Why Biden has eased up on Facebook over COVID misinformation

 

When U.S. President Joe Biden accused Facebook of "killing people" by spreading vaccine lies in July, many experts and researchers hoped it marked the beginning of a White House battle against a flood of misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic coursing through the United States.

Six months later, the deluge of misinformation continues and entities combating harmful information want the White House to do more. COVID-19 deaths recently hit their highest in almost a year, with over 2,600 people dying on average each day. U.S. studies show the unvaccinated are dying at much higher rates than those with jabs and boosters.

"The problem of vaccine misinformation was big a year ago and it is still big now," said David Lazer, who co-leads the Covid States Project. Fighting misinformation "requires continued focus and attention and effort," he said.

After slamming Facebook on July 16, Biden never again publicly accused Facebook or another company by name of spreading misinformation, according to a Reuters analysis of the president's speeches and remarks since that day. Biden has delivered 24 speeches on COVID specifically, including townhalls, since he called out Facebook, the analysis shows.

Interviews with 11 White House sources, experts and researchers who have worked with the Biden administration on this topic show that top White House aides feel Biden has few legal options to force social media platforms to comply and the administration has not been able to settle on a strategy to rein in Silicon Valley. Several pieces of legislation to hold social media companies responsible have stalled.

Biden also did not issue an executive order or proclamation to combat misinformation as he has done nearly three dozen times on other pandemic issues, according to a Reuters tally of White House records.

A dozen misinformation superspreaders identified by the White House and the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) last year, still hold over 40 accounts on Meta Platforms Inc-owned Facebook, Alphabet's YouTube and other social media companies, with millions of followers, as of December.

The White House "has been in regular touch with social media platforms, as well as leaders and media outlets about the critical importance of ensuring that they do not peddle misinformation," a White House official said. These meetings, the official said, include discussing the work such entities are doing to combat harmful information, and holding them accountable.

A majority of healthcare workers, in a January survey conducted by the COVID States Project, a U.S. research group trying to understand why so many Americans do not want to get vaccinated, said vaccine misinformation is "the single most important factor influencing unvaccinated patients decision not to get the COVID-19 vaccine."

Social media - particularly Facebook - remains one of the most commonly cited sources of misinformation negatively impacting patients, the healthcare workers in the survey said.

A Meta spokesperson declined to comment but the company previously said it had removed more than 24 million pieces of COVID-19 content globally and displayed warnings on more than 195 million pieces of COVID-related content on Facebook for violating its policies.

A YouTube spokesperson said the company has terminated the channels of several well-known spreaders of vaccine misinformation and since October 2020, it had removed over 130,000 videos for COVID-19 vaccine misinformation.

THE SECTION 230 PROBLEM

Biden has no easy legal options because Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shields social media companies from being liable for what users post on their platforms, according to White House sources, experts and researchers who have worked with the White House on this topic.

"The administration...is in fact far too cozy with tech companies, there is of course an institutional resistance at the civil servant level," said Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, who engaged with the White House last year on the issue. "It poses a serious problem when you're seeking to legislate and go into combat against companies."

Tech companies were some of the top donors to Biden's election campaign and now former Silicon Valley insiders serve in key positions in the administration.

Two White House sources, who worked on the issue last year, said the reason Biden backed off was due to few legal options and disagreement inside the White House over how tough to be on tech companies.

"The most that can be done is urging the companies to take action and we did a lot of that last year," one of the sources said.

Top officials at the White House held a series of combative meetings with social media companies, and Facebook in particular, leading up to last July to get the company and others to act on vaccine misinformation. Press Secretary Jen Psaki and Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, among others, also criticized the platforms publicly.

The growing pressure culminated with Biden's off-the-cuff comments on July 16. Since then, Biden has refrained from blaming social media companies directly by name.

Biden addressed harmful information on social media platforms four times since July 16. Twice he walked back his comments on Facebook: he said "Facebook isn't killing people" on July 19 and added "I wasn't attacking Facebook" on July 22.

He also mentioned the word "misinformation" in the context of it being a problem, without mentioning the role specific social media companies play, six times since July 16.

A Surgeon General's advisory about health misinformation in the United States, issued after Biden's July remark, focuses on how communities can combat it, not the companies spreading it. The recent controversy involving Spotify's role in spreading COVID misinformation, drew boilerplate criticism from the White House, saying the companies should do more to stop such content.

