Senate GOP’s Dilemma as Democrats Side With Trump

us too on YouTube by searching Bloomberg Global News. You know, I think the discussion point of the day for this pandemic has been the vaccines, the distribution and availability of the vaccines and how quickly is that occurring? Uh? And then once we do get the vaccines, how are people reacting? So let's get the latest. We can do that with our good friend Dr Ian LUs Bader. Uh. He comes on our show often to give us the latest intelligence.

Dr LUs Beder is a clinical Associate Professor of medicine at the n y U Lane Going Medical Center. Joining us on the phone from New York City. Dr los Beder, thanks again for joining us. I understand you took the vaccine. Did you tell us about your experience taking a vaccine and then maybe any side effects you may have had. Absolutely, Paul and Alex, thanks for having me on UM. The vaccine really for me was not that at all. That was the last week, last Wednesday, and there is for

many of my colleagues who took them. Uh. They were about a hundred and fifty people that day. Uh here at the n y U Center for Men's Health, and we've done you know, several thousand really throughout the city. Usually it's a localized pain, very similar to a flu shot, so you have some soreness at the site, usually for twenty four sometimes a little bit more than that. Um. I didn't even take Thailand all, so I was sort

of underwhelmed. But remember that's the first shot. Many people seemed to have a little bit more of a side effect after the second shot. And colleagues of mine who who are physicians, who had COVID and appropriately said, you know where we know the vaccine gives us higher antibodies for a longer period of time. Several of them also took the vaccine, which was appropriate. A couple of them actually seem to have a little more severe reaction of

some fevers and some eggs. So it does seem perhaps that in the people who have had COVID who take a vaccine, again that's appropriate. We think it does boost your you know, the length of the immune response, they seem to have a little bit of a harder time with it. Interesting, I think the first I've heard of that one UM technical question. So you're going to get your vaccine, How did you know when to get it, where to go? How do you know when to get

back for your second doze? And I know that you might be in a different situation because you're working on when you land going and you're a doctor, but I'm trying to understand, like where the issue is with getting the shot in people's arms. So you're you're totally right that we all need to do to kind of role this out more. We can talk about that, but at least it didn't why you UM, I think it's really quite efficient. Almost everyone is on an electronic medical record

system is called my chart. Everyone has a record. You're pinned when they when your shot is available, You then schedule a date and time show up for it. Sometimes there's a bit of a wait, you know, everything does not go off exactly on schedule. UM, but it was very uh, pretty seamless, I must say. You know, first day there was a real surge of physicians and nurses, and we continue, you know, to bring people in and so really the chart notifies you when you're ready, It

notifies you to make a date. Hopefully you show up for that and then you have the staff available, uh, you know, to give it to you. Uh. And generally this is daytime hours. Some sites are running on Saturday. Uh. So basically as many as can be scheduled during that essentially eight to like that time frame, uh is done.

So is the expectation doctor that as we get this to more broad rollout the city to some degree for posts, spokes for people in New York City, the city will have you know, the sourcing of the batches and then we'll allocate them to various distribution places, whether it's a hospital or doctor's office. Yes, that's exactly it. We've already had a lot of doses allocated. I think New York State is somewhere around nine thousand doses in the city.

It's only been about fifty five thousand. This is what I'm hearing from, you know, the sources shots actually given so far, and I think total New York State is about nineties thousand, So there is a gap between what is available and actually physically giving those shots out. And you know, at one point we heard about the military or other people doing it. To my knowledge, that's not happening. The medical centers and offices are giving it out, you

know as hubs. It it comes to a hub, especially because of the refrigeration that's needed, so they're sort of come to a main hub like n YU. They're then distributed to several sites under normal refrigeration, and then you have X amount of time to distribute them and basically on a daily basis, they are courier to the to the sites when they're then distributed throughout the day. So it is not the you know, logistics I think are

slowing this up a little bit. It's not those lines of people waiting in the old days for mass vaccinations. Uh even you know, whether it's at CBS where you know people would just come in because of you know, restrictions and scheduling, it's going to be unfortunately a slower process. But that's my take on it. When we start vaccinating the ordinary population how are those people going to get that information? Is their primary care physition, They're gonna have

a number, what has it work? So it's unlikely it's going to be a while before the primary care for positions are doing it. Once we get the the healthcare providers vaccinated, uh and this is according to our you know, more senior administrators. Once the doctors and nurses and frontline people uh in the I c U s and so forth get the shots, and we're in the process of doing that. The next group my understanding is sixty five

and older. And at least for the patients who are on the my chart system at n y U H they will receive an electronic messages. Often they communicate. Just as patients can reach me by sending me a message, n y U sends out this sort of mass information here. The people who meet the criteria, they then schedule an appointment, and I believe some of them will be at this office,

at this hub where we do have the vaccine. They will have to schedule it and then they will come in and you know, uh, not past a certain amount product. So still with us. Dr Ian les Beda, a clinical associate professor of medicine over at m yu Land Going Medical Center. We were just talking about was light to get a vaccine, how you wind up blending up people to get their shot, how that's all going to work.

