Sept 8 (Reuters) – The U.S. Federal Reserve should move forward with a plan to trim its massive pandemic stimulus programme despite a slowdown in job growth last month, St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank President James Bullard said in an interview with the Financial Times. Bullard dismissed concerns that the labour market recovery was faltering even as the U.S. economy created the fewest jobs in seven months in August after hiring in the leisure and hospitality sector stalled amid a resurgence in COVID-19 infections. “There is plenty of demand for workers and there are more job openings than there are unemployed workers,” Bullard said in the interview published on Wednesday. “If we can get the workers matched up and bring the pandemic under better control, it certainly looks like we’ll have a very strong labour market going into next year”, he told the newspaper. Bullard said in late August that he would like the central bank to start reducing its asset purchases soon and finish winding down those purchases by the first quarter of next year. “The big picture is that the taper will get going this year and will end sometime by the first half of next year”, he told the Financial Times.
Covid cases up 300% year over year… Hence my grave concerns
Europe opens lower amid coronavirus concerns
European shares dropped amid a blurred outlook for global growth, as investors await Thursday’s update from the European Central Bank. The Stoxx Europe 600 Index was down 1.1% as of 9:01 a.m. in London, trading at its lowest level since Aug. 19 as automakers, banks and industrials led losses. Miners and technology outperformed, but all sectors were lower. Volumes for Euro Stoxx 50 futures in the first hour of trading was double the 30-day average. Investment firm EQT AB fell 6.3% as an investor sold stock, part of a flurry of share sales on Tuesday that also included SoftwareOne Holding AG, automaker Stellantis NV and online retailer Asos Plc.
Europe’s main stock benchmark has struggled for traction after hitting an all-time high last month. While coronavirus vaccination programs are expected to continue to drive the economic reopening, disappointing economic data has distorted the recovery path just as interest rate-setters consider scaling back support. “A bit of a pull-back on the potentially slowing growth concerns is always likely,” Marija Veitmane, a multi-asset strategist at State Street Global Markets, said in written comments. The Delta Covid-19 variant has the potential to slow the global economic recovery, she added. Traders are now looking ahead to the European Central Bank’s policy update: “There will be a bit of sitting out, waiting to hear how much the ECB slows purchases,” Guy Foster, chief strategist at Brewin Dolphin, said in written comments. Some fund managers coming back from vacations may also be taking profits, Foster added. Governing Council member Robert Holzmann told Eurofi Magazine Wednesday that the ECB may normalize policy “sooner than most financial market experts expect.” The broader outlook for European equities is supported by the recent rebound in corporate profits, according to BlackRock. “Valuations remain attractive relative to history and look even more attractive than at the start of the year thanks to strong earnings,” strategists including Wei Li wrote in a report. Bankers’ views on global equities have turned slightly more negative, with firms including Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse Group AG cautioning on the U.S. market. Both are more positive on Europe, however. Among individual shares, Sanofi slipped 1% after agreeing to buy immune-system therapies firm Kadmon Holdings Inc. for $1.9 billion. Airlines including EasyJet Plc and Ryanair Holdings Plc gained as the Telegraph newspaper reported that the U.K. may scrap its green and amber warning lists for foreign travel next month.