Hany Farid, a computer science professor and misinformation researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, urged the White House's domestic policy team last year to do more to tackle misinformation.

Farid said he has not seen a "coherent or consistent message" from the White House and wants to see more leadership on the topic publicly. "I have not seen a message from the White House... to Congress to get serious about this."

https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/META-PLATFORMS-INC-10547141/news/Why-Biden-has-eased-up-on-Facebook-over-COVID-misinformation-37732029/

Eli Lilly profit falls 18% on higher costs

 

Eli Lilly and Co reported an 18% fall in fourth-quarter profit on Thursday, hurt by higher drug development expenses.

The company's net income fell to $1.73 billion, or $1.90 per share, in the fourth quarter ended Dec. 31, from $2.12 billion, or $2.32 per share, a year earlier.

https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/ELI-LILLY-AND-COMPANY-13401/news/Eli-Lilly-profit-falls-18-on-higher-costs-37732485/

Strained US hospitals seek foreign nurses amid visa windfall

 With American hospitals facing a dire shortage of nurses amid a slogging pandemic, many are looking abroad for health care workers.

And it could be just in time.

There’s an unusually high number of green cards available this year for foreign professionals, including nurses, who want to move to the United States — twice as many as just a few years ago. That’s because U.S. consulates shut down during the coronavirus pandemic weren’t issuing visas to relatives of American citizens, and, by law, these unused slots now get transferred to eligible workers.

Amy L. Erlbacher-Anderson, an immigration attorney in Omaha, Nebraska, said she has seen more demand for foreign nurses in two years than the rest of her 18-year career. And this year, she said, it’s more likely they’ll get approved to come, so long as U.S. consular offices can process all the applications.

“We have double the number of visas we’ve had available for decades,” she said. “That is kind of temporarily creating a very open situation.”

U.S. hospitals are struggling with a shortage of nurses that worsened as pandemic burnout led many to retire or leave their jobs. Meanwhile, coronavirus cases continue to rise and fall, placing tremendous pressure on the health care system. In California alone, there’s an estimated gap of 40,000 nurses, or 14% of the workforce, according to a recent report by the University of California, San Francisco.

Hospitals are filling the gap by hiring traveling nurses, but that can be expensive. And hospital administrators say not enough nurses are graduating from U.S. schools each year to meet the demand.

Some hospitals have long brought nurses from the Philippines, Jamaica and other English-speaking countries, and more are now following suit. And both longtime recruiters and newcomers are trying to take advantage of the green card windfall before the fiscal year ends in September.

The U.S. typically offers at least 140,000 green cards each year to people moving to the country permanently for certain professional jobs, including nursing. Most are issued to people who are already living in the United States on temporary visas, though some go to workers overseas. This year, 280,000 of these green cards are available, and recruiters hope some of the extras can be snapped up by nurses seeking to work in pandemic-weary hospitals in the United States.

The Biden administration, which has made moves to reverse Trump-era policies restricting legal immigration, has taken some steps to try to help foreign health care workers so they can assist with the pandemic. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said it would speed the renewal of work permits for health care workers, which could help keep some foreign citizens already in the United States on the job. The State Department told consulates last year to prioritize applications for workers at facilities that are responding to the pandemic, an agency official said.

Faith Akinmade, a 22-year-old nurse from Nigeria, is among those hoping for a quick solution. After completing college in the U.S., Akinmade has been working as an ICU nurse for University of Louisville Hospital in Kentucky. But her work permit is set to expire in March. She said she needs it renewed, or her green card approved, to stay on the job.

“At this point and time, I just feel like I have faith that at the end of March something is going to show up to continue to work,” Akinmade said. She said the issue affects many of her international colleagues as well as domestic ones, who may be pressed to take on shifts for colleagues if their immigration paperwork doesn’t come through.

Dr. Roxie Wells, president of Cape Fear Valley Hoke Hospital in Raeford, North Carolina, said she started trying to bring over foreign nurses before the pandemic, but it wasn’t until last year that these recruits started getting consular interviews in larger numbers. So far, about 150 were approved to come work, but Wells said they’re still waiting on another 75.

“Obviously it has become more necessary during the pandemic,” she said. “The 150, if we didn’t have them, we would be in a precarious situation.”

The surge in the omicron variant in the United States has made the strained staffing situation even more apparent in hospitals as health care workers, like so many others, have been sickened by the highly contagious virus and sidelined from work at a time when more patients are coming in.

