After US, China Pledges Support For India's Proposal to Waive Vaccine Patent Rights

After US, China Pledges Support For India's Proposal to Waive Vaccine Patent Rights

© REUTERS / NIHARIKA KULKARNI

INDIA

12:56 GMT 18.05.2021Get short URL

by Priya Yadav

India and South Africa called for a TRIPS waiver of certain intellectual property rights provisions for COVID-19 vaccines in a communication to the World Trace Organisation in October 2020 so that people in developing countries can receive access to life-saving vaccines and therapeutics as soon as possible.

China has pledged to support a proposal put forward by India and South Africa for a temporary waiver of Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) for coronavirus vaccines.

After the US expressed support for the proposal last week, Beijing on Monday said that it backs all actions conducive to helping developing countries fight the pandemic.

"China fully understands and is supportive of the developing world's demand for an IPR waiver for COVID-19 vaccines", Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told reporters in Beijing.

In early May, World Trade Organisation Director General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala appealed to member nations to expedite the proposal that could temporarily ease trade rules protecting COVID-19 vaccine technology, keeping in mind the urgency of the situation.

"As the largest developing country and responsible member of the international community, China will do all things that are conducive to developing countries' fight against the virus and support all actions that can help developing countries acquire vaccines in an equitable way", Zhao said.

Zhao said that China has provided vaccine assistance to over 80 countries and three international organisations and vaccine exports to over 50 countries. The country has also promised to supply 10 million vaccines to COVAX, a global vaccine distribution campaign backed by the World Health Organisation.

India had tabled the proposal to waive IPR in order to enable a boost in vaccine production to inoculate its large population. A senior official in the Department of Commerce, Anup Wadhwan said, "the proposal has received support from several countries. We are very hopeful that some decision will be reached at by the WTO anytime soon. This will help in scaling up the production of vaccines and other essential products to deal with the coronavirus".

The growing support of countries for India's proposal will help in combating the pandemic, Manoj Pant, an economist and director at the prestigious Indian Institute of Foreign Trade in New Delhi told Sputnik: "This is the only pandemic of the century. I don't see how any case against India's proposal for a waiver lie anywhere. Countries agreed that they will give exception to the universal IPR established in the WTO".

On 6 May, US Trade representative Katherine Tai, while announcing the US policy decision to lend support to the proposal, said "this is a global health crisis and the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures".

Over 100 lawmakers earlier wrote to US President Joe Biden urging him to support India's proposal on the IPR waiver. However, American billionaire Bill Gates said the IPR waiver should not be allowed and his comments subsequently led to protests in Delhi against his "hypocrisy" as he supports a large philanthropy organisation in India.

Though the US has lent its support it is said to be working to ensure that the waiver does not end up boosting China's biotech capabilities. A senior Biden administration official was quoted by the media as saying that the US would want to "examine the effect of a waiver on China and Russia before it went into effect to ensure that its fit for purpose".

The European Union too has agreed to participate in WTO discussions, but has maintained that a patent waiver can only be a short-term solution and that its important for countries like US to first lift export restrictions on COVID-19 vaccines.

 

Joe Biden reclaims ‘American leadership’ with pledge to share 80m vaccine doses

May 18, 2021

U.S. President Joe Biden, joined by Vice President Kamala Harris, gives an update on his administration’s COVID-19 response and vaccination program in the East Room of the White House on May 17, 2021 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

PRESIDENT Joe Biden announced on Monday (17) that the United States is surging exports of Covid vaccines to other countries to reclaim “American leadership” in the global fight against the pandemic. About 20 million more doses are confirmed to be released over the next six weeks, bringing the total earmarked for shipping out by the end of June to 80 million.

By July, the US will have easily cemented its place as leader on this stage, Biden said, adding that Washington was not using the rollout to “secure favors from other countries.”

“This will be more vaccines than any country has actually shared today, five times more than any other country,” Biden said in a White House speech. “Russia and China… have donated 15 million doses. You know there’s a lot of talk about Russia and China influencing the world with vaccines. We want to lead the world with our values.”

The doses will include Pfizer and Moderna or Johnson & Johnson vaccine stocks, marking the first time that US-controlled doses of vaccines authorized for use in the country will be shared overseas.

The Biden administration will work with the world’s democracies to coordinate a multilateral effort to cope with the pandemic, Biden said, adding that he expects to announce progress in these efforts at the G-7 Summit to be hosted by the UK in June.

