Updated at 2/5/2021, 1: 16: 25 PM BST
Leke Oso Alabi in London and Francesca Friday in New York
Global stocks reached their best week since November, as investors looked past US job numbers that marginally missed forecasts.
Wall Street’s S&P 500 index rose 0.4 per cent at the closing bell in New York, taking the blue-chip benchmark up more than 4.5 per cent for week.
Shares in GameStop rebounded at market close on Friday afternoon after the trading app Robinhood removed limits on the hot-button stocks at the centre of the retail trading frenzy, with gains for the gaming retailer settling to 19.2 per cent after climbing as high as 78 per cent.
Meanwhile, shares in the cinema operator AMC sunk about 5.3 per cent after reaching as high as 17 per cent earlier in the day.
Shares in the small drug developer Cassava Sciences fell as low as 24 per cent on Friday after almost soaring 700 per cent this year to become the top stock in the Nasdaq Composite index, as past trading caps imposed on so-called meme stocks pushed factions of day traders into the biotech realm.
But the investor excitement surrounding biotech goes beyond the rise of the Austin-based company, which released a promising study on its drug candidate for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease on Tuesday, to the forefront of day-trader chatter on Reddit and other platforms.
“To me, it’s investors contemplating what they believe are structural changes in the way that healthcare operates,” said Brian Levitt, global market strategist at Invesco. “I wouldn’t conflate that with what we saw in day-trading.”
Read more on this story here.
Daniel Dombey, Madrid
Spain has become the latest EU country to impose an age limit on taking the Oxford/AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine, authorising its use only for people between 18 and 55 years old.
The decision by the country’s Public Health Commission follows European Medicines Agency approval of the vaccine last week but also reservations set out by regulators in other EU member states, such as Germany, about the vaccine’s limited trial data for people over 55.
Vaccine rollout for the EU as a whole is lagging behind programmes in the US and the UK, a challenge that could be complicated by limiting the use of the AstraZeneca shot.
Spain plans to give the vaccine, the first shipment of which is due to arrive in the country this weekend, to health workers rather than to the elderly or people in care homes.
In an attempt to speed up vaccinations for the country as a whole, the Spanish authorities have recommended that a second AstraZeneca dose be delivered between 10 to 12 weeks after a first shot, allowing more people to get a first shot in a shorter time period.
As of Friday evening, Spain had administered almost 2m shots of the BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, with almost 700,000 people already receiving two doses. This means that just under 3 per cent of the country’s 47m population has been vaccinated so far.
Spain has the highest coronavirus infection rates in the EU, apart from its neighbour Portugal, although case numbers have been moving downward in Spain over the last eight days.
Peter Wells in New York
New York has vaccinated 75 per cent of healthcare workers in the state and will allow residents with comorbidities to be eligible for a jab from the mid-February, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced on Friday.
The vaccination milestone is an encouraging sign that New York continues to ramp up its rollout of vaccines, particularly among frontline healthcare workers, but the governor added that vaccination rates varied between hospitals and regions in the state.
New York has administered 99.02 per cent of the vaccines it has received in the first seven weeks of the rollout, Cuomo said. The state now receives an allocation of about 250,000 shots a week.
Adjusted for population, New York has administered 10,591 shots per 100,000 people, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as of February 4 and showing that almost 2.1m jabs had been administered. That puts it among the 20 states with the highest per capita vaccination rates.
With increasing levels of vaccination among healthcare workers and the elderly, the rollout is being broadened, with Cuomo saying people with comorbidities will be eligible for a coronavirus shot starting February 15. “Ninety-four per cent of people who died from Covid have comorbidities or underlying conditions,” he added.
Additionally, a vaccination mega site opened today at the New York Yankees’ baseball stadium in the Bronx. It is meant only for residents of the borough, which has the highest positivity rate in New York City, at more than 6 per cent.
The governor said New York was “ready, willing and able” to start using as first doses those shots that have been set aside as second shots when and if the federal government permits it.
Cuomo added he was encouraged by news on Thursday that Johnson & Johnson had filed an application seeking emergency use authorisation for its coronavirus vaccine, describing it as a potential “game changer” given it is a single jab and does not require ultra-cold storage.
Katrina Manson
The White House has turned to the US military to help with its vaccine rollout. More than a thousand active-duty troops will help inoculate Americans against Covid-19 at five centres nationwide.
Lloyd Austin, the new secretary of defence who Joe Biden said he picked in part for his logistical know-how to boost the domestic coronavirus response, gave the go-ahead for 1,110 troops to join the complex effort to vaccinate the public on Thursday.
Fewer than 7m people have received two doses of the vaccine, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, even though more than 57m doses have been delivered.
The Department of Defense said it was still reviewing a request from the federal government to send 10,000 troops to help at 100 vaccination sites.
The initial teams will include 400 vaccinators at five sites, as well as support staff.
James Shotter in Warsaw
Czech prime minister Andrej Babis today said his country could follow Hungary and use vaccines not yet approved by the EU in an attempt to accelerate its drive to protect citizens from Covid-19.
Hungary became the first country in the EU to purchase a vaccine not approved by the European Medicines Agency when it gave the green light to the Russian vaccine Sputnik V last month. It has also since approved the vaccine made by China’s Sinopharm.
Speaking after a meeting in Budapest with his Hungarian counterpart, Viktor Orban, Babis said the Czech Republic could consider taking a similar approach.
“The vaccine is not about politics. It’s about safety, about health,” Babis said. “I spoke with the [German Chancellor Angela Merkel] about the Russian and Chinese vaccines, and she is clearly calling for this vaccine to be approved in the EU.”
Hungary is due to start vaccinations using the Sputnik V vaccine next week. The Czech Republic has so far innoculated 327,759 people, largely with the BioNtech vaccine. It will receive its first delivery of AstraZeneca vaccines next week.