Sinead Carbery, president of Nurse Staffing Solutions for AMN Healthcare, said the demand for international nurses has risen between 300% and 400% since the pandemic began. The number of nurses that can be brought into the United States even with the additional green cards won’t be enough to meet demand, and many more recruiters are now seeking to hire nurses overseas because there are immigrant visas available, she said.

“This is a window of opportunity,” she said. “Because everything is flowing so well, there’s a lot of competition for that talent.”

National Nurses United, a union representing 175,000 registered nurses, said more scrutiny should be given to international recruitment to ensure foreign nurses aren’t brought in and subjected to unsafe working conditions. The union contends hospitals drove away U.S. nurses by keeping staffing levels so low — and this was well before concerns arose about worker safety and protections during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Michelle Mahon, the union’s assistant director of nursing practice, said many foreign nurses sign yearslong contracts with employers, which can make it hard for them to speak up about labor or patient safety concerns. She said hospitals that saw nurses quit during the pandemic are turning to an overseas workforce to replace them.

“This kind of dynamic is particularly attractive right now to employers who have not made any of the changes necessary to ensure patient and nursing safety during this COVID-19 pandemic,” Mahon said. “Instead of them addressing the actual problem, they want to go and pivot to this other really fake solution.”

Hospital administrators, however, contend there simply aren’t enough U.S.-trained nurses to go around. Patty Jeffrey, president of the American Association of International Healthcare Recruitment, said the United States should expand nursing education programs to train more nurses domestically, as well as let more nurses come in from overseas. But she acknowledged bringing in a much larger number of nurses would require legislation.

“The calls are every day ringing off the hook: We need 100, we need 200, we need all these nurses,” Jeffrey said.

Jorge Almeida Neri, a 26-year-old nurse from Portugal, arrived in the United States in December, though he began the process before the pandemic. He said a required international nursing exam was delayed due to the virus and it took four months to get a consular interview, though other international nurses he’s met waited much longer. He interviewed for his current job at a Virginia hospital, which he got through a staffing agency, about a year ago.

“After getting everything certified, the immigration process started, and I was like, ‘Oh, this is going to be quick.’ I was wrong,” he said.

Almeida Neri said many Portuguese nurses seek work overseas since wages are low, though many go elsewhere in Europe, which doesn’t take as long as the United States.

Despite the demand, there’s no guarantee hospitals will in fact snap up more visas. Greg Siskind, an immigration attorney, said U.S. consular offices aren’t required to issue visas solely because they’re available, and are hampered by limits on remote work and video interviews. He said most employment-based green cards tend to go to professionals already in the United States, not overseas, though more could be done to speed these up, too.

“Under their current policies, if they don’t make any changes, it is going to be hard,” he said of the likelihood the U.S. government will issue all the available visas, “but there’s a lot of things they could do.”

https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-immigration-travel-business-health-525b951967525e75ba40a0a03433c3bf

Siemens Healthineers Raises 2022 Outlook Thanks to Covid-19 Tests

 Siemens Healthineers AG said Thursday that its first-quarter revenue and earnings rose, and upgraded its guidance for fiscal 2022 as it expects to generate more revenue from its rapid Covid-19 antigen tests.

The German medical-equipment maker said net income was 472 million euros ($533.6 million) in the quarter ended Dec. 31 up from EUR437 million a year earlier.

Revenue was EUR5.07 billion, up 9.5% on year on a comparable basis, the company said. Analysts had expected the company to post quarterly revenue of EUR4.93 billion, according to a FactSet consensus.

Excluding rapid Covid-19 antigen tests, revenue rose 4.5%.

Siemens Healthineers said it now expects the tests to generate around EUR700 million in revenue, compared with previous expectations of EUR200 million, in fiscal 2022.

As a result, it raised its annual comparable revenue growth guidance to 3% to 5%, from 0%-2% previously, and its targeted adjusted basic earnings per share to EUR2.18-EUR2.30, from EUR2.08-EUR2.20 previously.

https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/SIEMENS-HEALTHINEERS-AG-42379342/news/Siemens-Healthineers-Raises-2022-Outlook-Thanks-to-Covid-19-Tests-37729559/

Roche sees slower 2022 sales growth as COVID tests demand eases

 Swiss drugmaker Roche said on Thursday sales growth would slow this year as it braces for less demand for its COVID-19 medicines and tests, expecting immunity against the novel coronavirus to prevail in the population from about April.

