- A little life: Heartbreaking obituary tells story of man bullied at school for being shy, shunned as an adult Daily Mail
- Brother’s heart-wrenchingly honest obit for 76-year-old sibling’s hard, lonely life goes viral: ‘He didn’t fit in’ New York Post
- Almost no one spoke to Brian when he was alive — but his obituary? It’s making people talk KARE 11
- A Forgotten Man -Outpouring Of Heartfelt Comments For Minnesota Man Minnesota’s New Country
- A lonely life ends. A brother writes a ‘brutally honest’ obituary. INFORUM
- View Full Coverage on Google News
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They Shunned Covid Vaccines but Embraced Antibody Treatment
Lanson Jones did not think that the coronavirus would come for him. An avid tennis player in Houston who had not caught so much as a cold during the pandemic, he had refused a vaccine because he worried that it would spoil his streak of good health.
But contracting Covid shattered his faith in his body’s defenses — so much so that Mr. Jones, nose clogged and appetite vanished, began hunting for anything to spare himself a nightmarish illness.
The answer turned out to be monoclonal antibodies, a year-old, laboratory-created drug no less experimental than the vaccine. In a glass-walled enclosure at Houston Methodist Hospital this month, Mr. Jones, 65, became one of more than a million patients, including Donald J. Trump and Joe Rogan, to receive an antibody infusion as the virus has battered the United States.
Vaccine-resistant Americans are turning to the treatment with a zeal that has, at times, mystified their doctors, chasing down lengthy infusions after rejecting vaccines that cost one-hundredth as much. Orders have exploded so quickly this summer — to 168,000 doses per week in late August, up from 27,000 in July — that the Biden administration warned states this week of a dwindling national supply.
The federal government, which was already covering the cost of the treatment — currently about $2,100 per dose — has now taken over its distribution as well. For the coming weeks, the government has told states to expect scaled-back shipments because of the looming shortages.
With seven Southern states accounting for 70 percent of orders, the new process has unsettled some of their governors, who have made the antibody treatment central to their strategy for enduring a catastrophic wave of the Delta variant.
More supplies are on the way. The federal government bought 1.8 million more doses this week, expected to arrive in the fall and winter. But for now, some hospitals are uncertain of supplies, state health officials said, even as patients keep searching for doses.
“We have providers struggling to get the necessary product,” Kody Kinsley, who leads operations for North Carolina’s Covid-19 response, said in an interview. “I think what has happened is a classic logistics issue, where all of a sudden there’s much more demand.”
Amid a din of antivaccine falsehoods, monoclonal antibodies have become the rare coronavirus medicine to achieve near-universal acceptance. Championed by mainstream doctors and conservative radio hosts alike, the infusions have kept the country’s death toll — 2,000 per day and climbing — from soaring even higher.
And after months of work by President Biden and Southern governors to promote the treatments, they have won the affection of vaccine refusers who said that the terrors and uncertainties of actually getting Covid had made them desperate for an antidote.
“The people you love, you trust, nobody said anything negative about it,” Mr. Jones said of the antibody treatment. “And I’ve heard nothing but negative things about the side effects of the vaccine and how quickly it was developed.”
Some Republican governors have set up antibody clinics while opposing vaccine mandates, frustrating even some of the drugs’ strongest proponents. Raising vaccination rates, scientists said, would obviate the need for many of the costly antibody treatments in the first place. The infusions take about an hour and a half, including monitoring afterward, and require constant attention from nurses whom hard-hit states often cannot spare.
“It’s clogging up resources, it’s hard to give, and a vaccine is $20 and could prevent almost all of that,” said Dr. Christian Ramers, an infectious disease specialist and the chief of population health at Family Health Centers of San Diego, a community-based provider. Pushing antibodies while playing down vaccines, he said, was “like investing in car insurance without investing in brakes.”
The government-supplied monoclonal antibodies, made by Regeneron and Eli Lilly, have been shown to significantly shorten patients’ symptoms and reduce their risk of being hospitalized — by 70 percent, in the case of Regeneron’s antibody cocktail. The treatments, given in a single sitting, use lab-made copies of the antibodies that people generate naturally when fighting an infection.