Roman Olearchyk in Kyiv
Ukraine on Friday announced UK-headquartered Crown Agents had secured for the country 12m doses of AstraZeneca and Novavax coronavirus vaccines produced under license agreements by India’s Serum Institute.
“The sooner we get the vaccines, the faster we will overcome the pandemic,” President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a statement after being briefed by his health minister Maksym Stepanov.
“Like every Ukrainian, I am waiting for the beginning of the vaccination process … 12m doses is a good signal from our partners, and this will be enough to ensure vaccination within the first months after the start of the deliveries,” he added.
The first batch of supplies are expected to arrive this month, the statement added.
Officials in the country of 41m, which plans to commence vaccinations in mid-February, have in past days announced that 117,000 Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines will also arrive this month under the WHO co-led Covax programme.
Kyiv has ruled out purchases of Russia’s vaccine. Both countries have been locked in an undeclared war since 2014 when Russia occupied Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and fomented a proxy separatist conflict in far-eastern regions that has claimed nearly 14,000 lives.
The country largely avoided a first wave of infections thanks to deep lockdowns imposed last spring, but cases have mounted after restrictions were eased starting last summer.
Confirmed Covid-19 cases stand at 1,237,169 including 23,387 fatalities.
John Burn-Murdoch in London and Mehul Srivastava in Tel Aviv
Cases and hospital admissions in Israel are falling steeply among vaccinated age groups in the first clear sign worldwide that Covid-19 jabs are preventing illness following a mass inoculation campaign.
Daily case rates among people aged 60 and above have fallen by 46 per cent relative to their mid-January peak, compared with a much smaller decline of 18 per cent among under-60s, according to analysis by a team from the Weizmann Institute of Science at Tel Aviv University.
The country has been in a lockdown since January 8 that initially pushed cases down across all ages at a similar rate, but the striking divergence in trajectory between the older citizens — who have received the jabs — and younger people has opened up in the wake of the world’s fastest vaccine rollout. The country has so far administered more than 57 doses per 100 residents.
Eighty per cent of Israelis aged 60 and above had received at least their first dose of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine by January 15, with mass rollout of the second dose beginning around the same time. As of February 4, 78 per cent of this group have received two doses.
Hospital admissions of those aged 60 and above have already dropped 34 per cent below mid-January levels, while admissions among younger adults had remained flat and are now slightly higher than they were three weeks ago.
Similar patterns are apparent in both moderate and severe hospital cases, suggesting that the vaccine is protecting against not only mild illness but also severe disease.
Read more here.
Naomi Rovnick
US stocks were heading for their best week since November on Friday, as investors cheered vaccine milestones and the prospects of president Joe Biden bypassing Republican opposition to his $1.9tn economic stimulus plan.
The benchmark S&P 500 rose 0.5 per cent in early trades, taking its rise this week to 4.8 per cent. If the gain holds this will be the index’s best week since the week to November 6, when US stocks rallied ahead of Biden winning the presidential election.
Ben Laidler, chief executive of investment strategy group Tower Hudson Research, put investors’ exuberance down to “growth optimism, fuelled by fiscal stimulus and vaccine progress”.
The S&P 500 is trading at 29.7 times constituent companies’ reported earnings, which is higher than its long-term average, leading some analysts to warn that market sentiment has become too positive. Last month, veteran investor and GMO co-founder Jeremy Grantham described the long run-up in markets since 2009, which has been supercharged by monetary and economic stimulus spending in response to coronavirus, as an “epic bubble” characterised by “extreme overvaluation”.
Others argue that stocks do not seem overvalued in a world of ultra-low interest rates, which have pinned down the yields on bonds, creating less potential for investment returns from government and corporate debt. “Equity valuations can stay inflated or even inflate further,” Citi strategists led by Robert Buckland wrote in a research note. “The fixed income alternative now looks much less attractive.”
Martin Arnold in Frankfurt
Luis de Guindos, the vice-president of the European Central Bank, has warned that eurozone growth is likely to undershoot its forecast in the first few months of this year after several countries tightened their coronavirus restrictions.
The ECB in December forecast eurozone growth of 0.6 per cent in the first quarter, but most economists expect the bloc to suffer a “double-dip recession” and predict it will continue shrinking at the start of this year after a decline of 0.7 per cent in the fourth quarter.
De Guindos rejected the call for €2.5tn of debt forgiveness by the ECB made by Thomas Piketty and 150 other economists in a letter published in some newspapers on Friday.
“The ECB can afford it without a doubt,” said the letter, which was also signed by the former Belgian minister Paul Magnette.
But the ECB vice-president said this proposal would breach the EU treaty, undermine the central bank’s independence and make “no economic or financial sense”.
Mamta Badkar in New York
The Canadian economy shed more jobs than expected at the start of the year, bringing employment to its lowest since August, as parts of the country implemented tough restrictions to curb the spread of coronavirus.
Employment in Canada fell by 212,800 in January, the biggest drop in nine months, Statistics Canada said on Friday. That is worse than economists’ expectations for a 47,500 job losses, according to a Reuters survey, and followed a drop of 53,000 in December.
The unemployment rate climbed 0.6 percentage points to 9.4 per cent, the highest in five months.
Overall, employment was down 858,000 from February last year before the coronavirus pandemic began.
The bleak job reports follows an extension or expansion of restrictions in central Canada over the past couple of months in some areas, where losses were concentrated.
Retail trade was hit particularly hard as the closure of non-essential shops in southern Ontario was extended to the entire province the day after Christmas.
Quebec closed non-essential retail on Christmas Day and implemented a curfew last month.
“While there is also scope for employment in the high-contact service sectors to rebound as restrictions are gradually eased, the current slow progress with vaccinations suggests that employment is unlikely to rise strongly again until the second quarter,” said Stephen Brown, economist at Capital Economics.
Matthew Rocco
The US annual trade deficit last year swelled to its highest level since the financial crisis, as the economy felt the pandemic’s effects on the global exchange of goods and services.