Explaining the procedure to be followed for the distribution of the surplus vaccines, a White House fact-sheet said that the US will work with WHO-backed COVAX and other partners to ensure that these vaccines are delivered in a way that is equitable and follows the science and public health data.

The US has been facing growing pressure to share more of its vaccine stockpile with the world as interest in vaccines has waned domestically. More than 157 million Americans have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine while 123 million are fully vaccinated. Biden hopes the US will have 160 million people fully vaccinated by July Fourth. 

 

For a short while, Paris Hilton 

cared for dying children in Gaza

PUBLISHED ABOUT 23 HOURS AGO

IMAGES STAFF

DESK REPORT

The American socialite tweeted in support of Palestine, 

but deleted it in favour of a more 'neutral' sentiment.

Photo: AP

Socialite and media personality Paris Hilton has made yet another headline but perhaps not for something she wants to make headlines for. She voiced her support for Palestinian people as Israel ramps up attacks against the people of the occupied state, only to later delete her post and stand with "both sides".

The poster girl for the luck of birth made her initial tweet with a share of the Middle East Eye's report on a 10-year-old Palestinian victim of Israel's colonial aspirations. The victim in question was a girl who saw her neighbourhood struck by Israeli missiles, where eight children and two women died. She couldn't keep herself from tearing up while speaking of the tragedy.

"This hurts my heart," said Hilton. "No one should have to live in fear," she asserted, saying her heart goes out to the little girl and the other children around her.

The tweet was then taken down supposedly when the realisation that the powers that be might not appreciate her thought occurred, or more likely, revealed to her. She deleted the tweet, replacing it with this.

Criticism of this replacement of sentiments has since erupted on social media.

Ahmed Shihab-Eldin, a Kuwaiti-American journalist, wondered why Hilton did so. He then answered his own question, regretfully admitting, "Because there is a consequence to supporting Palestinian dignity and right to life in the US."

Miqdaad Versi, a director for media monitoring at the Muslim Council of Britain, also wondered why the tweet was retracted.

Users used the incident as a reminder to just how significant celebrities talking about the matter is for mass awareness.

This user called the updated tweet 'hogwash'.

'Flattered’ Russian spy chief denies SolarWinds attack – BBC

By Metro US on May 18, 2021

FILE PHOTO: Exterior view of SolarWinds headquarters in Austin

LONDON (Reuters) -Russia’s spy chief on Tuesday denied responsibility for the SolarWinds cyber attack but said he was “flattered” by the accusations from the United States and Britain that Russian foreign intelligence was behind such a sophisticated hack.

The United States and Britain have blamed Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), successor to the foreign spying operations of the KGB, for the hack which compromised nine U.S. federal agencies and hundreds of private sector companies.

“These claims are like a bad detective novel,” SVR Director Sergei Naryshkin, a close ally of Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin, told the BBC in Russian.

Asked directly if the SVR was responsible for the SolarWinds attack, Naryshkin quipped with a smile that he would be “flattered” if the SVR had been responsible for such a sophisticated attack but that he could not “claim the creative achievements of others as his own”.

Naryshkin said he did not want to accuse the United States of being behind the attack but quoted from documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden to suggest that the tactics of the attack were similar to those used by U.S. and British intelligence agencies.

The United States and Britain cast Russia as a dangerous former superpower which they say has poisoned enemies with nerve agents and radioactive isotopes, meddled in Western elections and carried out hacking operations across the world.

Naryshkin said such accusations were absurd and that Russia was not responsible for the cyber-attacks, poisonings, hacks, or meddling in elections that it was blamed for.

The hack of SolarWinds, which was identified in December, gave access to thousands of companies and government offices that used its products. Microsoft President Brad Smith described the attack as “the largest and most sophisticated attack the world has ever seen”.

Britain’s GCHQ cyber spying agency said that it was highly likely that SVR was responsible for the SolarWinds attack.

Asked about a view that only 10% of Russian intelligence operations in Europe were uncovered, Naryshkin, who along with GRU military intelligence boss Igor Kostyukov, is one of Russia’s two most powerful spy chiefs, smiled and raised his eyebrows.

He added that correspondence between Russian intelligence and Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, known as MI6, had been re-established.

(Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; editing by Kim Coghill and Philippa Fletcher)

Neuberger: Ransomware Requires International Response

NSC Adviser Outlines Administration's Cybersecurity Priorities at RSA 2021

Scott Ferguson (Ferguson_Writes) • May 18, 2021


The threat posed by ransomware attacks, including the growth of cybercriminal cartels, double extortion schemes and big game hunting targeting larger organizations, requires an international response, Anne Neuberger, the deputy national security adviser for cyber and emerging technology, told attendees Tuesday at RSA Conference 2021.

