Opinion

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) made waves when it announced last week that vaccinated people can doff their masks. But one group of people has no hope of doing so: kids, for whom vaccines are still largely not authorised by the Food and Drug Administration. Only the Pfizer shot is authorised for kids as young as ...

Covid-19 related deaths in India are expected to double in the coming weeks. People across socioeconomic classes are being cremated en masse in large holes in the ground. The ordeal doesn’t even end with death. Medical bills are piling up, a burden large enough to tip working-class families into multi-generational poverty. Younger adults desperate for vaccines are effectively being forced ...

Times are tough when you’re wrestling with Covid-19, recession — and a rapidly recovering America. The US offers superior rates of growth, a prospect once considered outlandish, and a bullish prognosis on vaccinations. Emerging economies in Southeast Asia are naked. They should also be afraid. The US economy is roaring back from 2020’s debacle. Unlike Donald Trump’s foundering response to ...

Peter Mandelson, spirit guide to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, blamed the two “C”s for the Labour Party’s shattering defeat in a parliamentary by-election last week: “Covid and Corbyn.” The opposition party put up a poor showing in important local contests across the country, but the loss of Hartlepool to Boris Johnson’s Tories cut deep. On the doorsteps of ...

In the run-up to the US employment report, the forecasts of both economists and Wall Street analysts had migrated higher and pointed to an incredibly strong job creation number for April. What materialised, however, was a huge disappointment that constituted the biggest data miss on record. While firm conclusions about the reason will have to wait for more data over ...

In pursuing its “forever war” in Africa, France has tolerated autocrats and warlords in exchange for commitment to its counterterrorism goals. But President Emmanuel Macron is beginning to discover that the former often undermines the latter. At the start of the year, Macron entertained the fantasy of scaling back Operation Barkhane. The campaign, which began in 2013 in the band ...

Supply chains have rarely been under greater strain, but that upheaval is helping generate massive profits for shipping and postal companies. Two European logistics giants — AP Moller-Maersk A/S and Deutsche Post AG (owner of courier DHL) — delivered record earnings, just as US delivery giant United Parcel Service Inc did the week before. On the face of it, logistics ...

When Google renamed itself Alphabet Inc in 2015, co-founder Larry Page revealed that one of the new name’s meanings was a pun: alpha-bet, as in “a bet on investment returns above a benchmark.” This implied that the so-called “Other Bets” in Google’s financial reports — subsidiaries that work on projects ranging from self-driving cars to cancer cures — aren’t just ...

Covid-19 is crushing developing countries such as India, Brazil and South Africa, and it won’t help to simply tinker with the patents on life-saving vaccines made by a handful of pharmaceutical companies. It’s more crucial that the pharmaceutical industry’s manufacturing and distribution expertise be brought to bear on this epic challenge, as Bloomberg Opinion’s editorial board has noted. Access to ...

The European Union’s Covid-19 vaccination rollout had looked like a cross between a bad joke and a bad dream. Almost everything that could go wrong did: Logistical failures, supply delays, the odd diplomatic incident and an ugly bust-up with AstraZeneca Plc. The euro-area economy, battered by successive virus waves, fell into a double-dip recession earlier this year. Yet the bloc ...