The deficit rose by $101.9bn, or 17.7 per cent, from 2019 to $678.7bn, according to the Census Bureau on Friday. That was the biggest since 2008, reflecting a wider deficit in the export of goods and a decline in the services surplus amid global travel restrictions.
Exports rebounded at the end of last year as parts of the country began to loosen coronavirus restrictions imposed during the autumn. The monthly trade deficit narrowed in December from its highest level on record, with imports exceeding exports by $66.6bn, a 3.5 per cent decline from November. Economists were looking for the December trade deficit to hit $65.7bn.
The latest figures showed that exports of industrial supplies, food, capital goods and vehicles improved in December. Exports in services also grew.
“Still-weak global demand and travel restrictions will keep trade subdued in the near term, with total exports clearly lagging imports,” according to analysts at Oxford Economics.
The trade deficit in November was $69bn, revised from a previous estimate of $68.1bn. It marked the biggest monthly deficit since at least 1947.
Arthur Beesley in Dublin
Pub owners in Ireland have won a legal battle for insurance compensation after their trade was suspended in the coronavirus-induced lockdown.
The high court in Dublin ruled in favour of four bar owners in a 214-page judgment handed down on Friday in their case against FBD, one the country’s main insurers.
They had challenged the insurer’s refusal to indemnify them against the loss of business when the government closed large parts of the economy last spring to tackle the Covid-19 emergency.
“I am … of the view that cover is not lost where the closure is prompted by nationwide outbreaks of disease provided that there is an outbreak within the 25-mile radius and that outbreak is one of the causes of the closure,” said the ruling by Justice Denis McDonald.
The judgment will have implications for more than 1,000 pub and restaurant businesses, many of which have not traded for almost one year.
FBD, which previously set aside €30m to cover liabilities arising from the case, has committed to paying claims following the judgment.
“We expect the cost to be well within the range of considered financial outcomes, with FBD remaining strongly capitalised,” it said.
Asked whether the company might contest the ruling, a spokeswoman said “FBD are not appealing today’s decision on liability”.
The company’s shares, down almost 15 per cent in the last year, were up more than 3 per cent at €7.34 on the Dublin stock exchange after the ruling.
The Licensed Vintners Association, which represents 600 Dublin publicans, said it was “grossly unfair” that family businesses had to take high court action to vindicate their claims.
“We are now calling on insurers to quickly review their business interruption policies in light of today’s decision and to promptly pay all valid claims,” it said.
Naomi Rovnick
Investors last week put the largest amount of money into technology stock funds for almost two decades, following upbeat quarterly results from companies that have benefited from the coronavirus pandemic such as Netflix and Google parent Alphabet.
In the week to February 3, investors ploughed $4.2bn into funds invested in technology shares, according to data provider EPFR. That is the the largest amount since 2002, according to strategists at Bank of America who analysed the data.
During the latest quarterly earnings season, Netflix has hit 200m subscriptions and Google reported an unexpected surge in advertising revenues as retailers raced to attract online shoppers and travel companies banking on the US economy reopening after vaccines are rolled out widely enough.
Commenting on the EPFR data, strategists at Bank of America said investors had moved to “buy the dip”.
For much of November, December and January, shares in most of the world’s biggest tech companies rose less than the broad S&P 500 index as concerns mounted about high tech sector valuations.
In the past three months, of the so-called FAANG group of stocks – Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google’s parent Alphabet – only Apple and Alphabet have outperformed the S&P 500 index.
Katrina Manson and Kiran Stacey
Senior US state department officials have moved to mollify concerns about the pace of coronavirus vaccinations for employees, acknowledging there had been “some confusion” about the distribution of the jabs.
In a February 2 memo to staff, Antony Blinken, secretary of state, said the department had requested 315,000 doses of Covid-19 vaccines for employees, eligible family members and contractors but had so far received 47,050 doses, about 15 per cent of the amount requested.
“The department is one of several federal agencies receiving vaccine allotments due to our national security mandate,” said the memo, adding the decisions on who gets it “are not, and have not been, easy”.
The memo, which was marked sensitive and has been seen by the Financial Times, said the state department was set to receive enough doses to vaccinate 13,200 more people this month.
The department has decided to prioritise workers in southern and eastern Africa because of the emerging variant circulating in southern Africa and what it said was “significant disease under-reporting”, as well as staff in Washington and New York.
Some career officials have privately complained about vaccine allocations within the department, saying there has been a failure to vaccinate staff who are required to travel or who have been posted to medically underserved areas abroad suffering from severe outbreaks.
Breaking news
James Politi and Colby Smith
The US jobless rate dropped to 6.3 per cent in January and the economy created 49,000 jobs last month, as the recovery continues to struggle through the surge of coronavirus infections during the winter months.
The small increase in non-farm payrolls partly reversed the dip in job creation during December and matched economists’ expectations of a 50,000 gain.
The drop in the unemployment rate from 6.7 per cent in December was driven more by US workers exiting the labour force rather than rising employment, a discouraging trend for the US economy.
The return to job growth will reassure US economists and policymakers that the decline in December may have only been temporary and tied to a wave of new restrictions on activity to contain the pandemic, which are now easing.
However, the pace of new employment in the US economy remains extremely lacklustre, highlighting the travails of a labour market that is still operating far from full capacity and nowhere near its pre-pandemic levels.
Sectors such as leisure, hospitality and retailing continued to shed jobs last month, while gains were concentrated in government employment and professional and business services, like temporary help.
The weakness of the US jobs market has been one of the main catalysts for president Joe Biden’s drive to enact a new $1.9tn economic stimulus plan during this first weeks in the White House.
Harry Dempsey
The spread of coronavirus slowed in the UK in the final week of January, according to Office for National Statistics figures that will ease concerns that a recent decline in case numbers had levelled off.
