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China’s Digital Yuan Reportedly to Test in Four Cities

China’s Digital Yuan Reportedly to Test in Four Cities

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Screenshots of a purported pilot version of a wallet app for China’s forthcoming digital yuan are now circulating on social media.

Screenshots of a purported pilot version of a wallet app for China’s forthcoming digital yuan are circulating on social media.

Ling Zhang, executive director of M&A, Global Fiat, at cryptocurrency exchange Binance first shared the images on April 14, later retweeted by the exchange’s CEO, Changpeng Zhao. 

Screenshot ostensibly showing a new testing wallet app for the digital yuan

Screenshot ostensibly showing a new testing wallet app for the digital yuan. Source: @lingzh1220

Four cities selected for the trial

According to Ling Zhang, the app is available for download in four cities selected for the initial trial — Shenzhen, Chengdu, Suzhou and Xiongan. She highlights the inclusion of Xiongan, a new metropolis located on the outskirts of Beijing, which has been the site of a so-dubbed “smart city brain project.” 

The Xiongan New Area will have enhanced intelligent infrastructure that spans satellite information services, sensor recognition, a 5G network, supercomputing and big data facilities. The city has already attracted the country's tech giants Tencent, Alibaba, JD.com and Baidu, with President Xi Jinping visiting on more than one occasion.

Commenting on the screenshots, CZ remarked on China’s apparent “execution speed” in rolling out its trial for the central bank digital currency.

Ahead of the game

As recently reported, China appears to have been accelerating the development of the digital yuan, notwithstanding the COVID-19 crisis.

On March 24, the Bank of China was alleged to have completed the development of the currency’s basic functions and to have already moved on to drafting laws for its implementation.

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Caitlin Clark, Coach Prime, and Linsanity: The Anatomy of a Viewership ‘Craze’

This is a trying time for sports on television as the industry fights the headwinds of cord-cutting and media fragmentation. Television networks and leagues…

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This is a trying time for sports on television as the industry fights the headwinds of cord-cutting and media fragmentation. Television networks and leagues have taken measures that just a short time ago would have been considered extreme, desperate, or some combination of the two: an In-Season Tournament in the NBA; MLB in an Iowa cornfield; NASCAR inside the L.A. Coliseum. These efforts have been met with moderate success from a viewership standpoint, but they are not the type of needle-movers that drastically impact viewership in the aggregate. That type of shift requires a unicorn, and the last year has featured two: Caitlin Clark and Deion Sanders.

Clark has spent the past season breaking records on and off the court. Her Iowa Hawkeyes played in two of the four most watched college basketball games this season — regardless of gender. Both her record-breaking game against Ohio State and Big Ten Tournament championship win against Nebraska attracted over three million viewers. Only two men’s games, a Thanksgiving NFL lead-out between Michigan State and Arizona on FOX (5.18m), and a Duke-UNC game on ESPN (3.08m) also eclipsed the three million mark. Clark’s Big Ten Tournament semifinal against Michigan was the most watched women’s sporting event ever measured on Big Ten Network (1.08m). The championship game on CBS was the network’s most watched college basketball game of the year, men’s or women’s (pending results from this past weekend).

Of the six most watched women’s college basketball games this year, Clark played in five. Last year’s LSU-Iowa championship game delivered 9.9m viewers, the most ever for a women’s college game in the Nielsen people-meter era (dates back to 1988). The list could go on.

Deion Sanders — aka Coach Prime — transcended the sport of college football for a moment last fall. On his way to becoming Sports Illustrated Sportsperson of the Year, the Prime-fueled Colorado Buffaloes played in five of the fifteen most-watched regular season games of the year, more than any other school. Through the first five weeks of the season, Colorado played in either the first or second most-watched game of the week. Incredibly, that includes a Week 3 game against Colorado State that averaged 9.3 million viewers on ESPN, despite not kicking off until after 10 PM ET. That game drew four million more viewers than the second-most watched game that week, Georgia-South Carolina in the afternoon window on CBS. All of this for a team that won just one game the previous season.

Such viewership anomalies do not happen in a bubble; they are products of larger, media-driven forces. Think of last summer’s “Barbenheimer” craze for instance. Those two blockbuster films almost single-handedly lifted the box office from its pandemic-era depths. As many Hollywood analysts pointed out, the organic social media trend spurred from the strange juxtaposition of both movies being released on the same day led them to sell more tickets. Established media operations then picked up the story and fed into the trend. Social media isn’t always wagging the tail of traditional media, it can go both ways. The key to a true ‘craze’ however, is breaking through everywhere, no matter the media one consumes.

