Archives for March 2021

Millennial Money: Bust gender bias and balance work at home

No matter how modern opposite-sex couples can be in their views on equality, old habits die hard. The COVID-19 pandemic has made this abundantly clear to parents who already struggled to find balance.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, mothers and fathers both left the workforce earlier in the pandemic in April 2020, but nearly all fathers eventually returned to work, while many mothers stayed home . And a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that recessions typically lead to a gender wage gap growth of 2 percentage points, but a recession caused by a pandemic grows the gap by 5 percentage points.

This leaves a generation of career-driven women facing many of the same obstacles that kept previous generations of women underpaid or out of the workforce entirely. Working through these issues comes down to exploring your biases, modeling the behavior you’d like to see other families adopt and treating your partner with empathy.

COMPARE YOUR STATED VALUES WITH YOUR INGRAINED VALUES

Ed Coambs, a financial therapist in Charlotte, North Carolina , asks clients to tell him about how money and work were viewed in their families growing up. He finds that while your stated values may include equality, the values of your family and community influence your views, too, and those values may not match.

Coambs can relate. When he met his wife, she was in dental school and he was working as a firefighter. Once she graduated, she would earn more than him. At first, Coambs was in full support.

“Then we got into the reality of living life together,” he says. “It exposed insecurities about not being the breadwinning partner and not conforming to my internalized gender roles and expectations.” In Coambs’ case, his father was the breadwinning parent when he was growing up.

Culture affects your value system, too. Melissa Daroszewski was active in the Black Law Students Association when she was in law school. “We’d often discuss the increase in Black women earning higher degrees,” she says.

Many Black women she knew said they wanted to marry a Black man, but had difficulty finding someone who earned the same or more. Daroszewski — who graduated in 2009 and now lives in Laurel Springs, New Jersey — said that the men in her class were predominantly white.

“I can see it being problematic the further you get into your career, especially if you have aspirations to be a partner or a high-ranking member of whatever profession you’re in,” she says. “You’re going to want someone that’s going to be on equal footing or be OK with the fact that they’re going to earn less.”

The pull of family, race and community are strong, and your partner comes to the relationship with a cultural background of their own. As you work to resolve disagreements, it’s OK to admit that something feels off to you because it’s different from how you were raised.

“A lot of couples don’t take time in the development of their relationship to think through these really critical issues,” Coambs says. Talking about day-to-day money management is important, but also discuss things like how money was for you growing up. This can give you insight into your partner’s way of thinking.

BE THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO SEE

By challenging your own biases, you and your partner can begin to model the behaviors you wish were more widespread, which can bring about change even in a small way.

Darcy Lockman , author of “All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership,” looks to history for an example. During World War II, more women worked outside the home, paving the way for it to become more commonplace. “Behavior didn’t change because attitudes changed,” Lockman says. “Attitudes changed because behavior changed.”

Because of the pandemic, she says, we’re seeing something new play out. In families where the man can work from home and the woman has a job she has to do in person, men’s participation at home increased dramatically. Lockman credits women’s physical absence as a reason men stepped up. “That means millions of children and neighbors will see men at home,” she says, a new shift in behavior that may bring about another shift in societal attitudes.

TAP INTO YOUR WELL OF EMPATHY

Larin Brink worked in the TV and film industry as an assistant props master before she had children. She now works at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, a job that allows her to be more available to her family. Her earnings no longer match her husband’s, and his frequent back-to-back meetings mean she often handles things like virtual schooling or trips to the pediatrician.

“I don’t make as much money so my job’s not as important right now, and that sucks to say that, but that’s the truth,” she says.

But Brink recognizes that her husband is facing his own struggle: a fear that coworkers without young kids at home will be more available at work than he is. “He wants to be engaged to show and prove his worth,” she says.

Seeing things from the other person’s point of view is a great way to put out metaphorical fires. “Does empathy fix everything? No,” Coambs says. “But is it a great starting point? Yes.”

This column was provided to The Associated Press by the personal finance website NerdWallet. Sara Rathner is a writer at NerdWallet. Email: srathner@nerdwallet.com. Twitter: @SaraKRathner.

Iran road accident kills at least 14, including 8 children

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — A road accident in southeastern Iran on Tuesday killed at least 14 people, including eight children, an Iranian semi-official news agency reported.

There were no details as to what caused the accident. The crash involved three cars, the report said, and also left 11 people injured.

The accident comes as Iran is celebrating the Persian New Year, or Nowruz, which began on Saturday. Many Iranians are traveling during the holidays — despite warnings by health officials over the pandemic. Iran has struggled with the region’s worst outbreak of the coronavirus, with over 1.8 million registered cases and 61,951 deaths.

The ISNA news agency quoted Mojtaba Khaledi, spokesman of the country’s emergency department, as saying the accident took place around noon near the city of Zahedan in Sistan and Baluchistan province.