The ONS survey showed 846,900 people in England tested positive in the week to January 30, down from more than 1m in the preceding week.
Statisticians warned infection rates remain high, however, as positive cases identified in the week equated to one in 65 people in England.
The number of positive tests declined in Scotland, which has a notably lower infection rate than the other home nations, and in Northern Ireland, although it stayed level in Wales.
The latest ONS data send a reassuring signal after the previous week’s figures. They showed that the fall in cases had stalled, which raised concerns the effects of the lockdown on the spread of the virus might have been waning.
Sarah Crofts, senior statistician for the survey, said the percentage of people testing positive for the more transmissible virus variant first discovered in the UK had also fallen.
But she added: “While infections in England have decreased to below 1m, they still remain high.”
A separate study run by King’s College London, also released on Friday, recorded a 70 per cent fall in daily Covid-19 cases so far this year. However, scientists said they were at a similar level to the end of November, when England’s second lockdown came to an end and the NHS remained stretched.
Philip Georgiadis in London
Regulators are set to allow London’s Heathrow to increase its landing charges for airlines to help what was once Europe’s busiest airport claw back some of its coronavirus-induced losses.
The Civil Aviation Authority on Friday said it had no choice but to intervene. The hub’s finances have worsened since the autumn as travel restrictions have dug into passenger numbers.
The UK regulator said Heathrow’s proposal to regain £2.8bn by raising its fees was “disproportionate” and would not be in the interest of consumers.
But the CAA has been persuaded that adjustments to the airport’s prices could be made to help Heathrow see off the worst impact of the pandemic. The regulator has put out a consultation.
The UK’s biggest airport has been seeking permission to increase the fees it charges airlines to help offset a decline in the number of its flights, sparking a row with airlines including British Airways.
The airport lost £1.5bn in the first nine months of last year as passenger numbers collapsed. The outlook for aviation has since darkened as governments introduce restrictions on travel to combat the spread of variants of the virus that have been identified internationally.
Anna Gross
Covid-19 vaccines are “extremely safe”, researchers analysing data on side effects for the UK regulator have said, finding around 0.3 per cent of recipients report adverse reactions.
The group found that 22,800 of the 6.9m who received either the BioNTech/Pfizer or the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine between December 9 and January 24 reported experiencing an adverse reaction. That’s about three in 1,000 of those vaccinated.
“The benefits far outreach the risks,” said Professor Sir Munir Pirmohamed, chair of the Commission on Human Medicines’ Covid-19 vaccines benefit risk expert working group.
The researchers said that the majority of these reports, which come from the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency’s “yellow card” reporting scheme, were common side effects, such as fever, sore arms and muscle pain, and lasted on average around two days.
Pirmohamed noted that reported adverse reactions were more common among younger age groups.
“We know that the immune system does change as you get older,” he added, but that there was no noticeable difference in reactions among ethnic groups.
On the more severe side of the spectrum, the UK regulator has received 114 reports of anaphylaxis, an allergic reaction to ingredients in the vaccine, and 75 reports of Bell’s Palsy, a type of facial paralysis, the majority of which resulted from the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine.
The researchers analysed how many reports they would expect to occur in the absence of vaccination, known as the “natural rate”, and found that “the number of reports of facial paralysis received so far is similar to the expected natural rate”.
A total of 143 people have died following vaccination, the majority of whom were elderly with underlying illnesses. The report concluded that the “review of individual reports and patterns of reporting does not suggest the vaccine played a role in the death”.
Pirmohamed said that these deaths “don’t raise alarm bells in the number or the details of the cases”.
Sarah Provan
UK Covid-19 daily cases have fallen 70 per cent this year to end of November levels since a peak over the new year break prompted the country to buckle down into yet another nationwide lockdown to contain the spread of the virus.
Infections in the latest weekly figures dropped to an average 20,360 daily symptomatic cases of Covid-19 based on swab tests up to the end of January. The figures, from the Zoe infection survey, reveal a 29 per cent decline from a week ago, while the peak of the virus showed 69,000 daily cases on about January 1.
“We are making good progress against this virus,” said Tim Spector, the study’s lead scientist.
However, the King’s College London epidemiology professor cautioned that the UK is at the same level of daily cases as at the end of November’s lockdown, “with the difference being our NHS is overstretched and death rates are still high”.
On average one in 170 people in the UK have symptomatic Covid-19, the survey released on Friday showed.
The reproduction, or R, number is at 0.9, as daily cases fall in all regions. Rates across regions are more similar than they have been for months. The highest risk areas are on the south coast in Dorset, London and the city of Liverpool.
The R number shows the number of people to whom each infected person typically spreads the virus.
“We still need to give the vaccines a few more weeks to take effect and drive cases lower,” Spector said. “If as hoped these trends continue, I believe we should now be looking at getting children back into the classrooms sooner, so vaccinating teachers would be my next priority.”
Guy Chazan
Jens Spahn, the German health minister, said that the European Commission was in talks to acquire doses of a Covid-19 vaccine being developed by Novavax, a company based in Maryland.
“The commission has told us that it is in final negotiations with Novavax so I assume that we will see this contract very soon,” he told reporters on Friday. He added that he expected Germany would “participate in it, as it has with all the other contracts”.
Novavax has developed a protein-based vaccine called NVX-CoV2373. The European Medicines Agency recently started a rolling review of the shot, based on preliminary results from laboratory studies and early clinical studies in adults.
The EMA said those studies suggested that “the vaccine triggers the production of antibodies and immune cells that target SARS-CoV-2” — the virus that causes Covid-19.
In September, the vaccine entered a phase 3 clinical trial in the UK and another one in the US at the end of December. In January, Novavax announced that in the British trial, the vaccine had an efficacy rate of 89 per cent.
Spahn said he hoped to be able to offer vaccinations to all people in priority group 1, which includes all those over 80, and all those over 65 who live in care homes, by the end of the first quarter. He said that almost 80 per cent of all those living in care homes had already received one vaccine dose.