World, U.S. share markets come under pressure as Delta, economic worries mount
WASHINGTON/MILAN (Reuters) – World stock markets fell from record highs and U.S. shares were mixed on Tuesday as mounting worries over the slowing pace of economic recovery and the impact of the coronavirus Delta variant overtook investors’ hopes the Federal Reserve will delay tapering. Wall Street opened softer after Monday’s U.S. Labor Day holiday and the MSCI world equity index retreated from a record hit overnight, following seven consecutive days of gains to all-time highs. That followed gains during Asia’s trading hours on hopes of extra stimulus in Japan and strong China trade data. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 292.45 points, or 0.83 percent, to 35,076.64, the S&P 500 lost 19.29 points, or 0.43 percent, to 4,516.14 and the Nasdaq Composite dropped 8.90 points, or 0.06 percent, to 15,354.62 by 11:12 a.m. EDT (1512 GMT). European stocks retraced ahead of an ECB policy meeting on Thursday. The STOXX 600 benchmark was down 0.5% but just below its lifetime peak hit in August. “The combination of exorbitant expectations, nosebleed valuations and slowing macro environment make the go-forward reward/risk outlook less attractive,” said Jeffrey Carbone, managing director at Cornerstone Wealth in Huntersville, North Carolina. Data on Friday showed the U.S. economy created 235,000 jobs in August, the fewest in seven months as hiring in the leisure and hospitality sectors stalled, reducing expectations that the Fed will opt for an early tapering of its monthly bond purchases. The market took the surprisingly soft U.S. payrolls report on Friday “in stride, with the assumption that the Covid-19 Delta variant had an impact on economic activity in August,” Arthur Hogan, chief market strategist at brokerage National Holdings in New York, said in a market note. Speeches by a number of U.S. policymakers later this week will be closely watched for any indication about how the weak jobs report has impacted the Fed’s plans on tapering its bond purchases and keep its expansive policy for the near-term. The recent equity rally started after Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s dovish speech at the Jackson Hole Symposium in August. “Given that before Jackson Hole many FOMC members had come out in favor of tapering on a tight timetable, we’ll see if they confirm, or align with Powell’s more moderate message,” said Giuseppe Sersale, fund manager at Anthilia. Yields on U.S. Treasury bonds and inflation-protected securities rose on Tuesday, extending last week’s rise when data showing a jump in average wages confirmed price pressures were building in the world’s biggest economy. Japanese shares rallied further on hopes the ruling Liberal Democratic Party will offer additional economic stimulus and easily win an upcoming general election after Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga said he would quit.
“The mood is improving on hopes the government will take measures to support the economy and that the monetary environment will be kept accommodative,” said Wang Shenshen, senior strategist at Mizuho Securities.
A rout in bonds and shares of China Evergrande Group deepened on Tuesday after new credit downgrades on the country’s No. 2 developer.
The euro was last down 0.17 percent at $1.1848, while Europe’s broad FTSEurofirst 300 index dropped 0.47 percent to 1,821.34.
The ECB is seen debating a cut in stimulus, with analysts expecting purchases under its Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme (PEPP) falling, possibly as low as 60 billion euros a month from the current 80 billion euros.
ING strategist Chris Turner said Friday’s soft U.S. jobs report and dovish comments last month by Powell have taken “some of the sting out of the dollar’s upside.”
Israel was a vaccination poster child. Now its COVID surge shows the world what’s coming next
Israel, once a front-runner in the global race to move on from COVID-19, is now one of the world’s biggest pandemic hot spots. The country that was once predicted to be the first to vaccinate its entire population had the highest per-capita caseload of anywhere in the week through Sept. 4, according to figures compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Its world-beating inoculation rate, meanwhile, has tumbled down the league table. The nation of 9 million became the test case for reopening society and the economy in April when much of Europe and the U.S. were still in some form of lockdown. Yet Israel now shows how the calculus is changing in places where progress was fastest. It’s no longer just about whether people get coronavirus, but also how badly they get it and ensuring that vaccines are still working as the highly infectious Delta variant threatens to undermine immunity. More recently, it has led the way when it comes to vaccinating children and rolling out a booster shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine after research suggested reduced efficacy over time. Around 100,000 Israelis are getting inoculated every day, the vast majority of them with a third shot. “If you are able to maintain life without lockdown, and to avoid very high numbers of hospitalizations and death, then this is what life with COVID looks like,” said Eyal Leshem, a professor specializing in infectious diseases at the Sheba Medical Center in Tel Ha-Shomer. Since April, Israel has fallen from first to 33rd in Bloomberg’s vaccine tracker of populations considered fully vaccinated. The program plateaued amid hesitancy from some in the Orthodox Jewish and Arab communities. About 61% of Israelis have been given two doses, lower than in European laggards earlier in the year such as France and Spain. Following the spread of the Delta variant over the summer, Israel has seen cases climb, reaching an all-time high of 11,316 daily cases on Sept. 2. The number of people falling seriously sick and being hospitalized, though, has risen less than it did during the last coronavirus wave, peaking at 751 in late August, compared with 1,183 in mid-January. The trend is now downward.