But it's like we're getting ahead of ourselves, doctor, because first we're dealing with the virus that's in the here and then now. And that brings me to the new strain that we saw in the UK and it seems to be spreading all over the world. What do we know about that new strain? But we certainly know that in the UK they identify this and we also know that viruses mutate. We see that with the influenza virus. You know that we need a new vaccine every year

because there's significant mutations. In this case, we think there are probably several reasons why the virus mutates. Already, there have been a number of mutations somewhere in the range of fourteen ors so, and likely that is due to a selective pressure. Uh. If the virus is too deadly, h you kill off your host and that's not good for the virus. So if you can increase transmissive ability, in other words, make it easier to spread, great the

virus reproduces better. And if it's a little less lethal, you keep your host alive longer to infect other people. So there is this select of pressure not just for this specific coronaviruses, but many other viruses over time to become a little less a little less uh deadly. And we are seeing the case fatality rate come down a bit, but the numbers of cases and with something call they are not the number of people you can infect when

you're infected, has gone up, and that's a concern. I think we're going to see continuing rise in numbers because of that. And I think there's some evidence that that variant is here, or if not, probably will be here, even if you cut off flights. As you know, people can be asymptomatic, they can harbor it. So I think it would not be surprising to see our numbers go up in January, both due to holiday gatherings, probably as well as due to h new strains that are appearing.

So that's kind of where I wanted to go, doctor. I mean, you know, as I think back to that first wave in March and April, we were all hanging on um. It seemed like every word from Governor Cuoma and his daily press conferences and and looking at that chart and learning a new term, which is bending the curve. When do you expect that we will see a peak in new infections UH in the United States here in

this latest wave. Yeah, we unfortunately did not do a great job in UH in bending the curve, really do, for a variety of reasons, public health issues. We everyone was not worrying, you know, masks and and really doing adequate social distancing. And unfortunately, by sort of for longing this, we've paid a price, they think economically by these sort of shutdowns on and off. Again my senses, I think we're unfortunately going to peek into late January and February.

Most likely there's about a three week two three or four week allay with all of this, so I suspect that's when it will occur. We will be getting more vaccine. I think we've had a problem with distribution with the vaccine. Part of it is the sub zero fiser temperatures. I think as Maderna comes out, as astro Zeneca comes out, as J and J comes out, it will be easier

and hopefully distribution will be easier. Of course, all of this would have been easier had we had a universal health record where everyone is on the same electronic record, you can communicate with large numbers of people. Otherwise, mass vaccination is not easy to do. But my sense is that we're going to see some unfortunate numbers later in January. Real quick, how are we doing with deaths? The case

fatality rate is down. We've changed our approach to treating people, were often less aggressive and putting people on ventilators, So that's the good news. The problem is a surge where you can overwhelm hospitals and that looks like that may be happening in various areas, which is the downside. So although case fatality is raids down, the numbers really are

climbing uncomfortably. Dr inlus Bader, thank you so much once again for joining us and sharing uh your knowledge and wisdom of as we deal with this virus and now the good news of the vaccines. Dr inlus Bator, Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine at n y u Langown Medical Center, joining us on the phone from New York City. We always appreciate the perspective from the good folks. N y uh Langgown School of Medicine. Boy A fascinating story in

the Bloomberg Business Week this week. Uh, it's about how a charity, this one in Canada, the Superstar founders, how they innovated its way to political scandal. It's a kind of just a really deep, deep story that you can sink your teeth until let's get to it. Joel Weber, Editor Bloomberg Business Week, joins us on the access line from Brooklyn and Danielle Bokov. She is the medals and

mining reporter for Bloomberg News. She is in Toronto. Joel, just a fascinating story here, how these two brothers came together, built up this really amazing philanthropic organization and then it kind of just went downhill recently tells a story. Yeah, So it's been a dramatic year for we charity and if you're if you're not familiar with us, this is like a superstar charitable organization based in Canada, and it

has has had this dramatic rise over over decades. And really if you think about where they were a year ago and where they are where they find themselves right now. I think that there's just been you know, COVID's hit everyone. Um, but I think in in particular, this organization found that it was not only derailed from its main sort of way that it would have been able to fundraise and and make money, but then on top of it, um it also found that it acquired a form of scrutiny

that it was sort of unaccustomed to. And I think that is ultimately where Dan, Danielle and Natalie's reporting in this story is so so dramatic. So Danielle, can you tell us a little bit more? And you know, one of the things that I find so interesting about this is you obviously being in Canada, what is we charity? And particularly the co founders, two brothers, the Kielburgers, what have they been known for? They're really well known here

and they have been for some time, Joel. They started out as Free of the Children, which was a charity founded when Craig Kilberger was only twelve years old to combat child slavery, so he was a child activist. And then he and his brother Mark kind of built this organization up and they moved into other work in developing countries, so building schools, providing clean water, those sorts of projects.