Harry Dempsey
Pfizer has withdrawn its application for emergency use authorisation of its Covid-19 vaccine in India after local regulators said they required additional information about its safety and effectiveness.
The New York-based company said it had made the withdrawal after India’s drug authority pointed to insufficient data on side-effects and the lack of a local trial.
The shot, co-developed with BioNTech, is not integral to India’s vaccination plans. The country, which has a population of 1.4bn, is instead relying on the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine and domestically-developed jabs, which do not have such stringent requirements to be stored at ultra-low temperatures.
The country’s Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation said this week that Pfizer had “not proposed any plan to generate safety and immunogenicity data” in the Indian population and that possible side effects reported overseas were still under investigation.
The decision means that the BioNTech/Pfizer jab, which is also as yet unavailable in China, will be largely limited to developed nations that have the infrastructure necessary to keep the vials cold enough.
Pfizer, which developed its jab with Germany’s BioNTech, added that it would resubmit an application with additional information. It remained “committed to making its vaccine available for use by the government in India”.
James Shotter in Warsaw
Poland’s hotels, cinemas and theatres will be able to reopen partly in a week’s time as the country becomes one of the first EU nations to ease the latest coronavirus-induced restrictions.
The relaxation of the rules will allow the hospitality outlets to function at 50 per cent capacity from February 12, the prime minister said on Friday. Open-air sport can also go ahead from next Friday. Europe has been ravaged by the coronavirus and its variants during winter.
However, gyms and restaurants will remain closed, said Mateusz Morawiecki. The rules will be reviewed after two weeks.
“Our path is bringing results, but it is clear how aggressively this virus behaves,” Morawiecki told a media conference. “We have to behave cautiously, and we cannot allow a broad easing.”
Poland on Friday reported 6,053 cases and 368 deaths in its latest daily tally. The central European nation, which has a population of 38m, has recorded 1.5m cases of Covid-19 and 38,712 deaths.
Harry Dempsey
Foreign office minister James Cleverly has defended the UK’s hotel quarantine plans from criticism that it was too slow to provide firmer details, saying that places needed time to prepare.
The government first announced on January 27 that it would set up quarantine hotels for arriving passengers, in a similar move to one that Australia and other countries have adopted.
But it took the government until Thursday to announce the official start date — February 15 — for passengers coming from 33 “red-list” countries to self-isolate in hotels and to begin making formal contact with hotels about the details.
“We need time to prepare, we need time to make sure this works,” the minister said on Friday during a Sky News interview. “That’s why we’ve given the hotel industry notice to give them time to prepare, train staff and to get their rooms ready.”
Cleverly did not deny the suggestion that the government would cover the costs of people self-isolating in the early stages, which reports say could be about £1,500 for one person, saying that “we learn from international partners; it doesn’t mean to say that we’ll replicate what they do in every instance”.
Some states in Australia and Thailand make arrivals pay for quarantine services but others such as New Zealand foot the bill.
Oliver Ralph
Beazley said that it was reviewing its disaster scenarios after $340m of Covid-related claims pushed the London-listed insurer to a $50m full-year loss.
Chief executive Andrew Horton said that “despite the volume of information, data and predictive analytics at our fingertips, we didn’t foresee the events of this year” and added that the company would look at the way it responds to events that turn out to be worse than expected.
Despite the hit from Covid, the annual loss was far better than the $106m that analysts expected, thanks to a strong investment performance. Beazley’s shares rose 12 per cent to 359.8p in early trading.
Beazley was optimistic about the year ahead. Prices for commercial insurance are rising, and the company said that it had the capital strength to be able to grow.
Beazley said that its prices for policy renewals rose by 15 per cent last year and Horton added: “We anticipate the favourable rating environment will continue throughout 2021.”
The company did not pay a dividend for 2020 but Horton said that he was confident payouts could resume this year.
Leila Abboud in Paris
Sanofi pledged to expand the cost savings push at the centre of chief executive Paul Hudson’s turnround programme after delivering better than expected earnings per share in 2020 despite the Covid-19 pandemic.
Strong sales of the French group’s flu shots in the fourth quarter helped offset lower demand for its cardiovascular and diabetes drugs as some people stayed away from doctors’ offices and hospitals as the virus continued to spread in much of the world.
Sanofi, which is one of the world’s biggest vaccine makers along with GlaxoSmithKline and Merck, confirmed that it aims to get a Covid-19 vaccine to market by the fourth quarter. In December, it stunned investors and disappointed countries who bankrolled the jab when a dosing error in a clinical trial delayed the vaccine’s progress by three to six months.
The mishap left Sanofi trailing competitors BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna, whose vaccines based on mRNA technology are being administered to millions globally.
“We continue to work in parallel on our two Covid-19 vaccine candidates, with clinical trials starting in the coming weeks,” the Paris-based company said in a statement.
Ahead of a capital markets day to be held for investors on Friday, Sanofi promised an additional €500m in cost cuts to €2.5bn by 2022, and said the savings would be ploughed back into research and development to further its ambitions in immunology and oncology.
David Keohane in Paris
BNP Paribas hinted the worst of the pandemic impact could be over even as an increase in provisions for potentially bad loans lowered the French bank’s fourth-quarter profits.
France’s biggest bank reported that net income fell 13.9 per cent in the quarter to €1.6bn, but it still beat analysts’ expectations of closer to €1.2bn.
Revenues slid 4.5 per cent to €10.8bn, roughly in line with what analysts had pencilled in.
The bank’s cost of risk, which reflects provisions for potential defaults, rose by two-thirds over the same period last year to hit €1.6bn, ahead of expectations. That increase brought the total for the year to €5.7bn, a 79 per cent jump over 2019.
