessarily make them buy a new subscription.”

However, in the past few months there have been signs that Mr Zaslav’s bet might be on time. In October, the moderators of The Ringer’s podcast “The Watch” discussed their love for “passive television”. In November, The New Yorker noted the “rise of ambient TV” in an essay praising shows that can be seen in the background. And Netflix has broken into the old territory of Discovery with reality series like “Dream Home Makeover”, “Street Food” and “Cleaning Up With Marie Kondo”.

Mr. Zaslav apologized for the late arrival of Discovery + on the grounds that it would make sense for his company to wait for other streaming platforms to do the dirty work of conditioning viewers to pay monthly fees. (An early-stage special offer improves service. Many Verizon customers receive Discovery + free for 12 months.)

The competition will certainly be intense. In addition to Netflix’s foray into non-written programming, Disney + has numerous nature shows. Curiosity Stream, a standalone service that programs nature and nonfiction books, was a success.

Mr. Zaslav remains confident that reality fans will welcome an Old Guard appearance in the streaming group. And he argues that his way of putting shows together – with modest budgets and few big stars – is a successful one regardless of the medium.

“We’re different,” he said. “We have different economies. People see us differently. But they love us just as much. We want to prove that. “

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Entertainment

Motion pictures and TV Exhibits Leaving Netflix in January 2021

Movies and TV Shows Leaving Netflix in January 2021

Towards the end of the year, Netflix is ​​cleaning up its catalog of films and shows. It is true that many new originals will come to us in January – too Cobra Kai Season three and Fate: The Winx Saga – There are some titles that are leaving the streaming service. Fortunately, it’s not as extensive as last month. Among the titles are some solid comfort films like Mary Poppins returns, which will make a new home at Disney +, as well as the heartwarming Hallmark series When the heart calls. See what’s left of Netflix in January and add them to your watchlist while you can.

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Health

Covid Affected person Examine Reveals Some Profit From an Arthritis Drug

Covid Patient Study Shows Some Benefit From an Arthritis Drug

Adding an arthritis drug called baricitinib to Covid treatment regimens that contains the antiviral drug remdesivir can cut recovery times by a day or more, especially for those who are seriously ill, according to a study published Friday.

The results of a government-sponsored clinical trial were released more than three weeks after the Food and Drug Administration received an emergency approval for double treatment. Earlier this month, some experts said they were uncomfortable using medication without a chance to review the underlying data backing their performance. Last month, the World Health Organization also recommended rejecting remdesivir for treating Covid patients as there was no evidence of its use.

In previous press releases, limited results were disclosed showing that hospitalized Covid patients treated with baricitinib and remdesivir recovered one day faster than those who received remdesivir alone.

Some questioned the adoption of the combination treatment because baricitinib came at a high price – which could be around $ 1,500 per patient – and also cited side effects like blood clots. Several doctors also wondered if adding baricitinib would be worth it, since steroids like dexamethasone were cheap and widely available. Both baricitinib and dexamethasone are believed to suppress the excessive inflammation that causes many severe cases of Covid.

The new paper, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, adds some granularity to the results and shows that certain subsets of patients benefited far more from the addition of baricitinib than others. The study included more than 1,000 hospital patients with Covid, all of whom received remdesivir. People who were sick enough to need high doses of supplemental oxygen or non-invasive ventilation recovered eight days faster when baricitinib was included in their medication.

In these groups, “I think the data clearly support a role for baricitinib,” said Dr. Boghuma Kabisen Titanji, an infectious disease doctor at Emory University who pioneered early studies of baricitinib against the coronavirus.

Dr. Titanji also noted that the data suggested that certain patients may be less likely to die or need a ventilator when taking baricitinib in addition to remdesivir. However, like those showing faster recovery times, these results were inconsistent among study participants.

Dr. Lauren Henderson, a pediatric rheumatologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, said she was encouraged by the results and the prospect of another option in the coronavirus treatment arsenal.

She and several other experts added that they may still have a tendency to use dexamethasone as a treatment for seriously ill Covid-19 patients who needed respiratory support.

In contrast to baricitinib, studies have shown that dexamethasone inhibits mortality in seriously ill Covid patients. It’s also inexpensive and easy to get hold of, while baricitinib is more of a specialty drug and may pose barriers to the supply chain, said Dr. Erin McCreary, Infectious Disease Pharmacist at the University of Pittsburgh.

