Archives for February 2021

TOKYO (AP) — Asian shares advanced on Tuesday, lifted by the economic recovery, vaccine rollouts and signs that new coronavirus cases may be abating.

U.S. markets were closed Monday for Washington’s Birthday, a national holiday. Shanghai and Hong Kong markets are still closed for the Lunar New Year.

Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 jumped 1.3% in morning trading to 30,466.77, after closing the day before above 30,000 for the first time since August 1990. South Korea’s Kospi gained nearly 0.4% to 3,158.78, while Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 added 0.5% to 6,901.80.

Despite data that show regional economies have been hit hard by the pandemic, investors are still sending indexes ever higher. Analysts think Asian shares will continue to rally, cheered by the recent gains on the U.S. and European markets.

Hopes for a recovery are being driven partly by the COVID-19 vaccine rollouts, said Prakash Sakpal, senior economist Asia at ING.

“Gains will still likely be capped as investors remain wary of newer strains of the variant, which may be more resilient to existing vaccines,” he added.

A vaccine rollout is starting in Japan this week, a nation that’s lagged behind the U.S. and Europe with the inoculations. It begins with about 20,000 medical workers, followed by 3.7 million more medical workers. The government goal is to have shots available for elderly people in April, and for everyone by June.

Government data earlier this week showed the Japanese economy had rebounded from the growth drop experienced earlier over COVID-19, but contracted for 2020 overall. It’s unclear whether the world’s third largest economy can stay on the growth track, as worries continue about an ongoing wave of infections.

Uncertainty about whether the Tokyo Olympics can go on in July, postponed from last year, with no foreign spectators or perhaps no spectators at all, is adding to the gloom.

Still, optimism remains over stimulus measures, including trillions of dollars more aid from the U.S. government. Some companies have released surprisingly strong earnings reports, adding to investor enthusiasm.

“Global equity markets remain on the climb into this week with the multitude of positive factors, including U.S. fiscal stimulus hopes, positive earnings and the vaccine rollout supporting sentiment,” said Jingyi Pan, senior market strategist at IG in Singapore.

U.S. benchmarks ended last week at record highs.

In energy trading, U.S. benchmark crude oil added 69 cents to $60.16 a barrel in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange. It gained $1.23 to $59.47 per barrel on Friday. Brent crude, the international standard, gained 15 cents to $63.45 per barrel.

In currency trading, the U.S. dollar inched up to 105.50 Japanese yen from 105.39 yen. The euro strengthened to $1.2149 from $1.2131.

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Yuri Kageyama is on Twitter https://twitter.com/yurikageyama

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Union activist Terrence Wise recalls being laughed at when he began pushing for a national $15 per hour minimum wage almost a decade ago. Nearly a year into the pandemic, the idea isn’t so funny.

The coronavirus has renewed focus on challenges facing hourly employees who have continued working in grocery stores, gas stations and other in-person locations even as much of the workforce has shifted to virtual environments. President Joe Biden has responded by including a provision in the massive pandemic relief bill that would more than double the minimum wage from the current $7.25 to $15 per hour.

But the effort is facing an unexpected roadblock: Biden himself. The president has seemingly undermined the push to raise the minimum wage by acknowledging its dim prospects in Congress, where it faces political opposition and procedural hurdles.

That’s frustrating to activists like Wise, who worry their victory is being snatched away at the last minute despite an administration that’s otherwise an outspoken ally.

“To have it this close on the doorstep, they need to get it done,” said Wise, a 41-year-old department manager at a McDonald’s in Kansas City and a national leader of Fight for 15, an organized labor movement. “They need to feel the pressure.”

The minimum wage debate highlights one of the central tensions emerging in the early days of Biden’s presidency. He won the White House with pledges to respond to the pandemic with a barrage of liberal policy proposals. But as a 36-year veteran of the Senate, Biden is particularly attuned to the political dynamics on Capitol Hill and can be blunt in his assessments.

