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Science

On eve of first launch, Firefly revamps board of directors, may go public

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Enlarge / Firefly Aerospace is targeting a launch in mid-March for its Alpha rocket.

Firefly Aerospace

As Firefly Aerospace nears the debut of its Alpha rocket, with a first launch attempt expected in mid-March from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, the company’s chief executive is looking ahead to the future.

“The company is at an inflection point now where we’ve been in this hardcore development mode for Alpha,” said Tom Markusic, chief executive of Firefly, in an interview. “Our goals going forward are to transition from a development company to an operating company. And we’re also of course interested in the next growth phase of the company, which is to expand beyond launch vehicles and put increasing emphasis on spacecraft.”

To that end the company is moving to aggressively raise new funding and is shaking up its board of directors. Gone is Ukrainian Max Polyakov, and in are two senior members of the US government community. All of this comes as Firefly is expected to roll its completed rocket out to its launch site in California in two weeks and perform one or more hotfire tests. The company is projecting a launch between March 15 and 22.

Fundraising

Firefly seeks to become an “end-to-end” space company that can both launch payloads into orbit as well as provide a spacecraft to deliver materials to the Moon or elsewhere. To accomplish these objectives will require more capital, of course.

When the company faced a cash crunch in 2016—Firefly had to briefly shut down—a Ukrainian investor named Max Polyakov stepped in to provide about $200 million in funding. Markusic said about 10 percent of those funds remain, and the company is now seeking to raise $350 million. This will allow further development of a production line for Alpha, which can launch up to 1 ton to low-Earth orbit, and development of its successor, Beta, as well as a tug-like spacecraft.

Markusic said Firefly has not yet made a decision about whether to seek additional funding from private investors or pursue public options. The company has had interest from several special-purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs.

“We haven’t made a final decision yet,” Markusic said. “We have options for private rounds, and we definitely have a lot of interest from a few SPACs. So we’re really just evaluating the terms of the different offers and we’ll come to that decision as a board.” He expects the board will make a decision later this month.

Shuffling the board

Firefly also announced on Wednesday morning that it has changed the composition of its board of directors, which now consists of Markusic, Deborah Lee James, and Robert Cardillo. James, who will serve as chair of the board, has a long government career, including having served as secretary of the Air Force from 2013 through 2017. Cardillo was the sixth director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, serving from 2014 until 2019.

Both new board members bring national security gravitas to Firefly and are strong indications that the company intends to provide launch services, and perhaps more, to the US Department of Defense.

“These two new board members are clearly established individuals with a strong national security background,” Markusic said. “They can give our government customers complete confidence that the company is being controlled and directed by people that have the interests of the United States of America in mind. They’ve held the most senior-most positions you possibly can find in these areas.”

Enlarge / The Alpha rocket is shown before integration at Vandenberg Air Force Base.

Firefly Aerospace

Among those no longer on the board is Firefly’s financial savior, Polyakov, who has dual Ukrainian-British citizenship. This is a substantial change, as it moves the company’s Ukrainian backer from a role as a key decision maker to that of a stockholder. Markusic said Polyakov has the rights of a stockholder but that Firefly’s board now directs the company. Concerns had previously been raised about Polyakov’s background in an investigation by Snopes, and having an all-American board of directors should bolster Firefly’s efforts to work with the defense community.

“I don’t want to emphasize any concerns, or anything like that,” Markusic said when asked about Polyakov’s departure from the board. “I just want to say we’re being proactive about aligning the leadership of the company with our government customer base, and having a board that optimally does that.”

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Health

Oregon blocks public access to vaccine equity group’s meeting

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Oregon’s coronavirus vaccine equity group is to meet in secret Tuesday to evaluate the group’s work over the last month after the state shut down public access following weeks’ of open meetings.

Oregon’s Vaccine Advisory Committee was charged with recommending who should be vaccinated after the governor’s priority groups, with an emphasis on tackling health disparities that stem from “structural racism.” But the group’s final recommendations last week appeared rushed and some committee members expressed frustration with the process.

A spokesman for the health authority defended the decision to prohibit media or members of the public from viewing Tuesday’s 5:30 p.m. meeting, saying the group accomplished its original function at its Thursday session.

The committee “has completed its official duties and fulfilled its purpose of making recommendations” about vaccination order to the Oregon Health Authority, spokesman Rudy Owens said in an email Tuesday. “OHA is now working on planning for implementation of the committee’s recommendations. OHA will conduct an evaluation with VAC members of the committee process.”

The committee has met publicly eight times, including a meet-and-greet Jan. 5 that was open to the public and recorded for public viewing.

The advisory group recommended Jan. 28 that people with underlying conditions, front-line workers, people in custody and people living in low-income and group senior housing should get vaccinated next.

