“We’ll never have perfect data, and there will always be uncertainty,” said Grace Lee, a professor at Stanford University and chair of the advisory panel’s COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Technical Subgroup, when the group met on Wednesday. “It’s really, for me, about getting better risk estimates.” Committee members agreed to reconvene […]
Category: Coronavirus
New business models, big opportunity: Retail
The global crisis only amplified retail challenges. Since March 2020, at least 347 US companies cited the pandemic as a factor in their decisions to file for bankruptcy. Among them was Guitar Center, whose executives said its e-commerce sales couldn’t replace the experience of musicians trying out instruments in person. […]
US covid contract details are a “trade secret”—according to the contractors
As part of our reporting, we requested several Deloitte contracts unrelated to the vaccine system from the US Food and Drug Administration. That agency also redacted similar information. “It’s basically a rubber stamp“ All the redactions cite a rule in the Freedom of Information Act commonly referred to as Exemption […]
Everything you need to know about vaccine passports
But despite the recent media coverage, political takes, and new app launches, it’s not clear what the long-term outlook for vaccine credentials might be. In the short run, they might become a sort of nudge for the hesitant, encouraging them to get their shots in order to open doors that […]
America’s sequencing boom may be throwing money at the wrong problem
Instead of trying to work through these issues at the national level, the sequencing contracts allow individual public health agencies to request the names and contact information of people who have tested positive for variants of concern. But that just pushes the same problems of data ownership down the chain. […]
You don’t get an invite to these weddings unless you’re vaccinated
Julie-Ann Hutchinson and Kyle Burton, Baltimore-based health care professionals, went to extraordinary lengths to ensure their 40-person St. Louis wedding last September ran smoothly. They hired a “covid safety officer,” a nurse who, for $60 an hour for five hours, checked temperatures, asked guests how they felt, and handed out […]