Those new guidelines stated that people who are vaccinated are able to go maskless in most settings, including indoor gatherings among other maskless people.
Yet the same poll found that most vaccinated Americans are keeping their masks on: 90% of fully vaccinated people said that they had worn a mask in the last seven days.
Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
Notably, the question lacked specificity as to how those vaccinated people were masking.
While some national chains like Walmart, Starbucks, and Best Buy are allowing vaccinated customers to go maskless, many private businesses are still requiring all customers to wear a mask. And hospitals, public transportation, and airlines are all still asking everyone to wear a mask, vaccinated or not.
About 61% of the eligible American population has received at least one dose of the available COVID vaccines, according to the CDC, and President Biden has set a goal to hit 70% by July 4.
The poll results highlight a stark contrast between people who don’t plan to get vaccinated and those who either plan to get vaccinated, are partially vaccinated, or already are fully vaccinated: Less than half of the former group has used a mask in the last seven days, while 80 to 90% of the latter group have.
Masking quickly became a political issue, with far-right politicians like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene most recently comparing mask mandates to the Holocaust.
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Is the best way to protect people from a dangerous virus to create one in a lab? That’s the central question in the debate over gain-of-function research, a branch of virology that alters viruses in a controlled environment to make them more transmissible or infectious.
Proponents of this type of research say the work enables them to predict deadly pathogens that might emerge in real life and start work on vaccines or treatments ahead. But opponents think the experiments are simply too risky. A lab without proper safety protocol could accidentally release a more transmissible virus into the human population.
Competing theories about the coronavirus’ origin have recently thrust this gain-of-function debate into the spotlight, since a prominent lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, was conducting that kind of research on coronaviruses. What’s more, the US has funded grants that supported that lab – which might have given State Department officials an incentive not to thoroughly investigate the possibility of a lab leak, according to a recent Vanity Fair investigation.
Vanity Fair reported that at a December 2020 meeting, US State Department officials were “explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome attention to US government funding of it.”
For years, the US government gave grants to a nonprofit called EcoHealth Alliance, which in turn funded gain-of-function research – including studies at the Wuhan institute.
In a January internal memo obtained by Vanity Fair, Thomas DiNanno, former acting assistant secretary of the State Department’s Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, wrote that his colleagues had warned leaders within his bureau “not to pursue an investigation into the origin of COVID-19” because it would “open a can of worms.”
Of course, the possibility that US officials may have wanted to distance themselves from any association with gain-of-function work doesn’t necessarily make the lab-leak theory more credible. The leading theory is still that the virus spilled over to people from animals. That’s because around 75% of all new infectious diseases come to us from animals, and the coronavirus’ genetic code is very similar to that of other coronaviruses found in bats.
Still, a growing chorus of political and public-health leaders are calling for more thorough investigations into the coronavirus’ origin, including the possibility that it leaked from a lab.
How the lab-leak theory reentered the conversation
Experts from the joint WHO-China team that investigated the coronavirus’ origin attend a press conference in Wuhan on February 9, 2021.
Zhang Chang/China News Service via Getty Image
The lab leak theory gained traction again at the end of March, after World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stated that “all hypotheses remain on the table” as to the virus’ origin – even after a WHO report concluded that a lab leak was unlikely. In a May letter, a group of biologists wrote that the lab-leak theory should be taken seriously “until we have sufficient data.”
Proponents of this possibility usually point to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), since scientists were studying coronaviruses there before the pandemic.
But at the start of the pandemic, scientists quickly shut down the notion that the WIV could be to blame. A February 2020 statement published by 27 scientists in the journal The Lancet said the scientific community had overwhelmingly concluded that the virus originated in wildlife.
“We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” the statement read.
However, the organizer of that statement was the president of EcoHealth Alliance, Peter Daszak.
A laboratory on the campus of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, pictured on May 27, 2020.
HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP via Getty Images
In May 2014, EcoHealth received a roughly $3.7 million grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of which went toward gain-of-function experiments. By 2018, EcoHealth was receiving up to $15 million per year in grant money from federal agencies, according to Vanity Fair.
In one instance, EcoHealth Alliance helped fund research that created a new infectious pathogen using the molecular structure of the SARS virus. The aim of the study, according to the researchers, was to warn of the potential risk of a SARS-related virus re-emerging from bats.