However, the bank’s trading results missed analysts’ forecasts and BNP warned that the jump in fixed-income activity experienced by the sector in 2020 would probably not carry over into this year.
Jamie Smyth in Sydney
Australian farmers have warned that the country’s trade dispute with China and supply chain disruptions linked to the coronavirus pandemic will cost the industry $28bn over the next decade.
In a pre-budget submission published on Friday, the National Farmers’ Federation appealed to the government to invest A$3.5bn (US$2.66bn) to support a trade strategy aimed at diversifying the nation’s export markets and improving supply chains.
The industry’s goal of boosting the annual value of farm production to A$100bn by 2030 will be “severely challenged” by trade disruptions unless more support can be provided by Canberra, it warned.
Beijing has targeted Australia’s farm sector over the past 18 months, slapping trade sanctions on barley, seafood, wine and other exports as bilateral ties have sunk to their lowest level in a generation. Relations soured after Canberra called for an international probe into the origins of Covid-19 and resisted Beijing’s more aggressive foreign policy.
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Amy Kazmin in New Delhi
The Reserve Bank of India has held its key interest rate steady at 4 per cent, citing gains in economic recovery and moderating inflation as the number of new daily cases of coronavirus drops sharply.
Shaktikanta Das, the RBI governor, said the monetary policy committee voted unanimously to hold rates steady, as indicators showed “signs of recovery have strengthened further” since the previous meeting.
Inflation, which had been over the RBI target of 2-6 per cent since June, moderated in December, when it fell to 4.59 per cent on softening food prices.
The RBI projects 5.2 per cent inflation in the current quarter, down from a forecast of 5.8 per cent.
The RBI has estimated that the Indian economy will grow 10.5 per cent in the financial year starting on April 1 as it recovers from a major contraction triggered by the pandemic and associated restrictions.
Victor Mallet in Paris
It was an uncharacteristically fretful and tired-looking Emmanuel Macron who last week cast doubt on the effectiveness for the elderly of the Oxford/AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine and remarked that the UK’s successful inoculation campaign would not change its “total” dependence on road freight from the EU.
At the time of his comments at the Elysée last Friday — he said the vaccine appeared “almost ineffective for those over 65” when in fact there was not enough data to judge either way — the French president was poised to make a decision that may prove fateful for his political future on whether to impose the country’s third nationwide lockdown.
Hours later, Macron and his government, aware of large anti-lockdown protests in the Netherlands, chose merely to tighten border controls, close big shopping malls and reinforce monitoring of the existing 6pm-6am curfew.
However, evident disagreements between French ministers and health officials over how to tackle the year-old coronavirus crisis — and the slow rollout of vaccinations in France and the rest of the EU compared with the pace set in the UK and US — have raised questions about Macron’s chances of re-election in next year’s presidential poll.
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Amy Kazmin in New Delhi
At least one in five of India’s 1.4bn people have been infected by the coronavirus, according to a recent study carried out by the Indian Council of Medical Research.
The estimate that 20 per cent of all Indians have been exposed comes from a sero-prevalence study carried out between mid-December and mid-January, and highlights the broad spread of the pathogen in the South Asian country.
More than 28,500 Indians were tested for antibodies to the virus, which indicate past infection and an immune response. The results imply that at least 270m Indians had been infected — far more than the 10.8m cases officially acknowledged by the government.
The ICMR study found the highest level of exposure in urban slums, where nearly 32 per cent of people had been infected. It also found that around a quarter of healthcare workers had been exposed.
Similar studies have suggested even more widespread exposure. A New Delhi government study estimated that about 56 per cent of the population had been exposed. Major metropolitan areas such as Mumbai and Pune have also found much higher prevalence.
A study in Karnataka, a prosperous southern state, estimated that about 49 per cent of people, including 44 per cent of rural dwellers, had been infected. Results of a state-wide study in Tamil Nadu, also in the south of the country, are awaited soon.
Gary Jones in Hong Kong
A resident of Singapore displaying Covid-19 symptoms, convicted of leaving his hostel while on a stay-home notice, has been stripped of his permanent residence status.
In a statement released on Friday, the island state’s Immigration & Checkpoints Authority said: “In the case of Mr Chong Tet Choe, ICA has revoked his PR status on Feb 4.”
According to The Straits Times, “the Malaysian was charged in June for breaching his [stay-home notice] on four occasions to run errands with the knowledge that he displayed symptoms of Covid-19 infection”.
Chong, the newspaper continued, left his hostel on four occasions to buy groceries and food, withdraw money and to top up the credit on his mobile phone. He was sentenced to two weeks’ imprisonment for breaching Covid-19 regulations in August last year.
For each of his offences, Chong could have been fined up to S$10,000 ($7,470) and jailed for up to six months. Repeat offences carry the possibility of jail for up to a year and a fine rising to S$20,000.
Non-Singaporean residents also face the possibility of having their residency status revoked or permission to stay in the country cut short for breaking Covid-19 regulations.
Alice Woodhouse in Hong Kong and Stefania Palma in Singapore
The Indonesian economy contracted at a faster pace than forecast in the fourth quarter as the country battled rising coronavirus infections.
Indonesian gross domestic product shrank 2.2 per cent year on year in the three months to the end of December, according to official figures, up from a 3.5 per cent fall in the previous quarter. That was a sharper decline than the 2 per cent fall predicted in a Reuters poll of economists.
Quarter-on-quarter GDP fell 0.4 per cent on a non-seasonally adjusted basis, according to Reuters.
Indonesia’s economy in 2020 shrank 2.07 per cent year on year, marking the first annual GDP contraction since the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98.
Indonesia has recorded 1.1m coronavirus infections with the number of new cases climbing by close to or more than 10,000 a day for the past month.
Gareth Leather, senior Asia economist with Capital Economics, said the research consultancy’s mobility tracker showed that social distancing was still acting as a drag on the economy. However, despite a recent surge in cases, the country’s vaccine rollout suggests a brighter outlook, Leather said.
