Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
How To Step Up?: Silicon Valley Looks At Dozens Of Ways To Use Talents During Unprecedented Challenge
Silicon Valley’s technology whizzes are mobilized to fight the coronavirus, trying to hack everything from disease modeling to elder care and medical-device manufacturing. Yet it isn’t clear how best to apply the industry’s talents for on-the-fly innovation to a fast-moving pandemic, or whether the U.S.’s wellspring of disruption can make major contributions to solving society’s biggest crisis in decades. Thousands of volunteers from the tech world have begun pitching in on hundreds of hastily assembled projects over the past two weeks, as the virus ravaged Europe and spread in the U.S. (Fitch, Winkler and Seetharaman, 3/25)
The coronavirus crisis could have an unexpected consequence: A truce between Big Tech and politicians in Brussels, Paris and Berlin. Last week, Netflix, Google, Facebook and others agreed to reduce the quality of their videos to avoid internet congestion in Europe. According to Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton, this could be a turning point in how big platforms behave in the future. (Kayali, 3/25)
Elected officials are figuring out Zoom just like the rest of us. Some of the most important legislation states and cities enact to fight the coronavirus pandemic will be passed on grainy video chats or glitchy conference calls, using processes that have never been tested. (Brown, 3/26)
A group of 32 U.S. states have a message for the nation’s leading online platforms: You are not doing enough to stop price gouging amid the coronavirus crisis. In a letter sent on Wednesday to Amazon.com Inc, Walmart Inc, Facebook Inc and eBay Inc a bipartisan group of U.S. attorneys general outlined specific steps it wants the online platforms to take to end this practice. Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro is leading the effort along with attorneys general from the states of Connecticut, Vermont and New Mexico. (Bose, 3/25)
Twitter on Wednesday temporarily locked the account of a conservative website after it promoted an article suggesting that the medical community should consider intentionally infecting people with the coronavirus at “chickenpox parties” to help slow the spread of the virus. The article, titled “How Medical ‘Chickenpox Parties’ Could Turn The Tide Of The Wuhan Virus,” argued that a “controlled voluntary infection” program could allow young people to return to work after contracting and recovering from the virus. (Levenson, 3/25)