One of the paper’s authors was a prominent WIV virologist, Shi Zhengli. NIAID and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) are cited as financial supporters of the research.
The Trump administration canceled EcoHealth’s $3.7 million grant in April 2020. Then the NIH reinstated the grant in July but temporarily suspended its research activities.
Both NIAID director Anthony Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins have said that US agencies never funded gain-of-function research at the WIV.
“I fully agree that you should investigate where the virus came from,” Fauci told Senator Rand Paul at a Senate hearing last month. “But again, we have not funded gain-of-function research on this virus in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. No matter how many times you say it, it didn’t happen.”
He added, though, that it would have been “irresponsible” if the US hadn’t investigated bat viruses that may have caused the SARS outbreak.
“Are you really saying that we are implicated because we gave a multibillion-dollar institution $120,000 a year for bat surveillance?” Fauci told the Financial Times on Friday.
The US has funded gain-of-function research before
Anthony Fauci listens as President Joe Biden speaks at the National Institutes of Health.
Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
The US currently decides whether to fund gain-of-function experiments on a case-by-case basis. A multidisciplinary board at the Department of Health and Human Services evaluates the research to determine whether the benefits outweigh the risks.
The Trump administration implemented that policy in 2017. Before that, the Obama administration had put a moratorium on new funding for gain-of-function experiments that could make influenza, MERS, or SARS viruses more transmissible – or more likely to cause disease – through respiratory droplets in mammals. But that rule, created in October 2014, still made exceptions for research that was “urgently necessary to protect the public health or national security.”
An NIH official told Vanity Fair that the government’s approach to gain-of-function is complicated, though.
“If you ban gain-of-function research, you ban all of virology,” the official said, adding, “Ever since the moratorium, everyone’s gone wink-wink and just done gain-of-function research anyway.”
Kendra wasn’t usually one to get mad, especially not on the job. She’d joined Dollar General in 2019, as a longtime homemaker hoping for a change of pace. She loved chatting with the regulars who filed into her small-town location. She was meticulous about all the little tasks that went into keeping the store clean, organized, and running smoothly. Kendra had even worked her way up to the role of key-holder, the store employee responsible for opening and closing.
But then came the pandemic, and Kendra began to watch the stress start to “roll downhill.” The headwaters of the strain seemed to be visits, announcements, or corrections from regional and district management. The negativity seemed to submerge Kendra’s store manager, who became overwhelmed and less communicative toward her team. Soon, Kendra herself would find herself drowning in an increasingly fraught work environment.
“By the time you get down to that lowly stay-at-home mom that just wanted a part-time job – who is earning less than a hundred dollars a week because she’s making $7.25 an hour and only working 10 hours a week – it’s not worth it,” Kendra told Insider.
She says she’s not the “type of person” who acts out of anger. Yet, in the springtime of 2021, Kendra rage-quit her job.
Kendra isn’t the Dollar General worker’s real name. After verifying her employment records, Insider is protecting Kendra’s identity because she is concerned about getting her ex-boss in trouble with management. She said her manager is a “good person” who is simply under pressure.
On her last shift, Kendra says she could tell her store manager was displeased with something. During the pandemic, Kendra said she felt like she was constantly dealing with passive-aggressive and snide remarks, instead of clear direction.
“It’s like, if I’ve done something wrong, just tell me, you don’t have to be mean about it,” Kendra said. “Just tell me.”
The manager declined to share what the problem was, and the conversation got heated. So Kendra walked out, and never went back.
The phenomenon of rage-quitting is as old as work itself. Some people prefer to end things with a bang, not a whimper. So things like bridge-burning, walking off sans a two weeks’ notice, or even making a scene are nothing new when leaving a workplace. But the American workforce seems to be primed for rage-quitting at the moment – especially hourly workers in low-wage occupations like retail, which make up a giant portion of the workforce. In fact, hourly workers made up 58.1% of the US workforce in 2019, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Recently, multiple Dollar General employees at a store in Maine walked off the job after posting notes decrying the company’s work culture and pay. Similar incidents have occurred at Chipotle, Hardee’s, and Wendy’s around the country. Meanwhile, employers are complaining of a tight labor market, in some cases accusing unemployment benefits of luring potential workers away.
But there’s also evidence that many hourly wage-earners are simply fed up with their jobs. A study from the human resources assessment platform Traitify found that one in four respondents were at least “somewhat” less happy with their job than they were a year ago.