Maybe the most comparable sports craze in recent memory to the Clark-Sanders charged viewership of this past year is Linsanity. For a few weeks in 2012, New York Knicks guard Jeremy Lin broke out in a series of masterful performances that captured the imagination of the basketball world. Lin helped MSG Network improve its ratings by 82% through mid-February compared to the previous season — an absurd jump. However, Linsanity is perhaps also the most illustrative of another key factor in these viewership crazes: by definition, they are fleeting.

A look at Google search trends (below) puts these anomalies into perspective. Linsanity lasted about three weeks. Prime Time at Colorado was able to break through for about a month. Clark’s 2023 spike held for a few weeks in March, though her spike started much earlier this season, beginning to trend up in January. The lesson here, these massive viewership crazes are nice to have, can potentially raise the floor of a sport on the margins, but cannot be relied on for sustained viewership long term.

Caitlin Clark

Deion Sanders

Jeremy Lin

This isn’t to say these anomalies are without value. Networks have realized that facilitating these crazes help maintain healthy viewership in a difficult television environment. Thus, manufacturing these short-lived spikes could prove to be a key component of network’s strategies into the future. Last year for instance, FOX sent its Big Noon Kickoff show to a Colorado game four of the first five weeks of the season to help jump-start the Deion Sanders media blitz. ESPN’s College GameDay also setup shop in Boulder for the Week 3 game against Colorado State, the same week CBS’s 60 Minutes aired a Deion Sanders story.

As for Clark, ESPN recently announced that for the first time, it will embed a reporter (Holly Rowe) with Iowa for the team’s upcoming NCAA Tournament run. FOX gave Clark special treatment as well. When the network aired Caitlin Clark games this season, they would have her stat line permanently fixed on the scorebug. They livestreamed a “Caitlin Clark Cam” on TikTok. FOX even reportedly offered Clark an NIL package to incentivize her to play in college another year.

Of course, these crazes cannot solely be manufactured by the networks. There must be some truly organic interest in the subject for any of this to be possible. Between Clark and Sanders, there’s evidence to suggest that such crazes are becoming more frequent. Two in one year is notable when the last similar instance was Linsanity in 2012. This is partly due to the networks’ willingness to feed into these stories, though the growing desire in public life for shared experiences should not be discounted either.

Record-setting viewership has become commonplace for sporting events that have found ways to break into the monoculture. To be sure, some of that is because of Nielsen’s changes to out-of-home viewing measurements, though arguably the reason a property like the NFL has been so successful lately is because of its ubiquity in American life. Clark and Sanders have been able to simulate similar far-reaching appeal to generate viewership, albeit for shorter periods of time, and orders of magnitude smaller than the NFL.

A level of cultish personality, elite talent, or both seems prerequisite for a viewership craze to start. The level to which television networks will find ways to capitalize on these circumstances in the future remains to be seen. As traditional media fights for survival, with live sports as a main component, replicating Clark or Sanders-esque media booms may well become a substantial part of the formula. The next few years will be telling about how much influence traditional media still has in its agenda-setting role, and how far they’ll be willing to go to facilitate a media-induced frenzy.

The post Caitlin Clark, Coach Prime, and Linsanity: The Anatomy of a Viewership ‘Craze’ appeared first on Sports Media Watch.

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Gates-backed PhIII study tuberculosis vaccine study gets underway

A large study of an experimental vaccine for the world’s biggest infectious disease has finally kicked off in South Africa.
The Bill & Melinda Gates…

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A large study of an experimental vaccine for the world’s biggest infectious disease has finally kicked off in South Africa.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Medical Research Institute (MRI) will test a tuberculosis vaccine’s ability to prevent latent infections from causing potentially deadly lung disease. Last summer the nonprofit said it would foot $400 million of the estimated $550 million cost of running the 20,000-person Phase III trial.

It’s a pivotal moment for a vaccine whose origins date back 25 years when scientists identified two proteins that triggered strong immunity to the bacterium that causes tuberculosis. A fusion of those proteins, paired with the tree bark-derived adjuvant that helps power GSK’s shingles shot, comprise the so-called M72 vaccine.

Thomas Scriba

After decades of failures in the field, the vaccine impressed scientists in 2018 when GSK found that it was 54% efficacious at preventing lung disease in a 3,600-person Phase IIb study.

But the Big Pharma decided that a full-blown trial was too expensive to conduct on its own. Gates MRI stepped in to license the vaccine in early 2020, right before the Covid pandemic shifted global vaccine priorities towards the coronavirus, further stalling the tuberculosis shot.

“There’s been frustration that it’s taken so long to get this trial up and running,” Thomas Scriba, deputy director of immunology for the South African Tuberculosis Vaccine Initiative, told Endpoints News last summer.