“I don’t think it’s going to survive,” Biden recently told CBS News, referring to the minimum wage hike.

There’s a certain political realism in Biden’s remark.

With the Senate evenly divided, the proposal doesn’t have the 60 votes needed to make it to the floor on its own. Democrats could use an arcane budgetary procedure that would attach the minimum wage to the pandemic response bill and allow it to pass with a simple majority vote.

But even that’s not easy. Some moderate Democratic senators, including Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Krysten Sinema of Arizona, have expressed either outright opposition to the hike or said it shouldn’t be included in the pandemic legislation.

The Senate’s parliamentarian may further complicate things with a ruling that the minimum wage measure can’t be included in the pandemic bill.

For now, the measure’s most progressive Senate backers aren’t openly pressuring Biden to step up his campaign for a higher minimum wage.

Bernie Sanders, the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, has said he’s largely focused on winning approval from the parliamentarian to tack the provision onto the pandemic bill. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who like Sanders challenged Biden from the left for the Democratic nomination, has only tweeted that Democrats should “right this wrong.”

Some activists, however, are encouraging Biden to be more aggressive.

The Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, the co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, said Biden has a “mandate” to ensure the minimum wage increases, noting that minority Americans were “the first to go back to jobs, first to get infected, first to get sick, first to die” during the pandemic.

“We cannot be the last to get relief and the last to get treated and paid properly,” Barber said.

The federal minimum wage hasn’t been raised since 2009, the longest stretch without an increase since its creation in 1938. When adjusted for inflation, the purchasing power of the current $7.25 wage has declined more than a dollar in the last 11-plus years.

Democrats have long promised an increase — support for a $15 minimum wage was including in the party’s 2016 political platform — but haven’t delivered.

Supporters say the coronavirus has made a higher minimum wage all the more urgent since workers earning it are disproportionately people of color. The liberal Economic Policy Institute found that more than 19% of Hispanic workers and more than 14% of Black workers earned hourly wages that kept them below federal poverty guidelines in 2017.

Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans in the U.S. also have rates of hospitalization and death from COVID-19 that are two to four times higher than for whites, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

People of color are a vital part Biden’s constituency, constituting 38% of his support in November’s election, according to AP VoteCast, a nationwide survey of the electorate.

Adrianne Shropshire. executive director of BlackPAC, noted that Biden has promised to address racial inequalities and create a more fair economy. That means he now has a chance to ensure that hourly wage earners “come out of this pandemic in better shape than they went into it.”

“The recovery around COVID shouldn’t just be about how to stabilize and get people back to zero,” Shropshire said. “It should be about how do we create opportunities to move people beyond where they were.”

The White House says Biden isn’t giving up on the issue. His comments to CBS, according to an aide, reflected his own evaluation of where the parliamentarian would rule based on his decades of experience in the Senate dealing with similar negotiations.

Biden suggested in the same interview that he’s prepared to engage in a “separate negotiation” on raising the minimum wage, but White House press secretary Jen Psaki offered no further details on the future of the proposal if it is in fact cut from the final coronavirus aid bill.

One option could be forcing passage by having Vice President Kamala Harris, as the Senate’s presiding officer, overrule the parliamentarian. But Psaki was clear in opposing that: “Our view is that the parliamentarian is who is chosen, typically, to make a decision in a nonpartisan manner.”

Navin Nayak, executive director of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the political arm of the progressive think tank, said he wasn’t surprised at Biden’s assessment, but still feels the White House is making good faith efforts.

“They’re not putting this in there to lose it — they put it in there to win it,” Nayak said.

Nayak also noted Biden’s comments came before a Congressional Budget Office projection that found the proposal would help lift millions of Americans out of poverty but increase the federal deficit and cost 1.4 million jobs as employers scale back costlier workforces.

Sanders and other supporters argue that the CBO’s finding that raising the minimum wage will increase the deficit means it impacts the budget — and should therefore be allowed as part of the COVID relief bill. But that will ultimately be up to the Senate parliamentarian.