At about 1.2 million, or 28% of the Oregon population, the committee’s final list encompasses far more people than current vaccine supplies can accommodate in the near future.

State and local officials will likely have the final say in who among the group’s priority populations will get vaccinated when, state public health director Rachael Banks indicated during the last meeting.

The Oregon Health Authority last week said staff would review the operation and legal dimensions of the recommendations before referring them to Gov. Kate Brown.

“The committee has an optional meeting on Feb. 2 to discuss implementation issues,” the health authority announced in a news release Friday.

But state official now say that’s not the intended subject of Tuesday’s meeting. An agenda for the 5:30 p.m. session lists only “debrief and evaluation.” The state will release a summary of the Tuesday discussion, a health authority spokesman said.

The group had previously suggested that Black, Indigenous and other people be vaccinated after the governor’s priority groups. But last week, health officials said the agency couldn’t allocate resources based solely on race or ethnicity, so the committee removed those groups from the priority ranking.

The recommendations did include a statement of intention “acknowledging structural racism and pressure from systems that are not ready to center this truth about the ways structural racism impacts the health of Black, Indigenous and People of Color communities.”

— Fedor Zarkhin; fzarkhin@oregonian.com; 503-294-7674

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World

Seattle Public Schools’ Black Lives Matter lesson plans advance ‘anti-police narratives’: radio host

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Seattle Public Schools teaching Black Lives Matter lesson plans to children advance “anti-police narratives,” radio host Jason Rantz said on Tuesday.

“This is a curriculum that, to be clear, doesn’t just impact Seattle. This is happening all across the country this week in schools,” the radio talk show of KTTH Seattle told “The Faulkner Focus.” 

The Black Lives Matter curriculum-integrated program teaches students explicitly how to become progressive social justice activists, among other things.

“It forwards a number of anti-police narratives, including that police purposely target African Americans with the intent to kill, that they choose not to de-escalate, that they are quick to use force because of their training,” Rantz said.

LAID-OFF KEYSTONE XL WORKER SAYS DECISION TO CANCEL PIPELINE ‘IS GOING TO HURT A LOT OF PEOPLE’

Black Lives Matter lesson plans are “radical,” Rantz argued in an article he wrote on Tuesday.

Seattle Public Schools are conducting a “Black Lives Matter at School Week” that runs Feb. 1 through Feb. 5. 

Rantz wrote, “It indoctrinates elementary- and middle-schoolers into believing that Black people are ‘systematically and intentionally targeted for demise’ in this country. They even learn to blame and distrust the police.”

“There isn’t a hint of ideological diversity in any of the lesson plans,” Rantz said.

Blasting the content being taught to students, Rantz said that the curriculum calls “any jail or immigration law state violence.”

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“And it doesn’t just stop on policing and issues of diversity,” Rantz said. “It specifically says that it’s going after the family structure. It teaches kids as young as kindergartners that they should be choosing their own gender. And I think my favorite line from some of the curriculum that was put out there was treating everyone the same might be unintentionally oppressive.”

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Sports

On the anniversary of Covid-19 becoming an official public health emergency, experts say it’s time for a change

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“At the time there were fewer than 100 cases of the disease we now call Covid-19 and no deaths outside China,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Friday. “This week we reached one hundred million reported cases. More cases have been reported in the past two weeks than during the first six months of the pandemic. A year ago, I said the world had a window of opportunity to prevent widespread transmission of this new virus. Some countries heeded that call, some did not.”

The rare emergency declaration, also known as a PHEIC, is the highest level of alarm under international law. Only six have ever been declared in history.

It’s supposed to notify the world that urgent action is needed, but experts say the reason “some countries heeded that call, some did not” is because the declaration has no teeth.

The declaration gives the WHO “few surge powers and no funding,” according to Lawrence Gostin, a professor of public health law at Georgetown University and the director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Center on Public Health Law & Human Rights.

“The only power a declared emergency provides is to make ‘recommendations’ to governments. But most governments, especially in the US and Europe, almost universally failed to adhere to (WHO) recommendations,” Gostin said.

The WHO has been evaluating how it can improve the system, and changes could happen during the World Health Assembly in May.

In this second year of the declaration, Gostin and other legal scholars argue that there needs to be urgent reform to give the WHO much stronger authority and more ample funding, if such a declaration is ever to work more effectively in a global health crisis.

How a public health situation becomes an emergency declaration

Countries are supposed to notify the WHO within a short time frame if they have an event in their country that could trigger an emergency declaration. As spelled out in the International Health Regulations, certain diseases or public health events must pose enough of a significant risk that it requires a coordinated international response.

Once a country notifies the WHO about its health threat, the WHO will then call an expert committee together that meets behind closed doors to review the data and listen to testimony from the country that has reported the threat. The committee then makes a recommendation to the WHO director-general who makes the ultimate decision.

