Sound familiar?
Russian-made coronavirus vaccines, including Sputnik V and the one-dose Sputnik Light, are widely available country, but only 45 million of the country’s 146 million people have been fully vaccinated. Scholars attribute the hesitancy to low levels of trust in the authorities, who have sent conflicting messages about the pandemic since it began last year.
That's an alarmingly low 31%.
A Brazilian senator has formally presented a report recommending President Jair Bolsonaro be indicted on criminal charges for allegedly bungling Brazil's response to the COVID-19 pandemic and pushing the country's death toll to second-highest in the world.
For weeks, President Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters have made their presence felt with the roar of motorcycles during boisterous rallies meant to show steadfast fealty to an increasingly unpopular leader.
Until recently, the president’s opponents had refrained from convening street protests, opting instead to show their exasperation by banging pots and pans from windows and trading memes online.
But over the weekend, thousands of Brazilians critical of Mr. Bolsonaro took to the streets in the largest public mobilization against the president since the beginning of the pandemic.
Their show of force in cities across the country followed a series of damning revelations in congressional hearings examining the government’s catastrophic response to the coronavirus, which has killed more than 461,000 Brazilians.
From the start of the outbreak, Brazil’s president has been skeptical of the disease’s impact, and scorned the guidance of health experts, arguing that the economic damage wrought by the lockdowns, business closures and mobility restrictions they recommended would be a bigger threat than the pandemic to the country’s weak economy.
More than a year into the pandemic, deaths in Brazil are at their peak and highly contagious variants of the coronavirus are sweeping the nation, enabled by political dysfunction, widespread complacency and conspiracy theories. The country, whose leader, President Jair Bolsonaro, has played down the threat of the virus, is now reporting more new cases and deaths per day than any other country in the world.
He's shown disdain for facts and science-based recommendations. He's said the public will eventually realize they were "tricked" by governors and large parts of the media over a "measly little cold." He's embraced chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine as treatments for the coronavirus despite no evidence of the anti-malaria drugs' effectiveness in fighting the disease.
As Brazil's coronavirus infections have surged to a level surpassed only by the United States, President Jair Bolsonaro, the leader of Latin America's largest country, has followed a near-identical coronavirus script to President Donald Trump.
With upward of 800 people dying each day from Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, Brazil’s death rate is now second only to that of the United States. Lax quarantine measures are leading to rising contagion as Mr. Bolsonaro urges Brazilian workers to effectively defy local lockdown orders from states and municipalities. [emphasis added]
Foxconn’s chairman, Young Liu, expressed confidence that a company best known for assembling smartphones and laptops had a role to play in the car industry.
“Our biggest challenge is we don’t know how to make cars,” Mr. Liu told reporters on Monday.
Shortly after Foxconn appeared, your Cleveland Business Journal made a list of the deal’s pros and cons -- four of each. That’s how we were in the beginning too. Very balanced. We wanted so much to believe.
We’ve been at the Foxconn party since May 2017 -- and I can assure you, the hangover isn’t worth it. Promises just keep evaporating.
Foxconn has a contract with our local officials to create 13,000 jobs and invest about $10 billion in a large LCD screen manufacturing facility by the end of 2025. But it has virtually no production here and told the state in April it plans to create just 1,454 jobs and invest just $672 million.
Foxconn executives have come and gone. It never felt serious.
What is serious however, is the pickle Foxconn has put the locals in. The Village of Mount Pleasant and Racine County forced hundreds of people from their homes and issued about $400 million of bonds; four years later we’ve got a 4,000-acre industrial park that contains just five buildings, none with much activity. [emphasis added]
However, Wall Street isn’t pleased with the price Lordstown has negotiated for the former GM plant—or the general prospect of Endurance.
The $230 million price tag is less than one fifth of Morgan Stanley’s prior plant value estimate, Jonas wrote in a note to clients on Monday.
“We had previously assumed the Endurance project would be cancelled as we do not see a path to commercial viability at any appreciable scale,” he added. “[Endurance] likely exposes the company to the risk of further elevated cash burn and liquidity risks even in a contract manufacturing scenario.”
Still, the Foxconn deal will provide Lordstown with enough cash to navigate its operational issues at least in the short term.
No politicians showed up at the Lordstown plant for a big ceremony with executives — a key difference from the announcement in Wisconsin.
Willy Shih, an international trade and manufacturing expert at Harvard Business School, said such announcements in China are known as “state visit projects,” where high-ranking officials make grand pronouncements for economic plans. In China, it’s understood the plans may change radically based on economic realities, whereas in the U.S. the public expects a company to follow through with the announcement. [emphasis added]