Patients and doctors alike overlooked the treatments during the wintertime surge of infections. But hospitals and health centers have now ramped up their offerings, transforming dental clinics, mobile units and auditoriums into infusion centers. In states like Texas, where elective surgeries have been postponed to make room for Covid-19 patients, operating room nurses have been enlisted to give infusions.
One factor driving the demand is that many patients, including vaccine skeptics, have been spreading the word about their seemingly miraculous recoveries.
“They’re like, ‘I have Covid, I want this treatment, my friend or family told me about this,’” said Jennifer Berry, the Houston Methodist nursing director of infusion services. “Now the word is out.”
At Houston Methodist, nurses administered nearly 1,100 treatments across eight sites in the first week of September, well more than twice as many as any week last winter. The hospital reduced the average time between orders and infusions to two days this month from three days in early August, giving patients a better chance of fighting off infections.
Juggling the infusions with more seriously ill Covid patients this summer forced the hospital, in one case, to move a monoclonal antibody clinic to a strip mall storefront.
But the Texas health department has helped, providing 19 nurses for a different Houston Methodist infusion clinic, said Vicki Brownewell, the lead administrator for the hospital’s program. The Biden administration has also invested $150 million in expanding access to monoclonal antibodies, and Houston Methodist has used federal money to arrange medical taxis for patients struggling with transportation.
Even so, the infusions remain inaccessible to many. Given the heavy demands on staff and the need to create separate infusion rooms for infectious patients, certain communities, especially in rural areas, do not have clinics.
In San Diego, Dr. Ramers said, some large, for-profit hospitals have decided not to administer the antibodies at all because of the logistical hassles, leaving wealthier, well-insured patients to hunt down doses at his publicly funded clinic. Some nurses that he hired for infusions left for short, better-paying assignments in hard-hit intensive care units.
“The natural, capitalist incentives for health care organizations that are for profit don’t really favor doing this,” Dr. Ramers said. “It’s a lot of work.”
Understand Vaccine and Mask Mandates in the U.S.
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- Vaccine rules. On Aug. 23, the Food and Drug Administration granted full approval to Pfizer-BioNTech’s coronavirus vaccine for people 16 and up, paving the way for an increase in mandates in both the public and private sectors. Private companies have been increasingly mandating vaccines for employees. Such mandates are legally allowed and have been upheld in court challenges.
- Mask rules. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in July recommended that all Americans, regardless of vaccination status, wear masks in indoor public places within areas experiencing outbreaks, a reversal of the guidance it offered in May. See where the C.D.C. guidance would apply, and where states have instituted their own mask policies. The battle over masks has become contentious in some states, with some local leaders defying state bans.
- College and universities. More than 400 colleges and universities are requiring students to be vaccinated against Covid-19. Almost all are in states that voted for President Biden.
- Schools. Both California and New York City have introduced vaccine mandates for education staff. A survey released in August found that many American parents of school-age children are opposed to mandated vaccines for students, but were more supportive of mask mandates for students, teachers and staff members who do not have their shots.
- Hospitals and medical centers. Many hospitals and major health systems are requiring employees to get a Covid-19 vaccine, citing rising caseloads fueled by the Delta variant and stubbornly low vaccination rates in their communities, even within their work force.
- New York City. Proof of vaccination is required of workers and customers for indoor dining, gyms, performances and other indoor situations, although enforcement does not begin until Sept. 13. Teachers and other education workers in the city’s vast school system will need to have at least one vaccine dose by Sept. 27, without the option of weekly testing. City hospital workers must also get a vaccine or be subjected to weekly testing. Similar rules are in place for New York State employees.
- At the federal level. The Pentagon announced that it would seek to make coronavirus vaccinations mandatory for the country’s 1.3 million active-duty troops “no later” than the middle of September. President Biden announced that all civilian federal employees would have to be vaccinated against the coronavirus or submit to regular testing, social distancing, mask requirements and restrictions on most travel.
Of the 2.4 million monoclonal antibody doses shipped nationally, at least 1.1 million have been used. Precisely how many are still sitting on shelves is hard to determine because of reporting gaps. Still, waning federal supplies and soaring demand from less-vaccinated Southern states have caused what several states have described as large shortfalls in deliveries.