Gigs in industries like retail have long been denounced over low pay and high stress. But will the boiled-over rage of workers fresh off a life-altering pandemic – and any resulting labor shortage – finally prompt a major shift in working conditions?
‘So done with that job’
The pandemic itself had an outsized influence on worker’s decision-making. In some cases, workers who spoke with Insider cited the coronavirus as a primary reason for their unhappiness on the job, and their ultimate departure.
That was the reasoning behind Crista’s choice to depart from their job at PetSmart. Crista is also a member of the labor rights group United for Respect.
“I was really concerned about bringing COVID home from my place of work,” they told Insider.
Those fears grew as they watched managers and coworkers continuously flout mask requirements within the stores, even as COVID-19 deaths spiked. Crista says they found the work environment “callous.”
“It’s definitely hard to report stuff to the boss when the boss is breaking the rules, too,” they said.
Crista lives with their mother, who is 62. Their decision to quit was informed less by “rage” than by a deep dread over potentially infecting their loved one. Still, it amounted to a hasty departure. Crista can even pinpoint “the exact moment” they realized they needed to leave.
“My coworker was talking about how masks are so inconvenient to wear,” they said. “And she said, ‘If any of y’all get COVID from me, then sorry, not sorry.’ So she literally was like, ‘Yeah, I don’t care if you get sick, I just don’t want to wear my mask.'”
After thinking it over at home, they decided the “amount of pay” wasn’t worth the “lack of safety.” They called into work to put in their two weeks notice.
“The team lead said, ‘Just write it down on a piece of paper and don’t say anything about why,'” they said.
“I found it very strange and concerning that they would rather not hear why someone found a company to be a bad fit, especially during a global pandemic,” Crista said.
Crista says they went in to hand-deliver the note, but couldn’t find a manager. They left after situating the letter on a doorknob, and never received another call from PetSmart.
“PetSmart should know that there’s a huge disconnect between the corporate policies that have been put in place versus what their management and their staff actually do at their stores,” they said. “And that there needs to be some oversight and enforcement.”
In a statement sent to Insider, a PetSmart spokesperson said that the company remains committed to measures like “enhanced cleaning and disinfecting protocols, face covering requirements for associates and customers, daily health screening for associates, and many other steps to reduce the spread of COVID-19.”
“Nothing is more important than the safety of our teams and pet parents, and since the beginning of the pandemic, we have continuously directed our stores to adapt business practices to meet or exceed all applicable health and safety guidance, as well as other best practices for retail store operations,” the spokesperson said. “Additionally, we have significantly invested in personal protective equipment, including cloth face coverings, KN-95 masks and gloves for associates, cleaning supplies, physical barriers in our stores, and other items to protect our associates and customers.”
Insider also spoke with Helena, a former employee at a fast-fashion retailer. Insider verified her work history and is using a pseudonym to protect her identity over concerns about retaliation.
Helena says she had a number of relatives died from COVID-19, and she was often stressed about her boss taking the side of maskless shoppers over her own team.
“I was like, you know what, this company and the employees here just don’t care about anything other than the bottom line,” she said.
But things came to a head after Helena took a moment to check her phone at work, looking for updates on a relative who had just had a stroke.
“My manager went on the walkie-talkie for everyone to hear, saying, ‘Do me a favor and put your phone in your locker,” Helena said. “This was right after the mass shooting where the employees couldn’t even call home because they were made to put their phones in their lockers.”
During the April FedEx hub shooting in Indianapolis, workers trapped inside the facility were unable to call or text loved ones because of the shipping giant’s policy against cellphones at work.
The next day, the manager sent a long text out to the store workers about staying off their phones while on the job.
“This company furloughed us at the beginning of the pandemic,” Helena said, thinking to herself: “Why are you working so hard for them? They pay you $10 an hour and you have to do way more work. They don’t care about you.”
Helena had always given two weeks’ notice before leaving a job, so she penned a resignation letter and went to work her next shift. At closing, she found herself getting yelled at by her manager once more, as she tried to deliver her two weeks’ notice.
“I was just so done with that job,” she said.
She decided to just not show up the following day.
“When they texted me to ask me where I was, I told them I was revoking my two weeks’ notice,” she told Insider. “It felt so good to know that I would never have to work there again.”