At last, the vaccine is getting a chance to prove itself in a bigger study. If successful, it could lead to the first new shot for tuberculosis in over a century.

Emilio Emini, CEO of the Gates MRI, told Endpoints that the initial results may come in roughly four to six years. “Hopefully this will galvanize a refocus on TB,” he said. “It’s been ignored for many, many years. We can’t ignore it anymore.”

A substantial impact

Even though an existing vaccine helps protect babies and children against severe tuberculosis, the bacterium responsible for the disease still causes roughly 10 million new cases and 500,000 deaths each year.

Emilio Emini

By vaccinating adolescents and adults who test positive for infections but don’t have symptoms of lung disease, the Gates MRI hopes the shot will help prevent mild infections from becoming severe ones, curtail transmission of the bug, which is predominantly driven by people with lung disease, and reduce deaths.

“The impact would be substantial,” Emini said. But he cautioned that the biology behind mild and severe diseases is still mysterious. “The reality is that no one really knows what keeps it under control.”

The study, which will take place at 60 sites across seven countries, will include some people who are not infected with tuberculosis to ensure that the vaccine is safe in that broader population.

“Having to pre-test everybody is not going to make the vaccine easy to deliver,” Emini said. If the vaccine is ultimately approved, it will likely be used in targeted communities with high tuberculosis, rather than across a whole country, he added. “In practice, you would immunize everybody in those populations.”

Emini described the Gates MRI’s rights to the vaccine as “close to a worldwide license.” GSK retained rights to commercialize the vaccine in certain countries but declined to specify which ones.

A spokesperson for GSK said that the company “has around 30 assets under development specifically for global health … none of which are expected to generate significant return on investment.”

“It is not sustainable or practical in the longer term for GSK to deliver all of these alone. So we continue to work on M72, but in partnership with others,” the spokesperson added.

If the shot works, Emini said that the Gates MRI will sublicense it to a manufacturer that will be responsible for making and marketing the vaccine. The details are still being worked out, he noted.

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Choosing over the counter drugs for COVID 19? It’s complicated

COVID-19 illness may include symptoms such as a sore throat, fever, cough and fatigue. In January, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention…

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COVID-19 illness may include symptoms such as a sore throat, fever, cough and fatigue. In January, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued its most recent guidelines for the use of over the counter (OTC) drugs for COVID-19. Specifically, its guidelines state that most people with COVID-19 have mild illness and can recover at home while treating symptoms with OTC medicines such as acetaminophen (Tylenol) or ibuprofen (Motrin, Advil). 

Credit: Florida Atlantic University

COVID-19 illness may include symptoms such as a sore throat, fever, cough and fatigue. In January, the United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued its most recent guidelines for the use of over the counter (OTC) drugs for COVID-19. Specifically, its guidelines state that most people with COVID-19 have mild illness and can recover at home while treating symptoms with OTC medicines such as acetaminophen (Tylenol) or ibuprofen (Motrin, Advil). 

Researchers from Florida Atlantic University’s Schmidt College of Medicine and academic colleagues say it’s more complicated. They suggest that selecting an OTC medication to alleviate mild symptoms of COVID-19 should be based on the entire benefit-to-risk profile of the patient. Moreover, they say clinical decisions should be made by the health care provider for each of his or her patients.

In a review, published in The American Journal of Medicine, researchers take a closer look at both the potential benefits and risks of acetaminophen, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) – such as ibuprofen, as well as aspirin for the selection of OTC drugs to treat mild symptoms of COVID-19.

Traditional nonspecific NSAIDs such as the shorter acting ibuprofen and longer acting naproxen have been used to treat COVID-19. These widely used OTC drugs reversibly and non-specifically inhibit both cyclooxygenase enzyme isoforms. This results in systematic reduction in the synthesis of prostaglandins resulting in anti-inflammatory and fever-reducing effects. The researchers caution, however, that both ibuprofen and naproxen have similar but greater side effect profiles than aspirin, such as gastroenteritis and peptic ulcers.

Acetaminophen is one of the most frequently used OTC drugs in the U.S. and worldwide as a treatment for fever, allergic symptoms, headaches, myalgia, symptoms of the common cold, and most recently COVID-19. Acetaminophen was originally marketed as an alternative to aspirin for treatment of mild to moderate pain based on reduced mucosal gastrointestinal side effects. The authors caution that even at daily doses of 4,000 milligrams per day, generally accepted as safe for adults, acetaminophen can be toxic to the liver and may result in the onset of acute liver failure. In the U.S., acetaminophen is the leading reason for calls to Poison Control Centers with more than 100,000 cases per year. These circumstances account for more than 2,600 hospitalizations and 450 deaths in the U.S. due to acute liver failure. 