If an emergency is declared, then the WHO creates a list of recommendations for governments to undertake to stop the spread of the disease. The WHO also makes recommendations about how to share information.

If it’s in their own backyard, governments don’t like the declaration

As the policy is written now, there are many downsides and disincentives for governments to provide public health information to the WHO and no real guaranteed upside, according to global health law expert Mara Pillinger.

“Governments tend to prefer that the WHO not call them out and issue this highest alarm, because it may not help them manage the outbreak, but could in fact make it harder for humanitarian supplies and assistance to get into the country,” said Pillinger, an associate in the Global Health Policy & Politics Initiative at the O’Neill Institute of National and Global Health Law at Georgetown. “And it can impose an economic cost.”

In theory, the emergency declaration should raise the alarm and motivate other countries to act, not just to protect themselves, but also to help the country with the outbreak get that problem under control so it doesn’t spread further.

Instead, an emergency declaration often triggers other countries to issue travel and trade restrictions against the country with the outbreak. That country suffers financially, and the travel restrictions are often ineffective since they are applied too late or in a piecemeal fashion, Pillinger said.

The declaration needs more authority

With an emergency declaration nothing mandates other countries to send technical or financial assistance to help that country fight or control the disease. Assistance is instead a “question of political will and political coordination.” China didn’t need the money with the Covid-19 outbreak, but Congo did when an emergency declaration was declared with an outbreak of Ebola in 2018.

While the WHO can make recommendations about how countries should respond to a public health threat, it’s incumbent upon each individual country to decided how to respond; how to work with the WHO; how it will aid the country at the heart of the outbreak; and whether it will even take the WHO’s warning seriously.

“It’s a little bit like declaring a five alarm fire, but imagine that you had a center that is responsible for ringing the alarm bell and then it were up to individual fire houses to decide whether or not they send trucks to the fire,” Pillinger said.

The declaration also gives the WHO no real authority to investigate the outbreak if the country does not want the WHO there.

“Even now, WHO has just sent a team to China, a year late,” Gostin said. “WHO has no authority to independently verify country reports, which is why China was allowed to mislead the world concerning the community spread of (the novel coronavirus). The WHO team also has no legal authority to demand access to full information from the Chinese government and scientists.”

The future of the emergency declaration

One step may be the help the US has promised to give the WHO. The Biden administration reversed the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the organization. On January 21, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Dr. Anthony Fauci told the WHO that the US would “work constructively” to strengthen and importantly reform the WHO.

Gostin believes as the world heads into the second year of the emergency declaration the International Health Regulations need to be improved now to better manage the current Covid-19 crisis and to help manage future pandemics.

“WHO should be able to rally the world in response to a pandemic,” Gostin said, noting it hasn’t really even been able to do that. “We have seen little global solidarity and in fact ‘go-it-alone’ nationalism, especially ‘American first and only.’

“The mission of WHO is to lead a globally coordinated response to a pandemic,” Gostin said. “That never happened with Covid-19. And that is why it is urgent to reform the International Health Regulations and to give WHO strong powers and ample funding.”

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Health

US coronavirus: CDC says travelers must wear masks on all forms of public transportation

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The order goes into effect at 11:59 p.m. Monday.

The coverings must be worn over both the nose and mouth while waiting, boarding, traveling and disembarking, it said. The masks need to be at least two or more layers of breathable fabric and needs to be secured to the head with ties, ear loops or elastic bands, according to the order.

The CDC said it reserves the right to enforce the order through criminal penalties, but it “strongly encourages and anticipates widespread voluntary compliance” and expects support from other federal agencies to implement the order.

As the US death toll from Covid-19 tops 436,000 people, the Biden administration has already called for 100 days of mask usage as well as an increase in the allotment of vaccine doses for each state by 16% in hopes of managing the impacts of the virus that has made January the deadliest month of the pandemic.

Variants could dominate the pandemic going forward

And though vaccines are making their way to the public, health experts say the nation faces many more months of the pandemic, and the spread of variants has raised alarm.

More than 400 cases of a coronavirus variant first identified in the UK have been reported across the US, and health experts say new strains like it could soon become dominant.

At least 434 cases of the variant were detected across 30 states, the CDC said Wednesday — that number is more than 100 more than the cases reported just days before.

The UK variant as well as another first identified in South Africa have worried officials and experts because they are more easily transmitted than the strain the US has been fighting so far. And as leaders race to get Americans vaccinated, they say the newer strains could spread quickly.

“The projection that is made with regard to the UK (variant) is that probably by the end of March, the beginning of April, it actually will become more dominant in this country,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said during a White House news briefing on Friday.