“Unlike the rest of the world, the government is prioritising vaccinating the economically active population first. As fear of being infected falls, people’s behaviour is also likely to start to return to normal,” he said.
Alice Woodhouse in Hong Kong
Health authorities in China reported six local cases of Covid-19 on Friday, the lowest tally since December after strict measures were introduced to control outbreaks in the north of the country.
China implemented lockdown measures in a number of cities and launched rounds of mass testing as it faced the largest surge in infections since early 2020. The rise came ahead of the lunar new year next week, when workers traditionally travel home for the holiday.
Five of the new cases were reported in Heilongjiang, a province that borders Russia, taking its total number of Covid-19 patients recorded this year to more than 640. Shanghai reported two new Covid-19 cases.
The new cases mean the country has recorded almost 2,300 Covid-19 cases in 2021.
A further five people were found to be infected with coronavirus but did not show any symptoms. China does not include asymptomatic cases in its official tally.
Thomas Hale in Hong Kong
Chinese factories are pressing their employees to keep working over the country’s New Year holiday as the country’s booming export businesses rush to keep pace with global demand.
Apple suppliers including Foxconn, Pegatron and Luxshare are offering workers bonuses and overtime over the annual holiday, which begins next week, while other exporters in China cite higher orders and travel restrictions disrupting the country’s most important festival.
“More workers have stayed for work this year than in the past,” said Dan Peng, who works at Foxconn in Guangdong. “The reward for staying is very tempting and orders are abundant.”
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Peter Wells in New York
US coronavirus hospitalisations on Thursday fell below 90,000 for the first time since late November, while cases rose by the most in five days.
There were 88,668 people in hospitals across the US with coronavirus, according to Covid Tracking Project data, down from 91,440 on Wednesday.
It was the first time hospitalisations have dropped below 90,000 and Thursday’s reported figure marked the lowest level since November 24.
According to Covid Tracking Project, authorities attributed a further 3,705 fatalities to coronavirus.
However, a Financial Times analysis of the data set shows that 5,212 deaths were reported by states on Thursday, which would be the first instance of more than 5,000 reported fatalities in a single day, albeit with a caveat.
Indiana is the reason for the discrepancy. The state’s health department reported 37 new deaths but said an audit of coronavirus death records and test results for 2020 and 2021 led to the identification of 1,507 historical deaths that were not previously reported.
These boosted the state’s death toll since the start of the pandemic to 11,637 from the 10,091 reported on Wednesday, now the 12th-highest among US states.
An additional 123,907 new infections were reported by states on Thursday. That is up from an almost three-month-low on Wednesday of 116,960 and is the biggest daily increase since Saturday last week.
Robert Wright in London
The UK is “flying blind” about the impact of new immigration policies because coronavirus restrictions mean that the country’s methods of quantifying net migration are suspended or working less well than normal, a leading expert on the issue has said.
Madeleine Sumption, director of the Migration Observatory at Oxford university, said there was “absolutely massive uncertainty” about what was happening to migration in and out of the UK because of the suspension of the international passenger survey, normally the main means of gauging migrant flow.
Data collection was suspended in March last year because of the difficulty in conducting face-to-face interviews at border points during the pandemic.
Figures for new national insurance numbers, usually another important means of monitoring migration, have also been disrupted by delays in issuance during the pandemic.
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Alice Woodhouse in Hong Kong
Asia-Pacific equities gained on Friday, following on from record highs on Wall Street amid signs of improvement for the US labour market.
Japan’s Topix was up 0.9 per cent, the Kospi in South Korea rose 0.8 per cent and the S&P/ASX 200 climbed 1 per cent in Australia.
US stocks hit a new high on Thursday with the S&P 500 closing 1.1 per cent higher and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite adding 1.2 per cent. Those gains came amid strong earnings and as new US jobless claims fell to the lowest since November.
Kiran Stacey in Washington
The US drugs regulator is drawing up new rules which could make it faster to approve treatments and vaccines for new variants of Covid-19, the agency said on Thursday.
New, more infectious variants have spread rapidly in recent months across many countries as the virus adapts to greater levels of immunity among populations. One of the most concerning has been the B.1.135 strain, first identified in South Africa, which scientists believe is more resistant to both vaccines and antibody treatments.
Janet Woodcock, the acting commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said on Thursday the regulator would consider relaxing its usual authorisation rules to make it faster to approve vaccines and treatments targeted specifically at those strains.
The FDA has so far insisted that vaccine makers undertake months of Phase 3 clinical trials before being authorised. But Woodcock said on Thursday the agency was considering loosening those demands when evaluating vaccines that were based on existing technology but specifically targeted the new variants.
She said: “Our teams are currently deliberating and discussing the types of data needed to support changes in the composition of the vaccine, either through altering the existing vaccine or through the addition of new vaccine component(s), including how sponsors could demonstrate immune response to new variants through streamlined clinical programs that still gather the crucial data the FDA needs to demonstrate effectiveness, but can be executed quickly to gather this data.”
She added: “We do not believe there will be the need to start at square one with any of these products — we recognise we are in a pandemic and we need to arm health care providers with the most appropriate tools to fight this pandemic on the frontlines. We do not want to create obstacles to getting these tools to the frontlines.”
Hannah Kuchler in New York
Johnson & Johnson has filed an application for emergency use authorisation for its Covid-19 vaccine, putting the company one step closer to getting the first single shot vaccine in the US.
The world’s largest healthcare company said it expected to supply 100m doses to the US government in the first half of the year, boosting supplies and speeding up the rollout.
Last week, J&J published interim data that showed its vaccine had a 66 per cent efficacy rate, lower than the first shots approved from BioNTech/Pfizer and Moderna, but still far above the minimum threshold of 50 per cent set by the US regulator.
Paul Stoffels, J&J’s chief scientific officer, said the company was working with “great urgency” to make the vaccine available “as quickly as possible”.