Aspirin, or acetylsalicylic acid, inhibits the production of prostaglandins, which are responsible for mediating pain, inflammation and fever. The authors say that the beneficial effects of aspirin include anti-platelet, analgesic, antipyretic or anti-fever and anti-inflammatory properties. Aspirin is rapidly absorbed when taken orally and has a half-life of around four hours, after which it is mostly metabolized by the kidneys.

The researchers note that the anti-inflammatory benefits of aspirin should provide symptomatic relief of fever and body aches in COVID-19. They underscore, however, that health providers should view these in the context of the increased risks of bleeding, principally gastrointestinal. Further, COVID-19 itself may already predispose individuals to bleeding as well as to clotting abnormalities.

“We believe that health care providers should make individual clinical judgments for each of his or her patients in the selection of OTC drugs to treat symptoms of COVID-19. This judgement should be based on the entire benefit to risk profile of the patient,” said Charles H. Hennekens, M.D., Dr.PH, senior author, first Sir Richard Doll Professor and senior academic advisor in FAU’s Schmidt College of Medicine. “It is our belief that the individual health care provider knows far more about each of his or her patients than anyone, including expert members of guideline committees.”

The authors conclude that when the totality of evidence is complete, health care providers can make the most rational individual clinical judgements for their patients and policymakers for the health of the general public.

The authors believe that, at present, the totality of evidence is incomplete and requires reliable evidence from large- scale randomized trials designed a priori to do so, which is necessary to develop rational guidelines. They also believe that any guidelines should provide only guidance to health care providers. Currently, these considerations pose new clinical challenges for health care providers in prescribing OTC drugs to treat COVID-19. 

“The astute and judicious individual clinical decision making of health care providers for each individual patient based on all these considerations has the potential to do far more good than harm. Finally, guidelines should provide guidance to individual health care providers,” said Hennekens.

Study co-authors are Gage Collamore, a second-year medical student; Mark J. DiCorcia, Ph.D., an associate professor and associate dean for educational affairs and admissions; Yash Nagpal, a second-year medical student; and Larry Fiedler, M.D., a board certified gastroenterologist and an affiliate associate professor, all within FAU’s Schmidt College of Medicine; Michael A. Garone, M.D., a board-certified gastroenterologist and clinical assistant professor at George Washington University Hospital; and David L. DeMets, Ph.D., emeritus Halperin Professor and founding chair of biostatistics and informatics; and Dennis G. Maki, M.D., the Ovid O. Meyer Professor of Medicine; both at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.

Hennekens and Maki served for two years as lieutenant commanders in the U.S. Public Health Service as epidemic intelligence service (EIS) officers with the CDC. They served under Alexander D. Langmuir, M.D., who created the EIS and directed the epidemiology program at the CDC, as well as Donald A. Henderson, M.D., chief of the Virus Disease Surveillance Program at the CDC. Langmuir and Henderson made significant contributions to the eradication of polio and smallpox using widespread vaccinations and public health strategies of proven benefit and had extraordinary collaborations with local, state, federal and international health authorities.   

– FAU –

About the Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine:

FAU’s Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine is one of approximately 157 accredited medical schools in the U.S. The college was launched in 2010, when the Florida Board of Governors made a landmark decision authorizing FAU to award the M.D. degree. After receiving approval from the Florida legislature and the governor, it became the 134th allopathic medical school in North America. With more than 70 full and part-time faculty and more than 1,300 affiliate faculty, the college matriculates 64 medical students each year and has been nationally recognized for its innovative curriculum. To further FAU’s commitment to increase much needed medical residency positions in Palm Beach County and to ensure that the region will continue to have an adequate and well-trained physician workforce, the FAU Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine Consortium for Graduate Medical Education (GME) was formed in fall 2011 with five leading hospitals in Palm Beach County. The Consortium currently has five Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) accredited residencies including internal medicine, surgery, emergency medicine, psychiatry, and neurology.

 

About Florida Atlantic University:
Florida Atlantic University, established in 1961, officially opened its doors in 1964 as the fifth public university in Florida. Today, the University serves more than 30,000 undergraduate and graduate students across six campuses located along the southeast Florida coast. In recent years, the University has doubled its research expenditures and outpaced its peers in student achievement rates. Through the coexistence of access and excellence, FAU embodies an innovative model where traditional achievement gaps vanish. FAU is designated a Hispanic-serving institution, ranked as a top public university by U.S. News & World Report and a High Research Activity institution by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. For more information, visit www.fau.edu.


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