The fatalities among the children were two girls and six boys, aged between 3 years and 8 years. Two men and four women also died in the accident, he added. The casualties were taken to a hospital in Zahedan.

Iranian police said road traffic increased 52% during this Nowruz holiday, compared to the same period last year. So far, since the holiday-related traveling started last Friday, more than 120 people have died in road accidents.

With some 17,000 annual deaths, Iran has one of the world’s worst traffic safety records. The grave toll is blamed on wide disregard for traffic laws, unsafe vehicles and inadequate emergency services.

Reputation of AstraZeneca’s COVID vaccine marred by missteps

LONDON (AP) — AstraZeneca’s release Monday of encouraging data about its coronavirus vaccine from its U.S. trial raised hopes that the drug company could put a troubled rollout behind it. But just hours later, U.S. officials issued an unusual statement expressing concern the company had included “outdated information” from its study and that it may have provided “an incomplete view of the efficacy data.”

A company spokesman said Tuesday it was “looking into it.”

Coupled with earlier missteps in reporting data and a recent blood clot scare, experts said the new stumble could cause lasting harm to the shot that is key to global efforts to stop the pandemic and erode vaccine confidence more broadly.

“I doubt it was (U.S. officials’) intention to deliberately undermine trust in the AstraZeneca vaccine,” said Dr. Paul Hunter, a professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia. “But this will likely cause more vaccine hesitancy.”

Hunter emphasized that it was unclear how significant this issue might be. But it’s not the first time the company has run into problems.

Partial results from its first major trial — which Britain used to authorize the vaccine — were clouded by a manufacturing mistake that researchers didn’t immediately acknowledge. Insufficient data about how well the vaccine protected older people led some countries to initially restrict its use to younger populations before reversing course. And U.S. officials suspended an AstraZeneca study for an unusual six weeks while they sought details about problems reported in Britain before deciding the vaccine wasn’t to blame.

Then last week, more than a dozen countries temporarily halted their use of the AstraZeneca shot — against the advice of international health agencies — after reports of rare blood clots in some people who received it. The European Medicines Agency concluded the shot did not increase the overall incidence of clots, but the unwanted attention appears to have nonetheless left a mark.

In Norway, a top official warned on Monday it might not be able to resume its use of the vaccine because so many people were rejecting it.

“People clearly say that they do not want the AstraZeneca vaccine,” Marte Kvittum Tangen, who heads a Norwegian doctors’ association, told broadcaster NRK.

Last week in Bucharest, Romania, vaccination coordinator Valeriu Gheorghita said 33,000 AstraZeneca immunization appointments had been canceled in 24 hours and that about a third of the 10,000 people scheduled to receive the vaccine did not show up. In Belgrade, Serbia, a sprawling exhibition center set up for people to get the AstraZeneca vaccine was mostly deserted on Monday.

“This is unfortunately more about perception than it is the science,” said Dr. Bharat Pankhania, an infectious diseases specialist at Britain’s University of Exeter.

“We have now seen, on several parameters, that the AstraZeneca vaccine provides protection and is safe,” he said. “But the narrative for the public has not been as clear.”

France is a prime example of the confusion.

French President Emmanuel Macron initially suggested the vaccine wasn’t effective for older people, before backtracking. Still, France only authorized AstraZeneca’s vaccine for use in adults 65 and under, citing a lack of data. Then the government changed its mind, based on new data, and said it’s fine for all adults. But when there were reports of rare blood clots in some vaccine recipients, the government suspended use of the shot all together. When France restarted AstraZeneca, it for anyone under 55.

The whiplash-inducing messages come at a time when France — like much of continental Europe — is struggling to speed up its vaccination drive while also facing a spike in cases that is close to overwhelming its hospitals and prompting threats of new lockdowns.

On Monday, experts expressed hope the company could move past its troubles, when it announced that the shot was about 79% effective in stopping symptomatic COVID-19 and that there were no severe illnesses or hospitalizations among vaccinated volunteers, compared with five such cases in participants who received dummy shots.

Mene Pangalos, head of AstraZeneca’s research and development in biopharmaceuticals, said the data “puts to bed any doubts.”

But then in the early hours of Tuesday, the Data and Safety Monitoring Board experts from the U.S. National Institutes of Health said they were concerned by the information released.

“We urge the company to work with the DSMB to review the efficacy data and ensure the most accurate, up-to-date efficacy data be made public,” according to a statement released by a branch of the NIH.

Even if the company clears up the misunderstanding, it could have a lasting impact.

Julian Tang, a virologist at the University of Leicester, pointed to the decades-old controversy over the measles vaccine as a cautionary tale.