Gypsy Noonan, another United for Respect member, thought about quitting Walmart many times. She was often assigned as the sole cashier in the store, a task which she found incredibly stressful. Noonan says that work-related stress ended up causing her seizures. But she ultimately managed to hold off until she was offered a new opportunity. She gave her two weeks’ notice, but then found herself assigned to work the cash registers alone, once more.
She requested backup from her team lead, and from other coworkers. Everyone refused.
“At this point, it’s like a light bulb went off and I was like, I’m not doing this. I don’t have to do this. I refuse to let myself be abused by the system. And I walked out the next day”
‘Just trying to survive’
Some experts say that the spate of rage-quitting could signal a sea change for hourly workers. Quincy Valencia, the vice president of product innovation at hiring platform Hourly by AMS.
She began her career in big box retail management where she said “you enjoyed your workers, and the best ones you wanted to keep, but if someone quit, it was not a big deal. There were 10 people waiting to take that job.”
Now, Valencia said that attitude “boggles” her mind.
“A bad experience with the cashier is going to ensure that a customer doesn’t come back,” she said. “Nobody cares who your financial analyst is. And yet these industries have always taken more time and more care in trying to hire the right people into those [corporate] roles, than in hiring the people who are upfront.”
She said that there’s a “twisted mentality” around hiring hourly workers, in particular. Namely, jobs like working as a cook at a fast-food joint or a clerk in a grocery store are seen as a “rite of passage” for high schoolers, a frequently touted myth.
“Even now, the debate is going on about how these workers shouldn’t make $15 an hour, because these should be for high school students,” she said. “I would counter that this is sort of off-topic. So what, you can abuse them because they’re not raising a family?”
Valencia said that this attitude “cannot” continue to pervade the talent acquisition community.
“This category of worker – particularly in retail – has driven our economy over the past, especially here through this pandemic,” she said. “And now there’s a big mismatch right now between job availability and applicants for those jobs.”
But still, that doesn’t mean that going through with rage-quitting will empower workers on an individual basis. Laurie Ruettimann, a human resources expert with a focus on fixing work, told Insider that she’s concerned about the long-term implications for rage-quitters forced to find a new job on the fly.
“Why would you give up your known crappy job for an unknown, potentially crappy job?” she told Insider. “There is this tendency – especially when we’ve been sheltering in place for so long – like, ‘I’ve just got to get the hell out of here.’ But that instinct to just flee is always the wrong instinct.”
Ruettimann said that employees considering rage-quitting on the spot should try to give themselves “permission to take this process slowly” and to focus on gathering information on truly promising new opportunities before resorting to drastic measures.
For her part, Kendra, the former Dollar General worker, says that she doesn’t feel good about quitting out of anger. For now, she is enjoying spending more time with her husband, who she rarely used to see because of all the night shifts she worked. She also feels that there was no reason for her to continue subjecting herself to a high-stress environment for so little pay.
“I feel bad about it,” she said. “But in this country, everyone’s making money except for the ones actually doing the work.”
Kendra tries to avoid driving by her old Dollar General. The sight of the distinctive black-and-yellow sign makes her sad, thinking about all the workers “just trying to survive.”
The coronavirus, or rather the measurements taken against it, changed our perception of time. For many, the attempts to prevent the spread of the virus resulted in a feeling that time had come to a standstill.
When the pandemic first hit, this notion of stopped time was at the core of a widespread sense of crisis. For a while, many existed in survival mode, reacting to the demands of the day while unable to plan ahead. However, around the world, humans also began to deploy what in my work as a social anthropologist I call temporal agency – the ability to deliberately restructure, speed up, or slow down the times we are living in.
Many of us learned how to trick time in order to get through the new COVID-19 way of life. People restructured their daily lives by establishing new routines. Many had to navigate the differences between home and home office time, when both were spent in the same place. Some of us even learned how to tentatively plan ahead in a reality where the future was uncertain.
Many lockdowns later, I’m still impressed by the creative responses to the pandemic, particularly the many ways in which families and friends learned to share time at a distance. However, the one feature I particularly believe we should carry into the post-pandemic future is not that COVID creativity, but perseverance itself.