"International cooperation to address ransomware is critically important because transnational criminals are most often the perpetrators of these crimes, and they often leverage global infrastructure and money laundering networks to do so," Neuberger said.

To address the ransomware threat, the Biden administration wants to build the same type of coalition that helped the U.S. government investigate the SolarWinds supply chain attack and eventually determine that Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service was involved. The White House later imposed economic sanctions on Russia 

(see: FBI, CISA Warn of Ongoing Russian Cyberthreats).

Companies in all sectors need to make sure software vulnerabilities that ransomware gangs exploit are promptly patched, and they must strive to build more secure and resilient systems and networks, Neuberger said.

"It's concerning that ransomware often exploits known weaknesses, such as targeting endpoint and software vulnerabilities. ... Proactive prevention, through effective cyber hygiene, cybersecurity controls and business continuity resiliency, is often the best defense against these criminals," Neuberger said.

Neuberger's comment came as the investigation continues into the ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline Co., which forced the company to temporarily shut down its 5,500-mile pipeline for several days until full service was restored Saturday. Government officials say the incident is tied to a Russian-speaking cybercriminal gang using DarkSide ransomware.

Threats to Critical Infrastructure

Neuberger said the White House is increasingly focused on cyberthreats to critical infrastructure. For example, the administration has released a 100-day plan to address the security of the electrical grids, and similar initiatives for other areas, including oil and gas pipelines, are expected to follow

 (see: 100-Day Plan to Enhance Electrical Grid Security Unveiled).

Neuberger said companies as well as government agencies need to consider reliability and trust when building and modernizing operational technology and other systems.

"Trust is reliant on having the level of visibility needed to match the consequences if a system is degraded or disrupted," Neuberger said. "The level of visibility we need is built on the trust we need. And the trust and visibility we need are based on the consequences if a system fails. That's an important point to think about - particularly as we build systems here."

Executive Order on Cyber

Neuberger also told RSA attendees that President Joe Biden's executive order on cybersecurity, issued last week, is designed to help reduce the chances of another supply chain attack along the lines of the SolarWinds incident

(see: Biden's Cybersecurity Executive Order: 4 Key Takeaways).

Neuberger said the most critical component of the order is its guidelines for how agencies should evaluate software before it's implemented.

The order lays out extensive rules for how agencies must ensure vendors address security as software is developed, and it describes how the government will create an "energy star" type of label signifying whether software follows new security guidelines.

"Our efforts will pay dividends outside of the federal government because much of the software the government buys is the same software that schools, small businesses, big businesses and individuals use," Neuberger said. "The starting point for building more security is where you build your software, which should be in a separate and a secure build environment. This also includes things such as using strong authentication and limiting privileges."

Data breach detection, prevention and notification - DataBreachToday

Tracking DarkSide Ransomware Gang's Profits

Elliptic Says It Traced Payments by Colonial Pipeline and Many Others

CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M = PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION OF CAPITAL

Doug Olenick  • May 18, 2021

Ransom payment amounts generated by DarkSide ransomware (Source: Elliptic)

The DarkSide ransomware gang apparently collected over $90 million in ransom payments from about 47 victims, including Colonial Pipeline Co., since the gang began operating in August 2020, according to the blockchain analytics firm Elliptic, which says it analyzed bitcoin wallet activity

Using the ransomware-as-a-service model, the DarkSide gang, which says it shut down operations as of May 13, provided malware to affiliates, who infect targeted computer systems and negotiate ransom payments. The DarkSide gang reportedly took a 25% share for ransoms less than $500,000, gradually decreasing to a 10% share for ransoms greater than $5 million, with the affiliates getting the remainder, writes Tom Robinson, Elliptic's co-founder and chief scientist, in a blog Tuesday.

"This split of the ransom payment is very clear to see on the blockchain, with the different shares going to separate Bitcoin wallets controlled by the affiliate and developer," Robinson writes. "In total, the DarkSide developer has received bitcoins worth $15.5 million (17%), with the remaining $74.7 million (83%) going to the various affiliates."

The DarkSide Operation

Elliptic says it identified 47 bitcoin wallets that made ransom payments to Darkside.

About 100 DarkSide attacks have been identified, so apparently almost 50% of the gang's attacks resulted in a ransom payment, with an average payment of $1.9 million, according to Elliptic's analysis.