“There was absolutely no evidence to prove the (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine caused autism,” he said. But despite the retraction of the paper that made that claim, Tang said some people still worry about the vaccine.

The tepid support for the AstraZeneca vaccine in Europe stands in contrast to governments in the developing world that are desperate for supplies. Because the shot is cheaper and easier to store than those of many rivals, AstraZeneca’s vaccine is expected to be used widely in the poorer countries.

Dr. Bruce Aylward, a senior adviser at the World Health Organization, said the U.N. agency has a long list of countries “very keen” to get the shot as soon as possible. “We simply cannot get enough of it,” he said.

But some experts have worried that the skepticism in Europe could eventually cast a pall over the vaccine worldwide. They suggested one measure that could reassure a jittery public about the shot: a green light from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

“If the U.S. regulator looks at this data and authorizes AstraZeneca, that will carry a lot of weight,” said Jimmy Whitworth, a professor of international public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

AstraZeneca said it would be submitting its data to the FDA within weeks.

It’s still possible the vaccine can bury the doubts. At a vaccination center in Lisbon, 68-year-old Rui Manuel Martins dismissed the concerns, saying millions had been immunized with very few ill effects.

“There’s always some cases of people rejecting any medications,” he said before receiving his first dose. “It’s better to be vaccinated rather than not.”

Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, Angela Charlton in Paris, Stephen McGrath in Bucharest, Romania, Jamey Keaten in Geneva, Dusan Stojanovic in Belgrade, Serbia, Helena Alves in Lisbon, Samuel Petrequin in Brussels and Lauran Neergaard in Washington contributed to this report.

Putin to get coronavirus vaccine shot in Russia on Tuesday

MOSCOW (AP) — President Vladimir Putin said he will get a coronavirus vaccine shot on Tuesday, several months after widespread vaccination started in Russia.

Kremlin opponents have criticized Putin for not getting vaccinated amid a comparatively slow rollout of the shot in Russia, arguing that his reluctance is contributing to the already extensive hesitance about the vaccine. Russia, where only 4.3% of the 146-million population have received at least one dose, lags behind a number of countries in terms of the vaccination rate.

Surveys by Russia’s top independent pollster Levada Center have shown that a number of Russians reluctant to get vaccinated with Sputnik V has grown in recent months — to 62% in February from 58% in December. The Kremlin has said it doesn’t see a connection between Putin not getting vaccinated and public trust in the Russian COVID-19 vaccine.

Putin, 68, told a meeting with government officials and vaccine developers on Monday that he will get his shot “tomorrow,” without specifying which coronavirus vaccine out of the three authorized for use in Russia he will take.

Russian authorities have given regulatory approval to three domestically developed shots. Sputnik V has been approved last August with much fanfare at home and criticism abroad, because at the time it had only been tested on a few dozen people.

But a recent study published in British medical journal The Lancet showed the Sputnik V is 91% effective and appears to prevent inoculated individuals from becoming severely ill with COVID-19, although it’s still unclear if the vaccine can prevent the spread of the disease.

Two other Russian vaccines, EpiVacCorona and CoviVac, have also received regulatory approval before completing late-stage trials experts say are necessary to ensure their safety and effectiveness in line with established scientific protocol. EpiVacCorona is still undergoing these trials, while CoviVac was to begin them in March. No data on efficacy of these two vaccines have been released.

Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov also wouldn’t say which one of the three Putin will take on Tuesday, saying only that “all of them are good and reliable.”

According to the Russian president, 6.3 million people in Russia have already received at least one shot, and more than 4.3 million have had two doses.

Putin said that 60% of Russian adults need to be vaccinated in order to achieve herd immunity, which requires a total of 69.8 million vaccines. As of March 17, around 8.9 million two-dose sets of Sputnik V have been released into circulation in Russia, as well as over 115,000 two-dose sets of EpiVacCorona, the Russian leader said.

“Today we can confidently say … that the Russian vaccines are absolutely reliable and safe,” Putin said. “It is an absolute success of our scientists and specialists.”

Putin and his spokesman have been repeatedly asked why the president hasn’t been vaccinated so far. In December, the Russian leader said Sputnik V wasn’t being recommended to people of a certain age, adding that “vaccines have not yet reached people like me.”

At the time, the shot was only being offered to people ages 18 to 60, but in less then two weeks after Putin’s remarks Russian health authorities cleared the vaccine for those older than 60.

Last month, Russia’s Kommersant newspaper reported that Putin said he might get vaccinated at the end of the summer or beginning of the fall. The newspaper quoted Putin telling Russian media managers at a closed-door meeting that he didn’t want to do it for publicity’s sake in front of cameras and that he had other vaccinations scheduled already.

Peskov said Monday he didn’t “expect” Putin’s vaccination on Tuesday “to be a public event.”