Endurance, maintenance, and tenacity – the ingredients that make up perseverance – are under-appreciated even in times without crisis. However, they kept us going when life was hardest. Humanity surprised itself by quickly adapting to the new pandemic normal, but what counted more was the perseverance we deployed for more than a year without giving up. Creating a sustainable post-pandemic future will depend on it, too.
Missed opportunities
The pandemic taught us to appreciate, and even celebrate perseverance, not least the continuous daily work of all the heroic frontline workers (whose everyday work we’d taken for granted for too long). It also provided us with a chance to reconsider what’s important in our lives and how we want to organize our societies in the future. Many of us were made aware of what counts and what was missed the most.
Prominent amongst those things are the social relations that make us who we are – with family members, friends, neighbors, and colleagues, even those we had all those unnecessary fights with during lockdown.
In the post-pandemic future, we should never again take them for granted, nor all the hugs, kisses, and handshakes. We avoid doing that by appreciating the work that goes into maintaining these social relationships.
Apart from time for family and friends, we also yearned for other times – for travel and leisure, for example. We’d taken for granted the distinction between work and leisure, office and home time, and we’ll have to take time again to renegotiate these distinctions. Whatever we come up with in the end, this new work-life balance will also have to stand the test of time – whether it can endure in the future and we in it.
Endurance and exhaustion
During the pandemic, many people had to come up with new ideas and change their behavior. But once that change had happened, we were forced to maintain and endure our response to the pandemic.
The daily exercises, weekly Zoom calls with relatives or prolonged homeschooling efforts were all examples of endurance. In many places, perseverance shaped the latter part of the pandemic – it was all about making it through a few more dark winter days and resisting general exhaustion and lockdown fatigue.
As cities change, their inhabitants are forced to adapt their behavior to new social, economic, and political circumstances. Through this change, the fight to keep something you love alive requires endurance. Sustaining a social club that struggles to find new members or preserving your local community center from closure entails plenty of perseverance. Maintaining part of your urban infrastructure that suffers from funding cuts – your youth club or local park – is a revolutionary act, because it withstands the change others intended for it.
This work of maintenance and repair is at the core of our societies. It might look less interesting than attempts at making a difference, but without it, everything around us would collapse.
The end of this pandemic will not be a sharp cut. It will be gradual and, as humanity will have to pace itself, there will be more need for endurance. In the best case, the experiences of the pandemic will help us determine what this future should look like.
Although the pandemic will at some point be over, there are enough crises yet that demand our attention: economic, social, ecological, and political ones as well as potential future pandemics. The same sense of endurance, sustainability, and perseverance will have to characterize our responses to those, too.
It is not enough to wait for a shortcut out of climate change or a cure-all for economic decline. A truly sustainable solution to these crises will have to be maintained in new everyday lives and routines. It will have to work with a different understanding of what human agency is all about.
Like during the pandemic, we not only have to establish new ideas but make them work in the long run.
The United States will send 25 million excess COVID-19 vaccine doses to countries all over the world, the White House announced Thursday.
Nearly 19 million of the doses will be given through COVAX, the UN-backed global vaccine sharing program that helps vulnerable countries.
In total, 7 million of those doses will be donated to nations in South and Southeast Asia, including India, Nepal, Afghanistan, Philippines, and Vietnam. Another 6 million doses will be shipped across Central and South America, including to Brazil, Honduras, Guatemala, Haiti, and El Salvador. Approximately 5 million doses will be delivered to countries in Africa, coordinated through the African Union.
The remaining 6 million doses will be given directly to allies and countries seeing surges in COVID-19 cases, including Canada, Mexico, South Korea, Egypt, Iraq, and the West Bank and Gaza, the White House said.
“As long as this pandemic is raging anywhere in the world, the American people will still be vulnerable,” President Joe Biden said in a statement. “And the United States is committed to bringing the same urgency to international vaccination efforts that we have demonstrated at home.”
“This is just the beginning,” White House COVID-19 response coordinator Jeff Zients said during a Thursday briefing. The doses will consist of Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, Zients confirmed.
Vaccine shipments will take place over the next several weeks. The US plans to share a total of 80 million excess doses with the rest of the world by the end of June – five times the amount any other country has committed to donating, according to the White House.
“A number of those are even going to go out as soon as today,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a news conference Thursday.
The White House reiterated that the US has secured enough supply to fully vaccinate Americans and the doses that will be shipped come from a surplus in the US stockpile.