Source: Elliptic

DarkSide's moneymaking empire started off slowly but peaked in February, when the group and its affiliates brought in just over $20 million, Elliptic says, based on its wallet research. Ransom payments totaled roughly $15 million in March, $8 million in April and $14 million in May, Elliptic reports.

Robinson says Elliptic, using proprietary blockchain analysis tools, tracked Colonial Pipeline paying DarkSide more than $5 million in two separate payments to a wallet on May 8 and May 10.

"May was set to be a record month, until DarkSide reportedly shut down its operations on May 13 and its bitcoin wallet was emptied," Robinson says.

In response to increased scrutiny from the cybersecurity industry and the federal government over the gang's attack on Colonial Pipeline Co., DarkSide announced it was abandoning its ransomware-as-a-service operation, issuing decryptor keys and making some financial restitution to its affiliates for lost business.

The cyber gang said it had lost contact with the infrastructure that enabled it to conduct ransomware operations and work with its affiliates (see: DarkSide Ransomware Gang Says It Has Shut Down).

On Tuesday, Brett Callow, threat analyst with Emsisoft, said DarkSide remained dark.
Colonial Pipeline's Payments

Elliptic says it determined that on May 8, 75 bitcoins, worth about $5 million at the time, were deposited by Colonial Pipeline into a DarkSide wallet, with another payment worth $320,000 added on May 10.

"Our analysis shows that the wallet has been active since 4th March 2021 and has received 57 payments from 21 different wallets. Some of these payments directly match ransoms known to have been paid to DarkSide by other victims, such as 78.29 BTC (worth $4.4 million) sent by chemical distribution company Brenntag on May 11," Robinson says.

Elliptic says it was able to zero in on the Colonial Pipeline payments because they originated from the currency exchange previously used by the pipeline company.

On May 9, the day after Colonial made its payment of 75 bitcoins, DarkSide removed a large portion of the bitcoin from its primary wallet, Elliptic says. The analytics company says that on May 13, the $5 million that remained in the wallet was removed by an unknown source.

"There has been speculation that the bitcoins were seized by the U.S. government," Robinson writes in a May 14 blog.

Money Laundering

"By tracing previous outflows from the wallet, we can gain insights into how DarkSide and its affiliates were laundering their previous proceeds," Robinson also writes. "What we find is that 18% of the bitcoin was sent to a small group of exchanges. This information will provide law enforcement with critical leads to identify the perpetrators of these attacks."

DarkSide sent another 4% of the money to a darknet money laundering marketplace named Hydra, which offers various criminal services, Elliptic says, based on its tracking.

"Hydra offers cash-out services alongside narcotics, hacking tools and fake IDs. These allow bitcoin to be converted into gift vouchers, prepaid debit cards, or cash rubles. If you're a Russian cybercriminal and you want to cash out your crypto, then Hydra is an attractive option," Robinson says.

Elliptic hopes that by identifying the bitcoin wallets used by DarkSide, fintech companies and crypto exchanges can be alerted to any client deposits that originate from a DarkSide wallet.

With this knowledge, "they can ensure that DarkSide and other ransomware operators cannot cash-out or exchange their bitcoin proceeds, disincentivizing this activity," Robinson says.

Dying Gasp Attack?

The day after DarkSide's May 13 declaration that it was shutting down, European subsidiaries of the Toshiba Tec Group confirmed they had been struck with a ransomware attack, Reuters reports. DarkSide was apparently responsible for this attack, based on research from the Japanese security firm Mitsui Bussan Secure Directions.

Toshiba says it immediately shut down communications between its European entities and Japan to stop the attack from spreading.

"As far as the investigation result shows, the group recognizes that it is possible that some information and data may have been leaked by the criminal gang. We will continue to conduct further investigation in cooperation with external specialized organization to grasp the details," the company said.

Toshiba has not released any additional information regarding the attack and has not responded to a request for additional information.

Data breach detection, prevention and notification - DataBreachToday

About the Author
Doug Olenick
News Editor, ISMG
Olenick has covered the cybersecurity and computer technology sectors for more than 25 years. Prior to joining ISMG as news editor, Olenick was online editor for SC Media, where he covered every aspect of the cybersecurity industry and managed the brand's online presence. Earlier, he worked at TWICE - This Week in Consumer Electronics - for 15 years. He also has contributed to Forbes.com, TheStreet and Mainstreet.

1. Marx's theory of primitive accumulation: a suggested ...

   https://libcom.org/library/marx-primitive-accumulation...