New treatments for Covid-19

Things to know about Covid-19 treatment

Confused By The Terms To Treat Covid-19? Let us help:

    • ACE-2: A protein that sits on the surface of certain types of human cells. The coronavirus has to bind to ACE-2 in order to enter cells.
    • Adverse event: A health problem that occurs in volunteers in a clinical trial with a vaccine or drug. An adverse event is not always caused by the treatment tested in the study.
    • Antibody: A protein produced by the immune system that can attach to a pathogen such as the coronavirus and prevent it from infecting cells.
    • Antiviral drug: A drug that affects the ability of a virus to replicate in cells. The first drug approved in the United States for Covid-19, Remdesivir, is antiviral.
    • Approval, Licensing, and Approval for Emergency Use: Medicines, vaccines and medical devices cannot be sold in the US for no profit approval by the Food and Drug Administration, also known as Licensing. After a company submits the results of clinical studies to the FDA for review, the agency decides whether the product is safe and effective. This process usually takes many months. If the country faces an emergency – like a pandemic – a company can file an application instead Emergency approvalthat can be granted much faster.
    • Compassionate Use: A term used to describe treatments given to seriously ill people even though they have not yet been approved for that use by the Food and Drug Administration.
    • Cytokine storm: An overactive immune system reaction that can lead to massive inflammation and tissue damage. Cytokine storms can be responsible for many of the severe cases of Covid-19, and a number of researchers are testing drugs that may calm them down.
    • Interferon: A molecule of the immune system. Certain types of interferons can cause inflammation in the body while others can contain it. Still other types can stimulate cells to strengthen their defenses against viruses. Researchers are investigating whether treating synthetic interferons can help people fight off the coronavirus.
    • Monoclonal Antibodies: Monoclonal antibodies made in a laboratory mimic the natural antibodies made by the immune system. A number of companies have developed these treatments for Covid-19. President Trump received Regeneron’s antibody treatment soon after the disease was diagnosed.
    • Phases 1, 2 and 3 studies: Clinical trials typically take place in three phases. Phase 1 studies typically involve a few dozen people to determine whether a vaccine or drug is safe. In Phase 2 trials that involve hundreds of people, researchers can try different doses and take more measurements of the vaccine’s effects on the immune system. Phase 3 trials, involving thousands or tens of thousands of volunteers, determine the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine or medicine by waiting to see how many people are protected from the disease it is intended to be used against.
    • Placebo: A substance with no therapeutic effect that is widely used in clinical trials. For example, to see if a vaccine can prevent Covid-19, researchers can inject the vaccine into half of their volunteers while the other half are given a placebo with salt water. You can then compare how many people are infected in each group.
    • Post-market surveillance: The surveillance that occurs after a vaccine or drug has been approved and regularly prescribed by doctors. This typically confirms that the treatment is safe. Rarely, side effects are noted in certain groups of people that were overlooked during clinical trials.
    • Preclinical Research: Studies that take place prior to the start of a clinical trial typically include experiments that test a treatment on cells or animals.
    • Test protocol: A series of procedures that must be performed during a clinical trial.
    • Retrospective study: A study that analyzes data collected in the past to determine how effective a treatment is. Retrospective studies can provide useful information, but they are not as definitive as randomized clinical studies.
    • Spike protein: A protein that sits on the surface of coronaviruses. The spike protein binds to the ACE-2 receptor on human cells using a region called the receptor binding domain (RBD). As soon as the protein accumulates, the virus can enter the cell. Many vaccines and monoclonal antibody treatments are designed to stick to the tip.
    • Standard of care: A treatment that is accepted by medical experts as an appropriate method to treat a specific type of disease. Once a standard for treating a disease is established, new experimental treatments are usually tested against it rather than a placebo.

Several experts pointed to another study by the National Institutes of Health that seeks to directly compare two combination treatment regimens: one in which hospital patients receive remdesivir and baricitinib, and one in which remdesivir is paired with dexamethasone. Dr. McCreary also noted the importance of studying patients receiving both baricitinib and dexamethasone “to see if there is any incremental benefit.”

Dr. Andre Kalil, an infectious disease doctor at the University of Nebraska Medical Center and lead researcher on the new paper, noted that while dexamethasone had already become a widely accepted treatment for Covid-19, the steroid still needed further study. He cited “a variety of serious safety issues” with the drug that warranted thorough investigation.

Like other steroids, dexamethasone, which largely reduces inflammation, can be associated with a variety of undesirable side effects, including worsening conditions like diabetes or osteoporosis.