| April's jobs report clouds hopes of a swift economic recovery; Biden's move to suspend Covid-19 vaccine patents faces backlash. Tonight's Sentences was written by Gregory Svirnovskiy. | | | | | | | April's jobs report falls well below expectations | | | | | | - The April jobs report is out, and it's the worse miss relative to expectations in decades. Economists thought increased vaccinations and continued spending could yield up to 1 million new jobs this month. Instead, the US added 266,000. [Axios / Courtenay Brown]
- The numbers represent the lowest gain in jobs since January, signaling that the national economic recovery is not likely to be linear, and that it's difficult to achieve true growth while tens of thousands of people a day are still getting sick. Job gains from March were also revised down from 916,000 to 770,000. [CNN / Anneken Tappe]
- Experts believe the economy's slow performance this month is in part due to a shortage of available workers. The jobs, they say, are there. [CNBC / Jeff Cox]
- "I think this is just as much about a shortage in labor supply as it is about a shortage of labor demand," Harvard economist and former Obama adviser Jason Furman told CNBC. "If you look at April, it appears that there were about 1.1 unemployed workers for every job opening. So there are a lot of jobs out there, there is just still not a lot of labor supply." [CNBC / Jeff Cox]
- Wages actually grew, which appears to confirm a labor shortage. The largest job gains were seen in the hospitality industry, with 331,000 people hired chiefly to work at restaurants and bars. Business services lost 79,000 jobs; couriers and messengers lost another 77,000. [USA Today / Paul Davidson]
| | | Biden's move to suspend patents on Covid-19 vaccines sparks an international backlash | | - The Biden administration on Wednesday announced its support for suspending patents on Covid-19 vaccines, to speed up vaccine development all over the world. It's a move that puts the US in direct opposition to Big Pharma and some within the European Union. [NYT / Thomas Kaplan, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, and Rebecca Robbins]
- US Trade Representative Katherine Tai will now begin negotiating on behalf of countries hoping to rapidly develop their own vaccines with ready-made instructions. [Financial Times / Aime Williams, Kiran Stacey, Hannah Kuchler, and Donato Paolo Mancini]
- "This is a global health crisis, and the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures. The Administration believes strongly in intellectual property protections, but in service of ending this pandemic, supports the waiver of those protections for COVID-19 vaccines," Tai said in a statement on Twitter Wednesday. [Washington Post / Dan Diamond, Tyler Pager, and Jeff Stein]
- The European Union, especially Germany, has positioned itself against patent restrictions, warning the American plan could create "severe complications" for future vaccine production, decreasing the drive for companies to innovate by eating into their bottom lines. [Bloomberg / Arne Delfs and Eric Martin]
- And lifting patent restrictions isn't enough. Experts estimate any new vaccines wouldn't be available until 2022, mostly because of a lack of the raw materials needed to make them. For now, the move is mostly symbolic. [Stat News / Damian Garde, Helen Branswell, and Matthew Herper]
- Stephen Ubl, CEO of Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, said, "It's an empty promise. What's likely to happen if we give the recipe for these vaccines to other countries? They're not going to have the manufacturing capacity to actually manufacture the technology or the vaccines, but they are going to compete with our companies who can for scarce inputs," Ubl said. [Fox Business / Megan Gallen]
| | | | | | | | | [CNN / Dianne Gallagher and Veronica Stracqualursi] - Covid-19 cases in India continue to break records, with over 414,000 cases reported yesterday. Prime Minister Narendra Modi still refuses to lock down the country, despite calls from health experts to do so. [AP / Neha Mehrotra and Ashok Sharma]
- Analysis by the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation found that the true total of global Covid-19 deaths could be double the recorded number. [Axios / Dave Lawler]
- The WNBA kicks off its 25th season next week. When the league was founded in 1997, there were questions as to whether women's sports could be marketable. Now they look to be on the precipice of exploding in popularity. [Reuters / Amy Tennery]
- The Olympics are just 11 weeks away, but Japanese Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide's state of emergency declaration in Tokyo has imperiled a visit from IOC President Thomas Bach and frustrated a largely unvaccinated population. [AP / Mari Yamaguchi]
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