For Wise, potential congressional hurdles pale in comparison to real world realities.

He makes $14 an hour and his fiancé works as a home health care professional. But when she went into quarantine because of possible exposure to the coronavirus and he missed work to care for their three daughters, it wasn’t long before the family was served with an eviction notice.

People “figure it’s something we’re doing wrong. We’re going to work. We’re productive. We’re law-abiding citizens,” Wise said. “It shouldn’t have to be that way.”

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Associated Press writers Alan Fram and Kevin Freking contributed.

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Eds: This story has been updated to CORRECT the spelling of Terrence Wise’s first name.

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WILMINGTON, N.C. (AP) — Basketball legend Michael Jordan is donating $10 million to launch two medical clinics in underserved communities near his hometown in North Carolina, a regional health care system announced Monday.

The Novant Health clinics are set to open in early 2022 in New Hanover County along North Carolina’s southeastern coast, according to a statement from the system. The gift marks one of the largest ever from the Basketball Hall of Fame athlete, news outlets reported.

Jordan previously gave $7 million to open Michael Jordan Family Clinics in Charlotte in 2019 and 2020. Those clinics have since seen more than 4,500 patients and have administered nearly 1,000 COVID-19 vaccines, Novant Health said.

“I am very proud to once again partner with Novant Health to expand the Family Clinic model to bring better access to critical medical services in my hometown,” Jordan said in a statement. “Everyone should have access to quality health care, no matter where they live, or whether or not they have insurance.”

Novant said the new clinics would bring services to “more rural and rural-adjacent communities” and to those who are uninsured or underinsured.

Jordan grew up in Wilmington before going on to play at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He later played 15 seasons in the NBA, winning six championships with the Chicago Bulls.

“Wilmington holds a special place in my heart and it’s truly gratifying to be able to give back to the community that supported me throughout my life,” he said.

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GENEVA (AP) — It’s nearly launch time for COVAX, the United Nations’ unprecedented program to deploy COVID-19 vaccines for hundreds of millions in need around the globe.

More than two months after countries like Britain and the United States started immunizing their most vulnerable people, the U.N.’s health agency gave its approval Monday to a vaccine developed by Oxford University and AstraZeneca, which should trigger the release of hundreds of millions of doses by COVAX.

COVAX missed its own target of starting vaccination in poor countries at the same time as immunizations were rolled out in rich countries, and numerous developing countries have signed their own deals to buy vaccine, fearing the program won’t deliver.

The World Health Organization and partners hope COVAX can finally start shipping out vaccines later this month.

Here’s a look at the project:

WHAT IS COVAX, AND WHY DOES IT MATTER?

It’s a cooperative program aimed to make sure low- and middle-income countries get equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines. Some buy them, others get them for free thanks to donor countries and charities.

COVAX hopes to deploy some 336 million doses by the end of June, and around 2 billion doses by the end of the year.

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said last week that over 130 million doses of vaccine have been deployed globally — three quarters of them in only ten countries. Almost 130 countries with 2.5 billion people haven’t administered a single dose, he said.

WHY IS WHO ‘EMERGENCY USE’ APPROVAL IMPORTANT?

Unlike most wealthy nations, many developing countries don’t have the resources to assess whether vaccines should be approved. They rely on the WHO to determine if vaccines are safe, effective and have been made properly.

The most impactful moment for COVAX so far looms with Monday’s approval of the AstraZeneca vaccine; the program has bought hundreds of millions of doses, although there is no guarantee when countries will receive them. The Serum Institute of India, which will produce the majority of them, has previously said its provision of shots to COVAX would be “calibrated” in line with India’s own domestic and other needs.

But questions have arisen recently about the vaccine’s use, given the increasing spread of the virus variant first identified in South Africa. Early studies suggest the AstraZeneca vaccine is less effective against that variant and South Africa’s government delayed plans to roll out its own supplies of the vaccine. The WHO said last week the AstraZeneca shot should still be used in countries that have detected variants — but the head of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned the region’s countries to prioritize other vaccines instead.