But they also did a lot of educational work in Canada, especially UM and and also in the United States in the UK. So you know, they would go into into classrooms, for example, and teach school children in the developed world about philanthropy and in fire them to volunteer to fundraise, often for Wee charity, but but for other causes as well. And I think what's sort of interesting is just how

encompassing their reach was. So they had a lot of big corporate donors, they had celebrity supporters, scores of school kids, and we're just sort of generally really well connected in

Canada's elite establishment, which is still pretty clubby. And then the other thing they were really famous for were these we Days, which were these kind of massive jamborees, these really feel good events at stadiums with pop stars UM where some of the school kids in the developed countries who were really involved, they were called change makers, were essentially rewarded for doing good deeds by by getting to attend.

And that that was kind of like in a nutshell, they have a complicated business model that that's kind of it in a nutshell. Yeah, And you're saying, you know, celebrity is like their mentors, by the likes of like Oprah for example, UM So what happened? Where did things go wrong this year? Yeah, so Jewel mentioned that COVID was a blow to them, me too. WE, which is the war profit arm, operates trips to countries where the

charity side does the development work. So you would have volunteers and big donors who would go and they would stay in these really kind of often quite luxurious surroundings and then maybe they'd help like biggest foundation for a school or something for a little while um or tour a community, and the revenue from those trips uh would would go into the organization and some of it would go into the charity. And obviously that was hit by COVID.

You can't travel during COVID. UM the stadium stuff was was shut down as well because those events couldn't be held. But then the other thing that happened was in June, the Canadian government under Justin Trudeau awarded WE a lucrative contract to run a program offering COVID relief grants to student volunteers. And this would have paid a lot of money, like up to thirty five million dollars, which was like, you know, equivalent to a year of corporate and foundation donation.

So it really seemed like a lifeline. But the contract was uncontested, and it turned out that Rudeau family members had been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees and expenses for past rules supporting the charity. So there were immediately accusations of conflict of interest. And in the course of that scandal, as Jewel said, you had former employees stepping forward with allegations of racism, of exploitative behavior, and just generally a lot of people started looking much

more closely at this organization. Okay, so where do we stand now for we and and what's the organization planned to do going forward? Going forward? UM, it's not entirely clear. I mean, they have said that in Canada the charity ARM is winding down. They're planning to sell they have quite an extensive real estate UM portfolio which they're planning to sell to fund an endowment that they say is going to be used to sustain their international projects. But

they are still operating the charity in the US. UM they're looking at their UK ARM right now, and so the possibility of a comeback I think, I think is not out of the question. They have they have supporters, including some wealthy ones when US down or the Stillman Family Foundation has taken out full page ads in Canadian

newspapers supporting the organization. Um, But but it's not clear and certainly, if WE doesn't survive, one of the things that makes me the most sad is that there's going to be a lot of collateral damage and communities in the developing world. Um. You know, obviously, the hope would be that some corporations that have parted ways with WE amid all of this may step into help those who

are stranded, but we just don't know yet. So so Danny, you know, one of the most interesting things, um, that I think you're reporting broad Tellite was how complicated of a business structure WE has used. It's sort of it's for profit when it wants to be, but then it's also a nonprofit when it wants to be. What did your reporting reveal about that? And then I also just want to you know, touch on you know, the Africa

element of the reporting as well. Yeah, I mean, I mean it's the story is quite long, the reporting um that that we did, and certainly Nadliobeko person it was absolutely exhaustive, but um, dozens of entities linked to the keel Burgers or to top We executive. There's a graphic in this story which was our attempt to kind of

map the connections. Um We says. The complexity has been dictated by tax laws and regulations, especially in Canada that kind of trickled down to the structure elsewhere in the world. But I mean, if you if you look at it, it is it's kind of clear as mud. Uh. Even one of their their former longtime board members in parliamentary testimony this summer said she didn't know how many entities they had, so it makes it difficult to entangle. The