Infections jumped because of the prevalence of cases among the unvaccinated, especially children. There were also so-called breakthrough infections in those who have been vaccinated, and the drop in efficacy of vaccines.
That said, unvaccinated people account for more than 10 times as many serious cases as those who have received two doses, showing that even with immunity waning, shots are providing protection. For public health officials and politicians, the latest chapter of the pandemic is to concentrate on ensuring older people more at risk continue to be protected while cases are rising among children. The importance of that drive is heightened by the return of millions of children to schools last week, and the Jewish New Year this week. Epidemiologists say cases among the over 30s are already declining thanks to the boosters and restrictions on bars and restaurants to the fully vaccinated. The highest rate of new cases in recent weeks is among children under the age of 12, according to Ran Balicer, chair of the expert advisory panel to the government. There’s also a record level of testing. “Waning immunity is a real challenge that every country needs to prepare a contingency plan to tackle,” said Balicer, who is also chief innovation officer for Israeli health maintenance organization Clalit. The data coming from Israel in the coming weeks will allow the world to assess the efficacy of the booster shot program, he said. As of Sept. 6, at least 2.6 million people in Israel—around 28% of the population—have now had the booster shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, according to the Israeli Health Ministry. That rises to at least 64% for people in age brackets over 60. Significantly, the booster shot is also available for anyone over 12 who was vaccinated at least five months ago.
The wildcard is the return of schools. That could change the transmission dynamics and expose all age groups to infection because of kids coming home with COVID-19, Balicer said.
The World Health Organization’s heat map puts Israel in the top five in the wider European region. The rolling data show areas with the highest seven-day infection rates are in Scotland, where 68% of the population are fully vaccinated. Cases surged after restrictions were lifted and then schools returned from their summer break in mid-August. “If we look back a year ago, we virtually had no protection other than a complete lockdown,” said Leshem. “Now, we have an open education system, fully open commerce, and despite over 50,000 cases a week, we are not seeing increases in the number of severe cases and hospitalization.”
More U.S. first respondents are dying of COVID-19 infected in droves…vaccine rate under 30%
The resurgence of COVID-19 this summer and the national debate over vaccine requirements have created a fraught situation for the United States’ first responders, who are dying in larger numbers but pushing back against mandates. It’s a stark contrast from the beginning of the vaccine rollout when first responders were prioritized for shots. The mandates affect tens of thousands of police officers, firefighters and others on the front lines across the country, many of whom are spurning the vaccine. That is happening despite mandates’ consequences that range from weekly testing to suspension to termination — even though the virus is now the leading cause of U.S. law enforcement line-of-duty deaths. According to the Officer Down Memorial Page, 132 members of law enforcement agencies are known to have died of COVID-19 in 2021. In Florida alone last month, six people affiliated with law enforcement died over a 10-day period.
Despite the deaths, police officers and other first responders are among those most hesitant to get the vaccine and their cases continue to grow.
No national statistics show the vaccination rate for America’s entire population of first responders but individual police and fire departments across the country report figures far below the national rate of 74% of adults who have had at least one dose.
There is a worst case… forced quarantines
When public health epidemics like coronavirus stoke panic, governments have a long track record of responding to a political problem rather than a health problem
Leading up to his death in March of 1900, the Chinese immigrant had complained for weeks of a headache and lower back pain. When morticians later sliced open his grey body, they found organs swollen with blood. A swab from his lymph nodes confirmed the doctor’s fears: the bubonic plague had arrived in the United States. By dawn, armed guards had circled Chinatown, trapping almost 35,000 people inside. Health officials wearing masks and rubber aprons stormed the city to burn personal property, close businesses and evict tenants as they disinfected every building. The police used batons to beat anyone they deemed disobedient. “With the unclean habits of their [slur redacted] and their filthy hovels…they are a constant menace to the public health,” said James Phelan, the then mayor of San Francisco. Quarantine lines were carefully gerrymandered around white-owned businesses— even those directly across from closed Chinese stores. While white Americans were allowed in and out of the city freely, Chinese-Americans were trapped for months. They hid in alleys and desperately tried to escape until a large wooden fence with barbed wire was built around the boundaries of the city. Retrospectively, some experts believe Gin’s symptoms were indicative of gonorrhea-induced sepsis, not the plague. It’s difficult to imagine that an abuse of human rights tantamount to what took place in San Francisco in 1900 could take place today, but as the spread of Coronavirus leads to Americans being quarantined everywhere from cruise ships to Southern California military bases, it’s worth noting that U.S. quarantine laws are still squishy. Each state enforces quarantines within their borders based on their own laws, some of which haven’t changed since the 1800s. These laws are intentionally broad to give officials the flexibility to act swiftly in a public health crisis—but that can also allow biases and panic to seep into these decisions. During World War I, female prostitutes (but not their male customers) were quarantined to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. In the 1980s, California lawmakers proposed legislation that would quarantine those living with AIDs. Although the bill didn’t pass, the U.S. did quarantine HIV-positive Haitian refugees at Guantanamo Bay.