North Carolina providers have requested 15,000 weekly doses, the health department there said, more than double what the federal government has allocated. Florida said its latest weekly allotment left clinics there 41,000 doses short of what they wanted.
Hospitals had previously been able to order the drugs themselves. But the Department of Health and Human Services will now decide how many doses each state receives based on case rates and use of the treatment. State governments, in turn, will decide on doses for individual sites.
The new ordering process, which the Biden administration said would ensure “equitable distribution,” has unsettled some backers of the drug. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, a Republican, warned on Thursday that state officials were unprepared for the new responsibility of parceling out doses.
And in heavily vaccinated states, like New York, people coordinating treatments fear that shipments will plummet because of low case rates, leaving hospitals with so few doses that they shutter their programs. Some hospitals recently reported growing numbers of vaccinated patients receiving infusions.
Diana Berrent, the founder of Survivor Corps, which has worked to help patients find monoclonal antibody treatments, said that involving state governments would create delays: “You’re layering in 50 new layers of bureaucracy,” she said.
Doctors have warned that antibody treatments alone cannot keep pace with ballooning outbreaks. Whereas any one vaccination protects untold others from exposure, a single infusion only helps a single patient. Infusions must be given within 10 days of symptoms; they are unhelpful to most hospitalized patients. And receiving the antibodies once does not keep people from becoming seriously ill if they catch the virus again later.
“Something like that just doesn’t scale,” said Dr. Howard Huang, the medical leader for Houston Methodist’s infusion program.
As a result, health officials have warned that vaccine skeptics may become so enamored of monoclonal antibodies that they become even more resistant to getting a protective shot.
Within days of his infusion, Mr. Jones, the patient in Houston, had left the bedroom where he had been quarantined and returned to his work as a landscape architect. But he was still weighing whether to be vaccinated.
His doctor was pushing for the shot, he said. But the monoclonal antibodies had worked so well that he was tempted to simply return for another infusion if he caught Covid-19 again.
“If I can go get an infusion and feel as good as I do right now, man, I’d rather not take a vaccine that has just been developed,” he said. “That makes me nervous, still.”
Rebecca Robbins contributed reporting.
Frank Oz Says Disney Shunned Him From Muppets Work – The Hollywood Reporter
Frank Oz, the iconic puppeteer and director, is persona non grata with Disney, he revealed in a recent interview with The Guardian.
Known for his work on Muppets projects alongside the late, legendary Jim Henson, as well as for helming such classic films as Little Shop of Horrors and What About Bob?, Oz said in an interview published Monday that he would love to work on another Muppets project, but Disney, which purchased the IP in 2004, won’t work with him.
“I’d love to do the Muppets again but Disney doesn’t want me, and Sesame Street hasn’t asked me for 10 years,” he said. “They don’t want me because I won’t follow orders and I won’t do the kind of Muppets they believe in.”
Oz voiced Fozzie Bear, Miss Piggy, Sam Eagle, Animal and Marvin Suggs for several Muppets film and TV projects. On Sesame Street, he voiced Bert, Grover and Cookie Monster.
Oz said he does not watch current Muppets or Sesame Street projects. And he doesn’t pull punches as to why. “The soul’s not there,” he said. “The soul is what makes things grow and be funny. But I miss them and love them.”
Oz is steadfast when he talks about how, in his opinion, the Disney acquisition forever changed The Muppets.
“There’s an inability for corporate America to understand the value of something they bought. They never understood, with us, it’s not just about the puppets, it’s about the performers who love each other and have worked together for many years,” he said.
Oz did work with Disney when he returned to voice Yoda in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.
A Disney rep could not be immediately reached for comment.
SPACs, long shunned in Silicon Valley, going mainstream in tech
The New York Stock Exchange welcomes Desktop Metal Inc. (NYSE: DM), today, Thursday, December 10, 2020, in celebration of its listing. To honor the occasion, Ric Fulop, Co-Founder and CEO, rings The Opening Bell®.
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Roger Lee of Battery Ventures says that “SPAC” used to be a “bad four-letter word” in Silicon Valley.
Now, the board of every high-profile start-up is discussing special purpose acquisition companies as a legitimate way to go public, according to Jeff Crowe of Norwest Venture Partners.