Shares in J&J added 1.1 per cent in after market trading in New York.
Hannah Kuchler in New York
Gilead generated almost $2bn in revenue from its Covid-19 drug in the fourth quarter, helping the US biotech’s sales soar 26 per cent and beat expectations.
The World Health Organization has recommended against the use of Veklury, the drug for Covid-19 also known as remdesivir, arguing it does not improve survival rates or other outcomes.
But Daniel O’Day, Gilead chief executive, said it has been widely adopted in the US. “Gilead continues to play a central role in the pandemic, with Veklury now treating one in two hospitalised patients in the US,” he said.
Shares in Gilead gained 2.3 per cent in after-hours trading when the company reported total revenue of $7.4bn, compared with the average analyst estimate of $7.3bn. Veklury sales contributed $1.9bn. Adjusted earnings of were $2.19 a share higher than the consensus forecast of $2.15. Net income fell 42 per cent to $1.6bn.
The California-based company now forecasts 2021 product sales — including Veklury — to be between $23.7bn and $25.1bn. For the full year, it expects adjusted earnings of between $6.75 and $7.45 a share.
Jude Webber in Mexico City
Mexico should follow the US lead and allow all migrants, regardless of their immigration status, to be vaccinated against Covid-19, the International Rescue Committee urged.
“The virus does not discriminate between nationality,” Raymundo Tamayo, the IRC’s country director in Mexico, told the Financial Times. “In the case of the global Covid-19 pandemic and public health crisis, there cannot be any distinction of nationality. Everyone physically in the county is an opportunity to slow down the spread of the virus.”
The US Department of Homeland Security this week said it was “committed to ensuring that every individual who needs a vaccine can get one, regardless of their immigration status”.
Mexico has promised a universal, free vaccination programme but has not specified whether migrants in the country – most of them Central American but also including Haitians, Africans, Cubans and others – will be eligible.
Tamayo said he was preparing to discuss the issue with the foreign and interior ministries. Mexico prides itself on its human rights-based foreign policy. “We will appeal to their humanitarian and human rights principles,” he said. “Let’s lead by example.”
Tamayo said migrants should not jump the queue but should be inoculated when Mexicans of the same age have access to the vaccine.
Mexico this week launched an online registration for over-60s to sign up for the vaccine but it crashed immediately. It requires people to enter their population identification, known as CURP, which undocumented migrants do not have.
“We want to make sure that people who don’t have a CURP, regardless of their immigration status, can sign up with any document that accredits their age,” Tamayo said.
Mexico, with a population of 126m, has so far applied 686,601 does of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine. It expects to ramp up vaccinations with more BioNTech/Pfizer supplies as well as the Oxford/AstraZeneca jab, Sputnik V from Russia and China’s CanSino.
Mexico expects to have just over 174m doses of different vaccines by the end of the year to vaccinate nearly 105m people.
A car stolen from a vaccination site in Florida had vials of the coronavirus shot inside, prompting a nationwide alert in search of the vehicle. Police in Plant City, Florida, said the suspect drove off in the 2018 Hyundai Accent on Wednesday.
Northern Ireland will give students a one-off cash payment of £500 in compensation for the disruption they have suffered during the pandemic, as coronavirus restrictions force most universities in the UK to continue running classes remotely.
New, more infectious Covid-19 variants — including those first identified in the UK and South Africa — have risen to 14 per cent of infections in France from 3.3 per cent on January 8, French prime minister Jean Castex announced on Thursday.
Pakistani cleric Maulana Tahir Ashrafi, who serves as an adviser to Prime Minister Imran Khan, has taken the unusual step of issuing a fatwa, or religious decree, urging Pakistanis to ignore calls to refuse Covid-19 jabs. “I just want people to know there is nothing wrong with taking coronavirus vaccines,” he said.
Ralph Lauren reported a bigger-than-expected sales drop as the US retailer was hit by coronavirus-driven restrictions in Europe and Japan. Fiscal third-quarter revenues fell 18 per cent from a year ago to $1.43bn, just shy of Wall Street expectations for $1.46bn, according to a Refinitiv survey.
New US jobless claims dropped to their lowest level since November. First-time applications for unemployment benefits totalled a seasonally adjusted 779,000 last week, the Department of Labor said on Thursday, compared with economists’ forecast for 830,000.
Tapestry, the luxury conglomerate behind Coach and Kate Spade, has eked out an increase in quarterly profits thanks to limited discounts and strong demand for high-end handbags online and from China. The New York-based group generated net income of $311m in the three months to December 26, a year-on-year increase of 4 per cent.
Quest Diagnostics, the largest laboratory company in the US, plans to return more money to shareholders after reporting record profits thanks to surging demand for Covid-19 test processing. The New Jersey-based company raised its quarterly dividend 10.7 per cent and increased its share buyback authorisation by $1bn after higher demand for virus tests pushed up its fourth-quarter sales 56 per cent to $3bn.
The Bank of England announced on Thursday that it would put active preparations in place so that it could set negative interest rates within six months, but stressed that this was not a signal that its Monetary Policy Committee thought such a move was necessary.
Clorox raised its full-year profit and sales guidance as demand for its bleach and disinfectant wipes remained buoyant amid a pandemic-induced cleaning boom. The US company’s net sales rose 27 per cent to $1.87bn year on year in the three months to the end of December, its fiscal second quarter.
Anxiety levels in the UK population hit a record high during the first national lockdown last year, official figures showed on Thursday. Overall wellbeing fell sharply and, while it improved later in the summer as social activities resumed, even then it remained well below pre-pandemic levels on all measures.
UK consumer spending remained depressed as lockdown measures dragged on in January. Spending on credit and debit cards in the week to January 28 was 32 per cent below its average level last February, and had risen only slightly since the start of England’s third lockdown, according to Bank of England figures.
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