The announcement comes ahead of Biden’s meeting in the United Kingdom with the Group of Seven nations next week. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan noted on Thursday that the US plans to work with those countries to help end the pandemic.
“Our goal in sharing our vaccines is in service of ending the pandemic globally,” Sullivan said during a White House coronavirus task force briefing Thursday. “Our overarching aim is to get as many safe and effective vaccines to as many people as fast as possible.”
Melissa Wirt spent the last 15 months creating new policies and adjusting older ones around her employees who are also parents.
Courtesy of Latched Mama
Melissa Wirt is the mother of five and owner of nursing apparel company Latched Mama.
She created new policies and adjusted older ones to help her employees who are parents during the pandemic.
Around 10 million US mothers with school-age children were not actively working in January.
This article is part of a series called “Secrets of Success,” which examines specific leadership tips from prominent business leaders.
In one corner of Melissa Wirt’s warehouse, an employee prepared orders next to her daughter, who was attending virtual kindergarten. Meanwhile, an employee’s spouse was learning the ropes so he could join the company while she acted as the primary caregiver.
“We don’t have an HR department, so everything really runs through me,” said Wirt, the founder of breastfeeding clothing company Latched Mama. “Everybody was able to get whatever they needed during the pandemic.”
At a time when 10 million US mothers with school-age children aren’t actively working, Wirt has spent the last 15 months creating new policies and adjusting older ones for working parents to foster a supportive environment. Her leadership strategy has been one of flexibility and support, treating each scenario as its own case with its own unique solution.
“Our ‘why’ at Latched Mama has always been supporting parents, since the day we built the brand,” said Wirt, reflecting on her ability to assist working parents during the crisis. “It was relatively easy when the culture was already set up to allow people to be parents first and just adapt to what they needed.”
Building solutions based on specific needs
Wirt worked with each employee to find a solution for their specific need, which often included allowing parents to bring their children to work, encouraging flexible hours, and approving paid leave.
Courtesy of Latched Mama
Wirt was already the mother of two children when she hatched the idea for her business, which she runs out of her hometown of Midlothian, Virginia. She struggled to find affordable nursing clothes, and in 2014 launched Latched Mama to solve that problem.
Since then, she’s had three more children and spearheaded a generous family leave program; new parents can take 100 days of paid leave and bring their children to the office until their first birthday.
When COVID-19 reached the US, prompting schools to launch remote learning and daycare centers to temporarily close, Wirt knew her employees would need help balancing their careers and children.
“My philosophy as a business owner is that I want somebody to be able to bring their entire self to work,” said Wirt, who manages a 40-person company. “And it’s really hard to bring your entire self when people don’t realize that your entire self also includes your children.”
Wirt worked with each employee to find a solution for their specific need, which often included allowing parents to bring their children to work, encouraging flexible hours, and approving paid leave.
Other times, if one employee was the primary caregiver and their spouse was out of work, Wirt found ways to get them on the company payroll. She tapped that person’s expertise along with offering training sessions for newcomers.
“We were flexible about training entire families because we found that would help us make sure that needs are being met at home as well as needs for us as a company,” Wirt said.
While Wirt’s strategies were tackled on a case-by-case basis, she believes some of those pandemic-inspired policies might endure.
For example, she doesn’t feel the need to drag employees back to the office if they’ve found a rhythm to working from home.
“Most business owners feel the last 15 months have been a complete blur of survival and adapting and pivoting,” Wirt said. “We’re just going to adapt to what’s working now and the new normal.”
Today’s baby bust looks unlikely to turn into a delayed baby boom.
That’s according to the latest research from Melissa S. Kearney and Phillip Levine at the Brookings Institution, who say that births in the US are unlikely to rebound. The research comes on the heels of a recent CDC report that found the US birth rate fell by 4%, the sharpest single-year decline in nearly 50 years and the lowest number of births since 1979.
The total fertility rate – or the number of live births a woman is expected to have over her lifetime – also fell from 2.12 in 2007 to 1.64 in 2020, below the 2.1 replacement fertility rate needed for the population to naturally replace itself.
Declining birth rates during an economic downturn are typical. But the recession of 2020 was paired with a global health crisis, which could yield a stronger impact. Demographers are currently debating whether the current drop will prove to be a temporary or permanent phenomenon: Will women will end up having babies at a later date or have fewer babies overall?