Often times, quarantines are used by politicians to show they’re taking a problem seriously, regardless of whether research finds them effective, says Wendy Parmet, a Northeastern University law professor.
In reality, quarantines alone are rarely sufficient to quell an outbreak and can even spread an infectious disease further if fear of pleads people to hide or lie about their symptoms. The quarantines imposed in the wake of the Ebola outbreak in 2014, for example, had no public health justification, Parmet says. Asymptomatic people were contained to their homes for two weeks, even though they had tested negative for Ebola and the disease is only contagious when symptoms appear. One woman, quarantined to her apartment in New Haven, Connecticut, was left without access to food. When she tried to retrieve groceries her friend had left on her doorstep, a neighbor called the police. Another woman, a nurse who’d just returned from working with Ebola patients in Africa, spent three nights in a makeshift tent outside of University Hospital in Newark, New Jersey, with no access to a shower. A report from the American Civil Liberties Union later found that this quarantine was unconstitutional and the nurse sued New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. “They were responding to a political problem, not a health problem,” Parmet says. “They were really just political grandstanding, I don’t think there’s a nicer way to put it.” As long as Parmet has been working in public health laws, she has seen examples posturing calls for quarantine, which makes her especially worried as panic around coronavirus spreads to the United States. “People look for scapegoats in times of disease,” she says. “There is a long history of conflating disease protection and harsh policies towards vulnerable populations.”
Antivaxxers Big Brother can NOW force you to vaccinate
Nick Bit: They can force you to get a vaccination. And they will if these variants are not bought under control. Now that their are approved by the FDA vaccines the authority unquestionable exists to test you for vaccine antibodies and force you to get the jab:
In a 1905 case, Jacobson v. Massachusetts, the Supreme Court upheld compulsory vaccination during a smallpox outbreak. It explained that “the liberty secured by the Constitution of the United States to every person within its jurisdiction does not import an absolute right in each person to be, at all times and in all circumstances, wholly freed from restraint. There are manifold restraints to which every person is necessarily subject for the common good…. Upon the principle of self-defense, of paramount necessity, a community has the right to protect itself against an epidemic of disease which threatens the safety of its members.”
Cover-Up’: Florida’s MAGA Governor In COVID Scandal On Death Count Data
As Florida Governor DeSantis ignores safety measures, an explosive new report shows he might be misleading the public and hiding the accurate death numbers. According to reporting from the Miami Herald, coronavirus deaths in the state are not declining. MSNBC’s Ari Melber discusses the report with MSNBC political analyst Cornell Belcher.
NBC News U.S. hits 40 million Covid cases as delta variant spreads… kids forced to go to school to die!
The U.S. has logged 40 million Covid-19 cases since the start of the pandemic, as the fourth wave brought on by the delta variant continues to spread. The country has recorded 40,000,070 cases and 651,690 deaths, according to the latest NBC News tally. It recorded 35,355 news cases and 279 deaths Sunday. About 207 million people have received their first doses of a vaccine, and more than 175 million have been fully vaccinated. Vaccination rates have risen slowly since July, but still no state or territory has passed the 70 percent fully vaccinated threshold, and the country is nowhere close to its peak in April, when more than 3 million people were getting shots every day.