   2005-08-05 · If any sense is to be made, therefore, of the notion of a 'primitive accumulation' (in Marx's sense of the term) prior in time to the full flowering of capitalist production, this must be interpreted in the first place as an accumulation of capital claims - - of titles to existing assets which are accumulated primarily for speculative reasons; and secondly as accumulation in the …

America Is on a Road to a Better Economy.

 But Better for Whom?

The federal government is undertaking the largest stimulus program in American history. 

The payoff could be more widely shared than usual.

Credit...Illustration by Ardneks

LONG READ

By Ben Casselman
May 18, 2021
 The New York Times

The plunge the U.S. economy took last spring was so precipitous that the charts from the time look, literally, like cliffs. Industrial output fell 12.7 percent in April 2020, the worst drop since records began a century earlier, as entire industries shut down virtually overnight. Airline travel, as measured by the number of people passing through T.S.A. checkpoints, fell 94 percent in a month — from two million people on March 1 to just 124,000 on April 1. In two months, employers cut 22 million jobs, more than in every recession in the last 50 years, combined.

“This thing is going to come for us all,” the economist Martha Gimbel, now an adviser to President Biden, said in April 2020, when the full extent of the damage was just beginning to hit home. She meant every industry, every income group, every class of worker — not just flight attendants and line cooks but also white-collar workers in supposedly recession-proof industries. Even sectors that were initially thriving in lockdown, like personal entertainment and home improvement, would feel the pinch once enough people saw their paychecks evaporate. No industry is recession-proof in a recession that shuts down the entire economy.

That was the dominant view at the time. But it was wrong. “This thing” didn’t come for us all. It came for the restaurants, the hotels, the movie theaters and for thousands of other businesses and millions of workers. But the ripples didn’t spread as far as economists feared. The financial system didn’t melt down. White-collar workers didn’t lose their jobs en masse. The factories and construction sites that shut down in April had mostly reopened by June.

A year later, the recovery is in full swing. Restaurants are open again. Airports are filling up. The United States has regained two-thirds of the jobs lost last spring, and is closing the remaining gap at the pace of hundreds of thousands of jobs a month. In his annual letter to shareholders a year ago, Jamie Dimon, the C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase, warned of a “bad recession” that could rival the 2008 financial crisis; in this year’s edition, he predicted a multiyear boom.

Amid the euphoria, the government’s closely watched monthly jobs report showed that hiring in April was a quarter of what economists had expected, and down sharply from March. It was a stark reminder: The pandemic isn’t over. A robust recovery isn’t guaranteed. The U.S. economy still faces a long climb back to health — and the most vulnerable workers will, inevitably, be the last to benefit. The number of jobs held by college graduates in April was back almost to its pre-pandemic level; among those with a high school diploma or less, there is still a gaping hole of more than 3.5 million jobs.

Counting all the various Covid relief packages passed under two presidents, the United States has now pumped more than $5 trillion into the economy.

Political leaders and policymakers from President Biden on down have talked about the need to create a post-pandemic economy that is better than the one we left behind last year. The question is: Better for whom? The pre-pandemic economy, too, was praised in some corners as the best in decades, but it was still one in which the unemployment rate for Black Americans was twice that of white Americans, where someone could work a full-time job 52 weeks a year and still stay mired in poverty and where people’s toehold in the middle class was so tenuous that, within weeks of losing their jobs last spring, many were left idling in their cars in a miles-long line at a local food bank. “We need a different economy than the one we had, because the one we had clearly was not resilient,” says William Spriggs, a Howard University economist.

And yet in the next breath, Spriggs allows that he is optimistic that we actually will build a different economy this time, one in which jobs are plentiful, wages are rising and prosperity is widely shared. That optimism stems in part from the relatively strong recovery so far, and partly from the federal government’s ongoing efforts to keep it on track. But it also stems from the fact that after a crisis that laid bare the deep inequities in the U.S. economy, policymakers, journalists and voters are all less likely to accept without question a recovery that reaches only a small segment of the population.

The first two decades of the 21st century were a parade of economic disappointments: The bursting of the dot-com bubble was followed by a recession; which was followed by a “jobless recovery”; which was followed by another burst bubble, this time in housing; and another, even worse, recession; and another, even weaker, recovery.