In an earnings statement, the company said it expected currency-adjusted 2022 sales to be flat or grow in the low-single digits, below last year's 9% gain.

Roche anticipates sales of COVID-19 medicines and diagnostics to decrease by about 2 billion Swiss francs ($2.17 billion) to around 5 billion francs, it added.

It proposed raising its 2021 dividend to 9.30 francs per share but its stock fell 2.6% on the outlook.

Group earnings edged higher in 2021 as brisk demand for COVID-19 diagnostic tools and new prescriptions for drugs such as Hemlibra against haemophilia and cancer immunotherapy Tecentriq offset a sales decline in older cancer drugs.

For now, demand for its rapid antigen tests as well as lab-processed PCR tests remained strong, but Roche Chief Executive Severin Schwan told journalists on a call he was preparing for the pandemic to slow from the April-to-June quarter.

He said the diagnostics unit's high-throughput processing machines provided a competitive advantage. "There is just not enough qualified lab personnel... here we have a big advantage because our platforms are the most automated."

He cautioned his predictions on the pandemic's end had been wrong before but relief from the second quarter was his best assumption.

The company added the 2022 COVID-19 dynamics would depend on the as-yet unknown duration of immunity acquired from vaccination and past infections. Reflecting the uncertainty, Roche said those people could start contracting the disease again from mid-year or retain immunity for four years or longer.

Roche, primarily a maker of targeted cancer drugs, pivoted to also become a key supplier of coronavirus tests thanks to its diagnostics unit that mainly offers kits that guide individual cancer therapy.

Core operating profit, or earnings before interest and tax, adjusted for one-off items, rose 2% to 21.9 billion Swiss francs in 2021, in line with Refinitiv's smart estimate analyst poll.

It is aiming for next year's core earnings per share to grow in the "low to mid-single digit" percentage range at constant exchange rates, including the accretive effect of the recent repurchase of shares previously held by rival Novartis.

Late last year, its Ronapreve COVID-19 antibody treatment, made in a partnership with Regeneron, was shown to have lost its neutralising activity against the Omicron variant.

https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/ROCHE-HOLDING-AG-9364975/news/Roche-sees-slower-2022-sales-growth-as-COVID-tests-demand-eases-37729622/

Japan's Takeda says 9-mth operating profit jumped 29%, raises forecast

 

Japan's Takeda Pharmaceutical Co said on Thursday nine-month profit surged 29% from a year earlier, driven by sales growth for its 14 major drug brands.

Operating profit was 462.46 billion yen ($4.04 billion) in the nine months through Dec. 31, the drugmaker said in a news release.

Takeda raised its full-year operating profit forecast 1.1% to 515 billion yen. That compares with a consensus forecast for profit of 491.05 billion yen, according to a Refinitiv poll of 13 analysts.

The drugmaker said sales growth of mainstay drugs such as ulcerative colitis treatment Entyvio, along with expenditure controls and exchange effects were behind the forecast revision.

Takeda said it aims to distribute the first doses of the COVID-19 vaccine developed by Novavax Inc within Japan in early calendar 2022, subject to approval from regulators.

The Japanese government has agreed to purchase 150 million doses of the Novavax vaccine, which is to be manufactured domestically by Takeda.

https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/TAKEDA-PHARMACEUTICAL-COM-6491073/news/Japan-s-Takeda-says-9-mth-operating-profit-jumped-29-raises-forecast-37729692/

Valneva targets 2022 revenue boost of up to 70% on COVID-19 vaccine

 

French vaccine developer Valneva targets increasing its revenues year-on-year by up to 70% thanks to a boost from its COVID-19 vaccine candidate, it said on Thursday.

The company sees 2022 revenue of between 430 million to 590 million euros ($485.73 million to $666.46 million), including 350 million to 500 million euros of COVID-19 vaccine sales, which are still subject to regulatory approvals and deliveries of their COVID vaccine candidate called VLA2001.

Valneva's 2021 revenue soared 216% year-on-year to 348.1 million euros mainly on COVID-related revenues under a terminated agreement in Britain.

https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/VALNEVA-SE-54466/news/Valneva-targets-2022-revenue-boost-of-up-to-70-on-COVID-19-vaccine-37729547/