Board statement The board of FairWarning, a nonprofit devoted to alerting the public to hazardous consumer products and unjust corporate practices, has decided to dissolve the charitable nonprofit as of Feb. 20, 2021. This step is taken with regret as the small journalism nonprofit has devoted the last 11 years to protecting the public from harms to their health and safety. Circumstances beyond the board’s control have unfairly damaged FairWarning’s reputation and made it difficult to carry on a small-budget news organization dependent on charitable donations. The board wishes to thank the don ..read more

Hannah-Beth Jackson with a friend Amid growing calls for women on corporate boards, and headlines about corporate wrongdoing like the sexual harassment scandals at Google, California’s 662 publicly traded companies have added 669 women to their boards in the past two years. While that’s an impressive jump in women on boards, the companies didn’t do it because it suddenly struck them as a great idea. This sea change is driven by California Senate Bill 826, which took effect in 2019 and requires many of the West Coast’s most powerful corporate boards to give seats to women. And now, under the ..read more

An old residential building in Manhattan (Maciej_Bledowski/iStock) Lindsey first noticed the symptoms in mid-December. Her wife was even sicker, with a high fever. Six days later, testing confirmed it: they both had Covid. Lindsey knew she had to tell the neighbors upstairs. The two apartments share a thermostat and heating system in a five-unit, 1920s-era brick building in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C. Cooking smells from above frequently infiltrate their apartment, and Lindsey (whose name has been changed; she agreed to speak on condition of anonymity) was concerned she and her wif ..read more

Less bad: News about the pandemic is better, or at least less bad. In most areas of the country, new Covid infections and hospitalizations have dropped sharply from their early January peaks, leading indicators of a probable decline in deaths in the coming days. Even so, at least 1,547 people in the U.S. died of the coronavirus yesterday, according to The New York Times. And progress could stall with the spread of new virus variants, the easing of restrictions, and the possible impact of  Super Bowl gatherings. Following Sunday night’s victory by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, thousands o ..read more

Boosting the vaccine arsenal: Johnson & Johnson has applied to the Food and Drug Administration for emergency authorization to roll out its single-dose vaccine, with the first shipments possible by early March, The New York Times reports. The application followed a promising clinical trial in the U.S., Latin America and South Africa that found the vaccine was 85 percent effective in preventing severe infections in all three regions. While not as far along, the vaccine developed by AstraZeneca PLC and the University of Oxford was shown effective against a highly transmissible vari ..read more

In 2015, Nam Hyun Lee, a South Korean living in Southern California, got into the lucrative business of making herbal, over-the-counter sex supplements for men. He put an aggressive-looking rhinoceros on the label, and over the next several years shipped 10,000 capsules of “Rhino 69 9000” or “Rhino 8 8000” to distributors in Maryland and Texas, according an indictment by a federal grand jury in Santa Ana, California. Lee is now awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty to illegally importing bulk quantities of prescription drugs and faces up to three years in prison. But he was just one of man ..read more

“Frankly horrifying”: The Latino death rate in Los Angeles County has increased by over 1000 percent since November, from adaily average of 3.5 deaths to 40 deaths per 100,000 residents, Rong-Gong Lin II and Luke Money report for the Los Angeles Times. “Our Latinx community is, in fact, bearing the worst of this pandemic,” said L.A. County Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer. Death rates are going up for all racial groups: In early January, an average of 12 per 100,000 Asian residents were dying each day, up from 1 per day in November. During that same time period, the daily death rate of wh ..read more

One shot: A single dose coronavirus vaccine from Johnson & Johnson will soon be in front of the Food and Drug Administration, and could get emergency authorization in February, The New York Times reports. However, the efficacy of the vaccine dropped from 72 percent in the U.S. to 57 percent when tested in South Africa, where a new, extra-contagious Covid variant is rampant. Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna also say that their vaccines are less effective against this variant, which has spread to more than 30 countries, including the U.S. It’s another reason to vaccinate the U.S. population as qu ..read more

Black Plague tea. Biomagnetism treatment. Ozone therapy. Although authorities are trying to crack down, bogus Covid-19 promotions like these are still going strong, as frightened consumers seek out and fall prey to sham treatments and cures. Televangelist Jim Bakker was ordered by the  the New York State attorney general and the Food and Drug Administration to stop making misleading claims about his ”Silver Solution” being a cure for the coronavirus. The Justice Department, which reported receiving more than 76,000 tips about coronavirus scams by the fall, has filed at least 33 criminal ..read more

Border security: President Biden has prohibited non-citizens who have recently been in South Africa from entering the United States in an attempt to stop the spread of a new coronavirus variant, David Shepardson reports for Reuters. Biden also reimposed an entry ban on non-U.S. travelers who have been in Brazil, the United Kingdom, Ireland, and the 26 countries in Europe that allow travel across borders. Some health officials worry that the South Africa variant, which is 50 percent more infectious, will not respond to the vaccines. While that variant has not yet been detected in the U.S., anot ..read more