Officially, the Great Recession ended in June 2009, but it took two years for U.S. gross domestic product to return to its pre-recession level, and six years for unemployment to do so. Long-term joblessness didn’t even stop rising until the recession had been over for nearly a year, and it didn’t get back to its pre-2008 normal until well into 2018. Year after year, forecasters predicted that this was the year that growth would finally pick up and wages would rise and prosperity would be widely shared. And year after year they were wrong. The pessimism became so ingrained that by 2019, when things were, finally, actually pretty good, the dominant economic narrative was about what would inevitably cause the next recession. (“Global pandemic” did not tend to make the list.)

Judged against that grim benchmark, this recovery already looks like an improvement. The consensus is that G.D.P. will return to its pre-pandemic level sometime this quarter, and possibly already has. The unemployment rate is on pace to get there sometime next year. Turn on CNBC these days, and the debate is not over the risks of a weak recovery but over the possibility of runaway inflation, a problem usually associated with an economy that’s running too hot, not one that’s trying to get back on its feet after a crippling recession.

This recovery is different, in part, because this recession was different. The last crisis, like most recessions, was caused by a fundamental imbalance — the housing bubble — that had to be resolved before the economy could start growing again. Construction workers and mortgage brokers had to find jobs in other industries. Households had to get out from under unsustainable debt loads. Banks and other financial institutions had to write off hundreds of billions in bad loans.

This time, there was no imbalance. Things were basically going fine, and then an outside force, what economists call an “exogenous shock,” turned the world upside-down. If we could somehow have pressed “pause” until the pandemic ended, there would have been no reason for a recession at all.

Of course, there is no “pause” button. That’s why everyone was so worried about the ripple effects last year. Restaurants can’t pay waiters when they have no customers. Waiters can’t pay rent when they have no jobs. Landlords can’t pay their mortgages when their tenants don’t pay rent. Banks can’t make new loans when borrowers stop making payments. And so on and so on, until what began as an isolated crisis caused by a specific set of circumstances has turned into a general pullback in activity across the economy.

Except that never really happened this time. Evictions, foreclosures and bankruptcies all fell last year. The financial system, as anyone who has checked their 401(k) balance lately can attest, did not collapse. Perhaps the most shocking statistic in a year of shocking economic statistics is this one: In what was, by many measures, the worst year since at least World War II, Americans’ income, in aggregate, actually rose.

How is this possible? Because of the other reason this recovery is different: the federal government. Counting all the various Covid relief packages passed under two presidents, the United States has now pumped more than $5 trillion into the economy. That dwarfs not just what the U.S. has spent in any previous recession, but also the aid provided in almost any other large country.

Here’s what that money meant in the real world: When the economy shut down last spring, the federal government stepped in to ban most evictions and made it easy for borrowers to delay payments on their mortgages and student loans. It expanded access to nutrition benefits, school-lunch programs and other emergency relief programs. The Federal Reserve bought hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of bonds to keep credit flowing and avoid a repeat of the 2008 crisis.

Most important, the government gave people money. Lots of money. By April of this year, the typical middle-class family of four had received more than $11,000 through successive rounds of direct payments. That doesn’t include the expanded child tax credit that was part of the latest aid bill, which is worth up to $3,600 per child.

The CARES Act, which Congress passed in late March 2020, also provided $600 a week in extra unemployment benefits to laid-off workers, and created a whole new program — Pandemic Unemployment Assistance — to cover freelancers, gig workers and other people who ordinarily don’t qualify for benefits. And it created the Paycheck Protection Program, which gave out more than half a trillion dollars in low-interest — and in many cases, forgivable — loans to small businesses, most likely preventing thousands of employers from going under entirely.

The government didn’t get everything right. Much of the economic response to Covid was deeply, frustratingly flawed. People spent weeks battling their way through busy signals and overloaded websites to claim their benefits, often only to see their payments suspended because of a lost piece of paperwork or a data-entry error. Small-business aid was snapped up by businesses that didn’t really need the help (and in some cases weren’t small), while restaurants, retailers and concert venues that were truly struggling became ensnared in a tangle of red tape and, in some cases, simply gave up. Congress, which reacted with such uncharacteristic speed in the spring, quickly fell back into its old partisan patterns, with Democrats pushing for more spending, Republicans for less — resulting in a monthslong delay in aid during a critical period last fall.

“Their fiscal policy response was, in the beginning, on the money — it was exactly what we needed,” says Michelle Holder, an economist at John Jay College in New York. “But the long view was not necessarily taken into account with regard to how long it was really going to take our country to slog through this pandemic.”