“The fact is, when you have a virus that has ability to transmit more efficiently than the wild type in the community, sooner or later by pure viral dynamics itself, it will become more dominant than the wild type,” Fauci said.

The variants are likely to worsen the spread of coronavirus and add to the death toll, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington forecast Thursday.

Its model now projects 594,624 deaths by May 1, up from its previous forecast of 569,000 fatalities by that date.

And a rapid variant spread would take that number up to 620,000 by May 1, IHME said. In a worst-case scenario, nearly 654,000 Americans could be dead of Covid-19 by May 1, IHME warned.

Closing the vaccine gap while fighting new strains

To get a handle on the spread of the virus requires closing the gap between the number of available vaccine doses and those that have been administered, according to experts.

So far, at least 49,216,500 vaccine doses have been distributed and at least 27,884,661 doses of vaccine have been administered, according to the CDC.

Experts say they expect existing vaccines to be protective against new strains of the virus, but that the nature of the South African originating strain may make them less effective, adding another hurdle to the efforts to bring a sense of normalcy back to life in the US.

But officials have also said that they anticipate the production of new boosters or vaccines will have fast turnarounds, thanks to systems already in place.

Biotechnology company Novavax said it is developing a booster to protect against newly emerging strains.

On Thursday, the company announced its vaccine, known as NVX-CoV2373, was found to have an efficacy of 89.3% in a Phase 3 clinical trial conducted in the UK and the vaccine appeared to demonstrate clinical efficacy against some variants of the coronavirus.

In January, Novavax started developing boosters for the newer variants, and expects to select its ideal candidates in “the coming days.”

“The company plans to initiate clinical testing of these new vaccines in the second quarter of this year,” Novavax said.

CNN’s Jen Christensen, Rebekah Riess, Lauren Mascarenhas, Michael Nedelman and Jacqueline Howard contributed to this report.

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Business

Ubiquitous Digital Ad Company Taboola Going Public

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Taboola, the provider of digital ad space that frequently appears at the bottom of websites, is making its way to the stock exchange. The company announced Monday that it will do so via the preferred going-public vehicle of our age: a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC).

Taboola’s current business will be parked into the SPAC, an existing stock called ION Acquisition Corp 1 Ltd. (NYSE:IACA), thus becoming a publicly traded company.

The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter, Taboola said. The resulting entity will do business under the current name, and its ticker symbol should change to TBLA.

Image source: Getty Images.

Taboola said that its merger with ION would bring in total proceeds of $545 million, between the funds held in trust by ION and investments by third parties. According to Taboola, this values the merged entity at around $2.6 billion. The company said it would devote over $100 million to research and develop growth opportunities. It did not provide details about other spending targets.

As a privately held business, Taboola does not provide a great amount of detail about its finances. In the going-public announcement on its website, it said that its revenue, excluding traffic acquisition costs, was $379 million in 2020. Operating profit came in at $34 million, and adjusted EBITDA (earnings before income, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) topped $100 million. A bottom-line figure was not provided.

In its words, Taboola “enables digital property owners to harness the value of AI-driven recommendations and offers advertisers a way to effectively access users in the open web.”

It estimates the scope of what it describes as “the highly fragmented advertising market in the open web” to have been around $64 billion last year. 

 



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Health

Harris County Public Health worker Dr. Hasan Gokal charged with stealing vial of COVID-19 vaccine

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HARRIS COUNTY, Texas (KTRK) — A Harris County Public Health doctor is accused of stealing a vial of the COVID-19 vaccine, the Harris County District Attorney’s Office announced.

According to a news release issued on Thursday afternoon, Dr. Hasan Gokal stole the vial that contained nine doses while working at the county vaccination site at Lyndsay Lyons Park in Humble on Dec. 29.

A week later, Gokal told a fellow Harris County Public Health employee, who then reported him to supervisors. Mishandling a vaccine can result in a loss of government funding to the county, according to Harris County Public Health officials, who first investigated the matter resulting in Gokal getting fired.

“He abused his position to place his friends and family in line in front of people who had gone through the lawful process to be there,” said Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg. “What he did was illegal and he’ll be held accountable under the law.”

Gokal is being prosecuted by the Public Corruption Division of the Harris County District Attorney’s Office.

He’s being charged with theft by a public servant. The Class A Misdemeanor carries a penalty of up to a year in jail and a $4,000 fine.

Eyewitness News reached out to Harris County Public Health for comment. A spokesperson issued the following statement:

“I can confirm all the details in the news release sent out by the DA’s office are accurate. Harris County Public Health took immediate action upon learning of improper handling of vaccines, to include alerting authorities. However, given that this is an ongoing investigation, we have to refer you back to the DA’s office for any comment or interviews.”

Copyright © 2021 KTRK-TV. All Rights Reserved.



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