Brookings’ analysis implies the latter, that US fertility rates will be below replacement levels for the forseeable future. Considering that women who were born in 1975 to 1980 had an average of around 2.2 total lifetime births, Brookings took a look at expected lifetime births for more recent age cohorts.
It forecasted the total number of children ever born based on simulated age profiles of women in the 1985 to 2000 birth cohort under conservative, moderate, and aggressive scenarios. For each cohort, the total number of children ever born per woman continues to further fall. The forecasted fertility rate for the 2000 cohort is 1.44 conservatively, 1.77 moderately, and 1.92 aggressively, all well below the replacement fertility rate.
That is all to say, women are expected to have fewer babies going forward.
A decline in births could reshape the economy
This trend isn’t just another fallout from the pandemic, according to Brookings. It follows a decade of declining births for multiple cohorts of women as they wait to have babies until a later age. The simulated fertility rates, Kearney and Levine wrote, are similar to those in high-income countries.
Christine Percheski, associate professor of sociology at Northwestern University, recently told Insider that the US has been slow to fall in line with worldwide birth trends. “It’s about women having access to education and employment opportunities,” she said. “It’s about the rise in individualism. It’s about the rise in women’s autonomy and a change in values.”
Macroeconomic forces are another major factor in the decision to postpone having kids, a reflection of how expensive the US economy has become. Millennials have grappled with the lingering effects of the Great Recession and soaring living costs for things like housing and, of course, childcare.
If Brookings’ analysis proves to be true, experts are worried the US is entering a demographic crisis that would result in an economy with an aging population that isn’t replaced by enough young workers. It could yield higher government costs and a smaller workforce that would have to front the care costs for aging populations, creating a shortage of pension and social security-type funds.
“Young couples have said, ‘Give me a rain check, I don’t want the baby now because there’s too much uncertainty,'” he said. “But they will have those babies later. They don’t cancel their plans to have babies for life.”
Regardless of what happens, a declining birth rate doesn’t have to mean devastation for the economy. It will undoubtedly be an economic shift, but such change isn’t necessarily bad. It just requires structural adjustments, like creating new policies that accommodate to changes in population in size, and for people to welcome a reshaped economy with open arms.
The federal government updated its guidance for employers, saying companies may require their workers to get vaccinated for COVID-19. Additionally, they may offer incentives for employees who voluntarily receive vaccinations, such as paid time off or bonuses as long, as they are not coercive.
In April, the Biden Administration announced it would grant tax incentives to any small businesses that offer employees paid time off to get vaccinated. Companies both small and large have used incentives and flexible company policies to increase employee vaccination rates.
The new guidelines from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) includes protections for workers who may refuse the vaccine due to underlying medical conditions or conflicting religious beliefs, as defined by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Employers who determine that an employee who cannot be vaccinated due to a disability are a risk others are not allowed to bar them from the workplace unless there is no accommodation they can take “that would eliminate or reduce this risk so the unvaccinated employee does not pose a direct threat,” according to the guidelines. The same goes for employees who have religious objections to receiving the vaccine.
In neither case do employers have the right to automatically fire workers who cannot receive the vaccine. First they must determine whether the employee has rights under local and national discrimination laws.
However, experts say most employers will probably simply request their workers get vaccinated, rather than forcefully compel them. Although public confidence in the vaccine has increased, a survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 27% of respondents “probably or definitely would not get a COVID-19 vaccine even if it were available for free and deemed safe by scientists.” Forcing workers to take the shot or leave their jobs could backfire on employers.
There are also potential legal risks for employers. If a required vaccination causes harm to a worker, it could likely spur a workers compensation claim against their employer, employment law attorney Jay Rosenlieb told AARP.
“It’s a treacherous area for employers,” Rosenlieb said.
Stocks have been resilient after last year’s plunge into a bear market because of the COVID-19 pandemic but the recovery has moved too fast in the eyes of many investment professionals who say equities could face a correction in the next 12 months.
45% of respondents in a CFA Institute survey agreed that equities in their respective markets have “recovered too quickly.” The institute Tuesday released the results of its survey, which tallied responses from 6,040 members worldwide.
The results indicate that financial analysts believe there is a disconnect between economic growth fundamentals and capital markets caused in part by monetary stimulus, the institute said.