Russia has been actively marketing Sputnik V abroad, despite the slow rollout at home, in what some analysts see as an effort to score geopolitical points. Dozens of countries have approved the use of Sputnik V and signed deals with Russia to get shipments of the shot. Exporting the vaccines, however, has not been without delays, and questions remained whether Moscow had the capacity to deliver on its promises.

In order to boost production, the Russian Direct Investment Fund that bankrolled the vaccine signed agreements with pharmaceutical companies in several countries, including India, South Korea, Brazil, Turkey and most recently Italy. Putin said on Monday such agreements amounted to a total of 700 million vaccines a year.

“The geography of using the Russian Sputnik V is actively growing. Even despite deliberate discrediting of our vaccine, various hoaxes and sometimes outright nonsense, more states all around the world express interest in our vaccine,” Putin said.

The Russian president took aim at officials in the European Union, some of whom have expressed reluctance about using Sputnik V even though the bloc has been criticized for a slow vaccine rollout.

On Sunday, Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton, who heads the European Commission’s vaccine task force, told French television that the EU “has absolutely no need” for Sputnik V.

Putin called the statement “bizarre” and insisted that Russia was “not imposing anything on anyone,” questioning whether European officials protect the interests “some pharmaceutical companies or the interests of citizens of European countries.”

Sputnik V hasn’t yet been approved for use in the EU, but the body’s regulator, the European Medicines Agency, or EMA, started a rolling review of the vaccine earlier this month.

Some EU nations have decided not to wait for the EMA’s approval, and Hungary became the first EU country to authorize Sputnik V for use last month while Slovakia announced a deal last week to acquire 2 million Sputnik V doses in a move that prompted a political crisis in the country.

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Germany extends virus lockdown till mid-April as cases rise

BERLIN (AP) — Germany has extended its lockdown measures by another month and imposed several new restrictions, including largely shutting down public life over Easter, in an effort to drive down the rate of coronavirus infections.

Speaking early Tuesday after a lengthy video call with the country’s 16 state governors, Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that restrictions previously set to run through March 28 will now remain in place until April 18.

Coronavirus infections have increased steadily in Germany as the more contagious variant first detected in Britain has become dominant, and the country’s daily number of cases per capita has passed that of the United States.

“We basically have a new pandemic,” Merkel told reporters in Berlin.

“Essentially we have a new virus, obviously of the same type but with completely different characteristics,” she added. “Significantly more deadly, significantly more infectious (and) infectious for longer.”

Since their last meeting three weeks ago, which saw the two sides agree a multi-step plan to relax restrictions, several states have tried to avoid going back into tougher lockdowns when the weekly number of new infections exceeds 100 per 100,000 residents on three consecutive days.

Merkel made clear that she wouldn’t accept that.

“Unfortunately, we will have to make use of this emergency brake,” she said.

The weekly infection rate per 100,000 people stood at 107 nationwide on Monday, up from the mid-60s three weeks ago.

Officials agreed to largely shut down public life from April 1-3, adding a public holiday and shutting down most stores for the period. Public gatherings will be banned from April 1-5, to encourage people to stay at home.

Amid concern over the rise in Germans traveling abroad on holidays, authorities also agreed on a blanket requirement for air travelers to be tested for COVID-19 before boarding a flight to Germany.

Drawing up legally watertight rules has proved a headache at times. A court in Germany’s most populous state, North Rhine-Westphalia, said Monday it struck down rules requiring people to get appointments to visit shops. It said they violated a requirement that businesses get equal treatment.

The state government promptly reinstated the rules, tightening them for some businesses — such as bookshops and garden centers — that were previously exempt.

According to Tuesday’s agreement, authorities will aim to offer free tests to all students and teachers in German schools, many of which have only recently reopened after months of remote teaching.

Merkel said Germany, which had comparatively low deaths during the first phase of the pandemic last spring, has seen “successes but also of setbacks” and insisted that the situation would improve as more people get vaccinated.

Germany’s vaccination campaign has so far lagged behind expectations, with only about 9% of the population receiving at least a first shot and 4% receiving both doses by Sunday.

“It’s difficult for longer than we thought,” said Merkel. “But there’s definitely light visible at the end of the tunnel.”

Asked about the EU’s plans to restrict the export of vaccines and components, Merkel said she supported efforts by the bloc’s executive Commission to ensure contracts are fulfilled, citing the supply problems the EU has had with the AstraZeneca shot.

Britain, which left the EU last year, has strongly protested against the plans, fearing it could get cut off from deliveries.

Merkel said she and French President Emmanuel Macron had each spoken to Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson about the issue in recent days and EU leaders would aim to reach a decision “in a responsible way” at a virtual summit Thursday.

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AP journalist Geir Moulson contributed to this report.

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Follow AP’s pandemic coverage at:

https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic

https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine

https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak

Archives for March 2021

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