But as bad as it was, the scale of the hardship would have been far worse without the abundant government response. Researchers at Columbia University found that the federal aid kept 18 million Americans out of poverty last April and 13 million in January. The image of Americans lining up at food banks is, appropriately, seared on our collective memory, and measures of food insecurity did rise in the pandemic. But government aid almost certainly saved far more people from hunger, says Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, a Northwestern University economist who has studied food insecurity during the pandemic. She notes that data from the Census Bureau shows rates of hunger dropping sharply after government aid checks arrived in January and March.

And the aid didn’t just rescue millions of individual families. It also arguably rescued the economy itself. Last spring, for example, landlords across the country feared that tenants who had lost their jobs would start missing rent payments. But that never happened at a large scale. According to data from the National Multifamily Housing Council, which represents apartment owners and managers, 80 percent of tenants paid rent on time last May, and 95 percent paid by the end of the month — both comparable to the previous year, despite an eviction moratorium that lowered the stakes for nonpayment.

Researchers at the JPMorgan Chase Institute, using data from thousands of checking accounts, found that practically as soon as the CARES Act aid began flowing, spending among low-income consumers rebounded fully to its pre-pandemic level. In other words, unlike in virtually every other recession on record, millions of people lost their jobs, but they didn’t have to stop spending. More than anything else, that is what put us on track to avert a downward spiral.

“It doesn’t look like it’s going to happen,” says Louise Sheiner, a former Federal Reserve economist who is now at the Brookings Institution. “The fiscal support is what will prevent it from happening.”



Credit...Illustration by Ardneks


U.S. employers added 266,000 jobs in April. In any normal time, that would represent a good month for hiring; in the two years leading up to pandemic, job growth averaged a bit under 200,000 jobs per month. But in the context of an economy that is still down more than eight million jobs from February 2020, it represented an alarming deceleration (770,000 jobs were added in March). It also further inflamed an already-simmering debate over the best way to help the economy. Democrats looked at the unexpectedly weak job growth and saw evidence of an economy still in need of government aid. Republicans looked at it and saw evidence that government aid was contributing to the problem — that enhanced unemployment benefits were discouraging people from looking for jobs, leading to a shortage of available workers.

Still, few economists expect the weakness to last. Goldman Sachs, in a note to clients after the disappointing jobs report, said it expected job gains to average 800,000 per month between May and September, which would still represent a faster recovery than after any crisis in recent memory. Speed matters because a principal lesson of the last recession is that the victims of a slow recovery are disproportionately the most disadvantaged workers. Wage growth for all but the highest-earning workers didn’t begin to pick up in earnest until nearly a decade into the recovery from the last recession. The Black unemployment rate didn’t fall below 10 percent until 2015, six years after the recession ended. (The unemployment rate never hit 10 percent for white people in the first place.)

‘There is going to be a tendency to look at those numbers and say, “Mission accomplished,’ before it is time.”

Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chairman, has repeatedly cited racial and other disparities as a reason for trying to revive the economy as quickly and completely as possible. People at the bottom of the income ladder enjoyed just a few years of decent gains before the pandemic cut the recovery prematurely short. The faster we can get back there, the sooner they can begin to enjoy those gains again. “Those who have historically been left behind stand the best chance of prospering in a strong economy with plentiful job opportunities,” Powell said in a speech at a National Community Reinvestment Coalition conference in early May. “Our recent history highlights both the benefits of a strong economy and the severe costs of a weak one.”

Low-income families are starting in a much different place from where they were in the last recovery. Indeed, American households are, on average, in the best financial shape in decades. Debt levels, excluding home mortgages, are lower than before the pandemic. Delinquencies and defaults are down, too. And Americans in aggregate are sitting on a mountain of cash: $6 trillion in savings as of March, more than four times as much as before the pandemic.

Averages, of course, don’t tell the full story. The wealthy, and even the merely affluent, have done exceedingly well during the pandemic. They have, by and large, kept their jobs. They have seen the value of their stock portfolios soar. And they have spent less on vacations, restaurant meals and other services. For those at the other end of the economic spectrum, the picture looks very different: Many of them lost their jobs, had no investments to start with and needed every penny of the aid they received to meet basic living expenses, if they managed to get that aid at all.

Those diverging fortunes are what commentators have called the “K-shaped recovery” — rapid gains for some, collapse for others. But that narrative is incomplete. Millions of people have been financially devastated, but many more have not been. Most low-wage workers kept their jobs, or got them back relatively quickly. Many of them will emerge from the pandemic in better financial shape than they entered it, thanks in large part to successive rounds of government aid. Low- and middle-income families came out of the last recession mired in debt, and spent years trying to climb out of that hole. That reality colored their financial decisions long after the recession was over: whether to buy a house, whether to go to college, whether to take a chance on that new job or that new career or that new city. This time around, many people will have the opportunity to make their choices free of that burden.