Central banks worldwide cut interest rates to ultra-low levels and increased asset purchases, among other actions, to foster economic recovery from the coronavirus crisis that forced a widespread shutdown of businesses and threw millions of people out of work. Those moves along with vaccinations of people worldwide from the respiratory disease have encouraged investors to embrace so-called risk assets including stocks.
In the US, the S&P 500 has gained nearly 12% since the start of 2021. That gain follows its 16.3% rise in 2020 after sliding into a bear market in March 2020 because of worries about the world’s largest economy falling into recession. The tech-concentrated Nasdaq Composite has also advanced this year, picking up 7%, although many large-cap tech stocks have dropped in favor of small-cap stocks of companies who are closely exposed to economic recovery. The Nasdaq soared in 2020 by 43.6%.
Meanwhile, the MSCI ACWI Index, representing large- and mid-cap stocks in 23 developed and 27 emerging markets, has picked up about 25% this year following its 16.3% rise in 2020. The MSCI ACWI ETF has bulked up by 11% during 2021.
But stocks are likely to run into a correction within one to three years as central banks begin to rollback stimulus as their respective economies mend from the pandemic, the survey respondents told the CFA.
“To me, it also indicates to authorities that monetary stimulus is not a simple or linear lever to pull given the complexity of the economic and financial ecosystem; there will be unintended consequences to consider in the future,” Paul Andrews, managing director of research, advocacy and standards at the CFA Institute, said in a statement.
The CFA Institute said 150,024 individuals received a survey invitation and the total response rate was 4%. The margin of error was plus or minus 1.2%.
In this March 22, 2019, file photo, Heather Randazzo, a grow employee at Compassionate Care Foundation’s medical marijuana dispensary, trims leaves off marijuana plants in the company’s grow house in Egg Harbor Township, N.J.
AP Photo/Julio Cortez, File
The pandemic initially disrupted the legal cannabis industry, but 2020 saw record sales of $17.5 billion.
Dispensaries navigated changing regulations and markets to find new ways to reach customers.
A cannabis producer in Las Vegas told The New York Times sales in Nevada could top $1 billion in 2021.
Shortly after Nevada officials announced that licensed cannabis stores and medical dispensaries could reopen after lockdown, Nicolas MacLean said cars were lined up for five blocks waiting for curbside pickup.
Like many industries in Las Vegas, the cannabis industry used to rely on tourists for sales, but that changed when the pandemic hit, MacLean, who serves as the CEO of Las Vegas-based cannabis producer Aether Gardens, told The New York Times.
“Locals are very discerning – they want something they aren’t going to find on the black market,” MacLean said. “Especially when you are stuck at home.”
The year of 2020 saw extraordinarily strong sales of legal cannabis in the US, up 46% from 2019 to a record $17.5 billion, according to cannabinoid market research firm BDSA.
“I expect this will be the first year Nevada does over a billion in cannabis sales,” MacLean said. “And it happened on the back of what I think no one expected.”
In western Massachusetts, where recreational cannabis use is legal, Meg Sanders, CEO of Canna Provisions, said government restrictions and later social-distancing requirements forced her to radically change her sales strategy.
At first, only medical dispensaries were allowed to remain open, while recreational-use retailers were forced to close.
“To have liquor stores deemed essential and not adult-use cannabis – especially when the law passed in Massachusetts was about regulating cannabis like alcohol – was surprising and unfortunate,” Sanders told The Times.
As Canna Provisions was allowed to re-open, the shop’s particular boutique-style in-person shopping experience had to change in favor of over-the-phone preorders.
“Our county is an internet desert,” she explained.
Now when customers call, they speak with a salesperson who can answer their questions and walk them through the available topicals, edibles, and smokables – a method, she said, is “working” for business.
“In our Lee store, preorders have become almost 100 percent of our business, so we bought more handsets and hired more people to answer the phones, and our revenue is up,” she said.
In Florida, Oswaldo Graziani Lemoine, the creative director at Fluent Cannabis Care, said his company’s 19 locations were able to remain open for the roughly half million state residents with medical cannabis cards. (Recreational use is illegal in the state of Florida.)
“For us, it became less about the in-store experience and more about offering our customers deals and the ease of pickup,” he told The Times.
In addition to offering special discounts, Graziani said future locations will be designed with pre-orders and drive through sales in mind – no counter, no lobby, just green.