In the eyes of Lux Capital co-founder Peter Hebert, SPACs are “stealing from the 2021 IPO calendar.”
“We have encouraged our highest-quality companies to seriously consider this,” said Hebert, whose firm raised its own health-tech SPAC in October and is looking for a target. “The vast majority of companies looking at doing traditional public offerings are dual-tracking SPACs.”
Within Lux’s portfolio, 3D-printing company Desktop Metal went public through a SPAC in December. Others like real estate software companies Latch and Matterport have announced deals this year with so-called blank-check companies.
The sudden burst of SPACs reminds some long-timers of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s. Pre-revenue businesses with far-out goals are going public at astronomical valuations, and famous athletes and other celebrities are getting in the mix. Mention the acronym to any well-known start-up CEO and you’ll likely hear about the non-stop calls they receive from sponsors with hundreds of millions of dollars to spend.
To Wall Street skeptics, it looks like the finance industry’s latest scheme to make money from speculators in a low interest rate environment with the market at a peak and investors hungry for all things tech. SPACs have raised more than $44 billion so far this year for 144 deals, according to SPACInsider. That’s equal to more than half the money raised in all of 2020, which itself was a record year.
While there’s undeniable mania in the SPAC boom, there’s another story playing out in parallel. Venture-backed tech companies with high-growth prospects are shunning the IPO process, which has its own flaws. Instead they’re getting comfortable with the idea of hitting the market in a way that would have been unfathomable just a year ago.
In a SPAC, a group of investors raise money for a shell company with no underlying business. The SPAC goes public, generally at $10 a share, and then starts hunting for a company to acquire. When it finds a target and a deal is agreed upon, the SPAC and the company pull in outside investors for what’s called a PIPE, or private investment in public equity.
The PIPE money goes onto the target company’s balance sheet in exchange for a big equity stake. The SPAC investors get stock in the acquired company, which becomes the publicly-traded entity through what’s known as the de-SPAC.
One major advantage: SPACs allow companies to provide forward-looking projections, which companies typically don’t do in IPO prospectuses because of liability risk.
“An IPO is what I would call backward-looking,” said Betsy Cohen, who led a SPAC that recently took car insurer Metromile public. “Because a SPAC is technically a merger, you’re required to tell investors what the merged companies will look like after the merger and project forward.”
It’s also a much faster process than the IPO, which involves spending many months with bankers and lawyers to draft a prospectus, educate the market, carry out a roadshow and build a book of institutional investors.
Fin-tech companies have been big SPAC targets
Many of the better-known SPAC targets so far have been at the intersection of tech and financial services. For these companies, cash burn rates are high and real GAAP profits often won’t come for years, even under the best circumstances.
Metromile, whose technology allows drivers to pay by the mile rather than a monthly fee, started trading on Wednesday after merging with INSU Acquisition Corp. II, a SPAC led by Cohen and her son, Daniel. Chamath Palihapitiya, the venture capitalist turned mega SPAC sponsor, and billionaire Marc Cuban invested in a $160 million PIPE.
As of Friday’s close, the stock was trading at $17.23, giving Metromile a valuation of over $2 billion based on the fully diluted share count.
“Metromile enters the insurance market at a time when telematics are installed in virtually every car going forward, so there’s the opportunity to look at insurance on an individualized customized basis, which is huge,” Cohen said in an interview. “We felt it was an important company to bring to the public markets and allow them to have access to capital in way insurance companies do.”
Cohen, who founded The Bancorp, said she will have closed seven SPACs by later this year, including payments company Payoneer and boutique investment bank Perella Weinberg.
Metromile CEO Dan Preston told CNBC this week that around the middle of 2020, as his board was evaluating financing options, he expected to raise a large round of private capital and then go public in four to six quarters. The company had been around for a decade and raised hundreds of millions of dollars in funding.
Metromile CEO Dan Preston
Winni Wintermeyer
Other insurance-tech businesses like Lemonade and Root held traditional IPOs last year. But Preston says the more he learned about SPACs, the more he realized it was the better approach for his company, which faced the high costs of operating in the heavily regulated insurance industry — and a pandemic that slashed the amount of miles driven.
“The sweet spot are companies that are pretty close to being public but need a little more historical data to get ready,” said Preston.
