President Biden has compared the fight against the coronavirus to wartime mobilization, but with the exception of pharmaceutical companies, the private sector has done relatively little in the effort. It has not made a major push to persuade Americans to remain socially distant, wear masks or get vaccinated as soon as possible.
Biden administration officials and business leaders will announce a plan on Friday to change that, David Leonhardt of The New York Times reports in The Morning newsletter.
The plan includes some of the country’s largest corporate lobbying groups — like the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, the National Association of Manufacturers and groups representing Asian, Black and Latino executives — as well as some big-name companies.
Ford and Gap Inc. will donate more than 100 million masks for free distribution. Pro sports leagues will set aside more than 100 stadiums and arenas to be used as mass vaccination sites. Uber, PayPal and Walgreens will provide free rides for people to get to vaccination sites. Best Buy, Dollar General and Target will give their workers paid time off to get a shot. And the White House will urge many more companies to do likewise.
Many of the steps are fairly straightforward. That they have not happened already is a reflection of the Trump administration’s disorganized pandemic response. Trump officials oversaw a highly successful program to develop vaccines, but otherwise often failed to take basic measures that other countries did take.
“We’ve been overwhelmed with outreach from companies saying, ‘We want to help, we want to help, we want to help,’” said Andy Slavitt, a White House pandemic adviser. “What a missed opportunity the first year of this virus was.”
The Bank of England’s chief economist warned on Friday that inflation could overshoot the central bank’s target and cause policymakers to act more aggressively, adding his voice to a debate that has roiled financial markets in recent days.
Andy Haldane described inflation as a sleeping tiger that had been “stirred from its slumber” by the large amounts of monetary and fiscal support used to protect the economy from the pandemic, according to a speech published on the bank’s site.
Central bankers and economists on both sides of the Atlantic are debating the path of inflation and whether easy-money policies will need to be halted sooner than expected to contain it. In some circles, there are…
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