The lesson of both this crisis and the last one is that policy matters. In the last recession, an initially fairly robust response petered out too quickly, leading to a decade of stagnation. That hasn’t happened this time, but it still could. Unless the April jobs numbers are indicative of a broader slowdown — something hardly any forecaster thinks is especially likely — the aggregate economic statistics are going to start looking very strong in the coming months. “There is going to be a tendency to look at those numbers and say, ‘Mission accomplished,’ before it is time,” says Nela Richardson, chief economist for ADP, a payroll-processing firm.

That is what happened a decade ago. But this time, far more people are paying attention. Inside the White House, economists have zeroed in on the labor-force participation rate among Black women as a key measure of economic health. Powell, at the Fed, now talks in virtually every public appearance about race and inequality — topics that previous Fed chairs typically tiptoed around or avoided altogether. Journalists who covered the aftermath of the last recession are more likely to question the notion that the economy is good just because the unemployment rate is low.

Kristen Broady, a fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program, says that people are finally paying attention after years of being preached to that public-policy discussions should focus less on aggregate statistics. Recently, journalists and policymakers have been bringing up the subject with her, rather than the other way around. That, as much as anything, is cause for optimism.

“This is the first time,” she says, “that I have hope.”



Ben Casselman writes about economics, with a particular focus on stories involving data. He previously reported for FiveThirtyEight and The Wall Street Journal. @bencasselman • Facebook

A version of this article appears in print on May 23, 2021, Page 48 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Road to Recovery. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

SHAMEFUL 

Pandemic puppies returned to shelters as COVID-19 restrictions lift

Pet adoptions rose 12 percent in 2020.
ADOPTION DOES NOT MEAN RENT AND RETURN

By Jenna Romaine | May 12, 2021

Story at a glance

Shelters are reporting high rates of returning and surrendering dogs adopted during the pandemic, as well as other pets.

Some animal rescues have noted a large portion of the owners surrendering their dogs were first-time pet owners.

The returns coincide with the easing and lifting of coronavirus restrictions in many states.

Rescuing and buying pandemic puppies was all but a trend when the coronavirus first swept the nation last year, and now shelters are seeing that trend fizzle out as the pandemic wanes, with people heading back to their local shelters to return their now-grown dogs.

When the pandemic started, Moms and Mutts Colorado Rescue "couldn't rescue enough dogs to meet the demand," Aron Jones, executive director of the shetler, told USA TODAY.

This sentiment is echoed by a multitude of shelters.

Mirah Horowitz, executive director of Lucky Dog Rescue in Arlington, Va., told the Washington Post in January 2021, “There just haven’t been a lot of animals to take in. It’s been tough getting animals.”

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Data collected by PetPoint supports this, finding that pet adoptions rose 12 percent in 2020.

Now at Moms and Mutts Colorado Rescue, Jones stated the rate of returned animals has doubled its typical amount, and a majority of the surrendered dogs are about 1-year-old.

"The trends that we've seen is the people who adopted, either they didn't have any other dogs or pets or they were first-time dog owners, and I think that was the biggest thing," Jones said.

The surrendering of these dogs coincides with cities and states easing and lifting coronavirus restrictions as more and more of the population becomes vaccinated, allowing these owners to return to work, go out to socialize more often and even take trips.

But returning and even rehoming a dog has traumatic effects on the animal.

"They get used to a routine pretty quickly. They get used to the family, they get used to their space, they get used to their routine and schedule they have," Ashley Roberts, program manager for adoptions, fosters, and transports at Lucky Dog Animal Rescue, said. "It's really scary for them."

It can also lead to elongated stays in shelters for these returned dogs, or even eventual euthanasia, as the dogs being returned tend to have aged, and older dogs have a 25 percent chance of being adopted, whereas puppies have a 60 percent chance, according to the ASPCA.

Owners returning their pets has risen 82.6 percent since 2020, though it has dropped 12.5 percent compared to 2019, which may reflect the coinciding adoption surge, according to Best Friends Animal Society.

“There’s no reason people going back to work can't successfully keep their pets, with some adjustments and planning," the Best Friends Animal Society director of public relations, Eric Rayvid, said. "Our pets have been there for us and provided companionship and comfort through an extremely difficult year, and we should honor the commitment we made to them through adoption."