Metromile said in its merger filing that it expects insurance revenue to increase 39% to $142.1 million in 2021, and then jump 81% in 2022 and more than 100% in 2023. Adjusted gross profit will increase from $11.1 million last year to $144 million in 2023, the filing says.
Online lender SoFi said in January that it was going public through a SPAC run by Palihapitiya in a deal valuing the company at $8.65 billion. In the merger agreement, SoFi projects annual revenue of $980 million this year, increasing annually to $3.7 billion in 2025, while contribution profit will more than quintuple over that stretch to $1.5 billion.
In other finance SPACs, Palihapitiya led the reverse-merger of digital real estate company Opendoor, which went public last year and is now worth over $20 billion. He did the same with health insurer Clover Health (which said this month that it’s under investigation by the SEC) and is leading the PIPE for solar financing provider Sunlight Financial.
Top-tier investors joining the fray
He’s also doing software deals. In January, Palihapitiya was a PIPE investor in Latch, a developer of smart lock systems sold to real estate companies. Latch generates recurring software sales and said 2020 booked revenue jumped 49% from the prior year to $167 million.
Blackrock, Fidelity and Wellington are also part of the PIPE, meaning they’ll be equity holders when Latch goes public. Those names, viewed as top-tier public market investors, are becoming familiar to SPACs, with at least one of them showing up in the PIPE for SoFi, Matterport, Opendoor and consumer genetics company 23andMe.
For companies that can attract investors of that caliber, and have sponsors they trust to stick with them through the ups and downs of the journey, a SPAC can be the most efficient way to raise money. Large private rounds typically require hefty dilution, while IPOs often come with a discount of 50% to 100% for new investors.
In a SPAC, the target ends up handing up to 20% of shares to the sponsors and additional stock to PIPE investors. The rest primarily remains with insiders. When public, the company has the ability to raise follow-on capital at market rates. For example, Opendoor just announced it’s raising $770 million at $27 a share, marking an increase in valuation of about 200% from the time of the PIPE investment.
Norwest’s Crowe, whose firm was a venture investor in Opendoor and online therapy provider Talkspace, another SPAC target, said that pricing is favorable for the best companies because there are so many SPACs going after them.
“Pricing is nuts,” Crowe said. “There’s enormous pent-up demand for all these companies. A lot of companies that would’ve gone public in a relatively even fashion over 2021 and ’22, if markets hold, now are all going out in a mad rush.”
Venture investors are jumping in as well. In addition to Lux, firms including FirstMark Capital, Ribbit Capital, Khosla Ventures and SoftBank have raised their own SPACs. Separate from their firms, venture capitalists Steve Case, Reid Hoffman and Bradley Tusk have followed Palihapitiya into the SPAC sponsor arena.
Growth stage venture firm G Squared announced this week the close of a $345 million SPAC. Founder Larry Aschebrook, in an interview, called it “just another tool in our toolbox” to help companies access capital. He said it can be a good option for a CEO who’s ready to run a public company and a business that’s raised a lot of money in the past and can benefit from ready access to the capital markets.
G Squared Ascend I Inc. SPAC IPO at the New York Stock Exchange on Feb. 5th, 2021.
NYSE
“There are only a handful we think are super high-quality companies,” Aschebrook said about the tech SPAC deals that have already been announced. “Companies we’re interested in are teetering on profitability or are profitable and are logos that everyone knows.”
While Battery’s Lee no longer views SPACs as equivalent to a curse word, he said there hasn’t yet been one out of his firm’s portfolio. However, Battery is an investor in Coinbase, which is going public through a direct listing, following the lead of Slack, Spotify and Palantir in allowing existing stakeholders to sell in the debut rather than issuing new shares as a company.
Lee said he wouldn’t at all be surprised to see a SPAC from one or more of his companies this year, acknowledging that it’s become a third viable mechanism to go public.
“The direct listing was the first thing new thing to happen in the capital markets in 50 years — and the rebranding of SPACs is the second thing,” Lee said. “At the end of the day, you’re still running a public business and you have to be capable of withstanding the rigor and scrutiny.”
WATCH: Matterport CEO on going public through SPAC deal with Gores Group