WHO GETS THE DOSES FIRST?

COVAX leaders haven’t said.

Gian Gandhi, the UNICEF supply coordinator for COVAX, said a confirmation of the doses that the U.N. children’s agency can deploy will come once the WHO has approved the AstraZeneca vaccine.

The WHO takes into account readiness and need, and has placed a priority on getting doses to health care workers and vulnerable people like the elderly.

The deployment “will vary from country to country,” Gandhi said. “In some instances, the timeframe could be in the range of days and weeks; in others it could be several weeks.”

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Lori Hinnant contributed from Paris.

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LONDON (AP) — Britain’s newly established quarantine hotels received their first guests on Monday as the government tries to prevent new coronavirus variants from derailing a fast-moving vaccination drive that has delivered more than 15 million shots in ten weeks.

Passengers arriving at London’s Heathrow Airport were escorted by security guards to buses that took them to nearby hotels.

Some of the travelers said they had tried and failed to make it to Britain before Monday to avoid the quarantine.

Zari Tadayon, who flew to Heathrow from Dubai and was taken to the Radisson Blu Edwardian hotel near the airport, said she had hoped she would be allowed to quarantine at her home in London. She said she felt “horrible” about the enforced 10-day hotel stay.

“How I’m going to cope I don’t know. It’s going to be tough,” she said.

Britain has given a first dose of coronavirus vaccine to almost a quarter of its population, but health officials are concerned that vaccines may not work as well on some new strains of the virus, including one first identified in South Africa.

Under the new rules, residents of the U.K. and Ireland arriving in England from 33 high-risk countries must stay in designated hotels for 10 days at their own expense, with meals delivered to their door. In Scotland the rule applies to arrivals from any country.

International travel has already been sharply curbed by the pandemic and Britons are currently barred from going on overseas vacations.

Critics, however, say Britain’s quarantine hotels are being set up too late, with the South African variant already circulating in the U.K.

Nick Thomas-Symonds, borders and immigration spokesman for the main opposition Labour Party, said reports of passengers from “red zone” countries mingling with others on planes and at the airport showed that the government’s quarantine policy was “half baked.”

On Sunday, the Conservative government reached its goal of giving the first of two doses of vaccine to 15 million of Britain’s most vulnerable people, including health care workers and those aged over 70.

Visiting a London vaccination center on Monday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson praised the “unbelievable effort” by scientists, medics, pharmacists, members of the military and volunteers that had achieved Europe’s fastest vaccine rollout.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock said the vaccination drive is now being extended to people over 65 and those with underlying health conditions. The government aims to give everyone over 50 their first vaccine shot by the end of April and vaccinate the whole adult population by September.

Simon Stevens, chief executive of the National Health Service in England, cautioned that the national vaccination campaign consisted of “two sprints and a marathon, (and) we’ve just come to the end of the first sprint.” He said months of inoculations, and possibly booster shots against new variants, lay ahead.

Britain has had Europe’s worst coronavirus outbreak, with more than 117,000 deaths, though Infections and deaths are now falling steadily after more than a month of national lockdown. On Monday the U.K. recorded 9,765 new cases, the first time the figure has been below 10,000 since Oct. 2. There were 230 new deaths recorded, almost a third fewer than a week ago.

The government says it will announce a “road map” for easing lockdown on Feb. 22.

Johnson is under pressure from some members of his governing Conservative Party to lift the lockdown soon, allowing businesses to reopen and people to visit friends and family.

The prime minister, who has been accused of being too slow to lock Britain down last spring, then too quick to ease restrictions over the summer, now is striking a more measured tone.

“Although the vaccination program is going well, we still don’t have enough data about the exact effectiveness of the vaccines in reducing the spread of infection,” Johnson said at a news conference.

“We must be both optimistic but also patient,” he said. “Because we want this lockdown to be the last.”

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Pan Pylas in London contributed to this story.

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Follow all of AP’s pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic, https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak

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