accounting is also difficult to untangle. Sorry did you no? No, I think just be a run out of time here, So but I just want to thank you Danielle for that reporting and it's just a fascinating report. I urge everybody to take a look at it. The story in Bloomberg Business Week with Danielle but Cove, she is Toronto bureau chief for Bloomberg News, joining us from Toronto, and Joel Webber, editor of Bloomberg Business Week on the remote

access line from Boklan. Just a fascinating discussion, particularly those folks in Canada, but everybody, I think we'll find it very interesting. I'm Alex Steel alongside Paul Sweeney. Let's stay on tech for a second. We are joined now by Rob Licasio, founder and chief executive officer of Live Person, who joins us from Fairfield, Connecticut. Um Rob is the luddite here on the show. That's sub anchored less. What

is Live Person? So we provide the technology when you're messaging with like Delta Airlines or T Mobile and you're like messaging them for customer care and sales, and we provide the platform to provide that technology, and then we provide an AI layer to do these conversations with automation what we call chatbots. Uh Rob, I'm a stock jockey. So the first thing I do and uh I talked to a CEO as I pop up with the symbol of the company and Live Person LPs N on the

Bloomberg terminals. The stock symbol market cap for the company about a little more than four billion dollars. The stock is up sixty six percent year to date. Talk to us about how the pandemic has impacted the way your clients companies you know, you know, like like Delta airlines like David's Bridle, like the Home Depot, like Gipoltle. How has it changed how they want to interact in message

with their customers. You know, my original vision when I started the company was really about providing a digital experience, much like when you walk in the store. You walk in the store, you're talking to somebody, you can ask questions, they help you. Now, with stores being shut down during the pandemic or limited access, what happened is the acceleration of the use of our platform to recreate these store experience. But digitally is what really has driven the demand in

our business. You know, we're we're going to grow this year and we three x the number of traffic messages in traffic on our our services because consumers they still want that personal service and they can't walk into a store. So that changed the game for us with companies like Chapolti and companies like that in Home Depot, So what do you do then, with say the customers at home DEEPO in Chipotle, that you do that's different than the standard like HSBC for example, or RBS. Yes, such pulpic

was really interesting. Obviously pandemic hits. People are not walking in you know, to the stores. So how do how do we you know, really change the game there. So what we came up with was a bot called Pepper, and you communicate with Pepper through Facebook Messenger, through eye Message on Apple devices and you can start basically configuring your burrito right there and then you go to the store and they hand it to you when it to

the door. So it really solved the problem of you know, I'm not walking in I'm not I need to be socially distant. But now I can do this without having to, you know, sit in front of Robrito and have someone two feet from me. So so that's the kind of stuff we're doing. We're doing for one of the largest jewelers in the country. They got shut down too, but they wanted to create an experience where a consumer could see the product, to communicate with someone and then once

again comes to the door pick it up. Someone's buying a diamond ring. They still have a lot of questions about that. So that's really what we're we're we're powering. So Rob give us example of you know, maybe a company that came to you, uh after the pandemic hit that perhaps you hadn't seen before or you'd called on and then and they weren't interested. But they said, boy, the world has really changed. We need some AI driven messaging.

We need to up our game. Yeah, I go back to this jewel You know, Jewelry a jewelry company was the largest in the country. They we would never go after them because nor only we are powering contact centers. So we're part of these large contact centers like the Team Mobiles of the World and HSBC's and and what happened was retail and especially this jeweler. We came to us and said, look, we can't get people into the stores they want to buy jewelry. How can we create

a different experience with you? And then during the first couple of weeks we went live right after the right after Thanksgiving. We sold a couple of million dollars worth the jewelry within two weeks. So they weren't even sure themselves. We'll make an announcement the name and everything that shortly. But they weren't even sure themselves. When people buy jewelry

like this, how are they going? But they are so bought in on how this just changed the game and now they're rethinking, now, what's happened is not like, oh, we have to have our stores open or we've got to create the experience out of thinking this could be a main way in which we sell. So we're bringing video to that now too, so you can do a video conversation. And then we have all this automation, We have all the AI that will keep the consumer engaged.

So maybe they bought something, there's a follow from the I how did it work? How is the gift for your wife? And we build all of that connected tissue to create this unique consumer experience versus they went into a store, went home, and now they're on their own. They're always connected to the branch. Okay, So based on that, I mean, I get why it would work for a jeweler, right, because you're not gonna drop like thousands of dollars just by looking at something online. Right, you want to talk

to somebody. I get that. But for like a Chipotle, why wouldn't I just go to seamless and like buy it on seamless, Like there has to be some kind of barrier for entry. That makes the most sense, because first of all, Seamless is put themselves between the consumer and pultic. What do you think about it, they're in between them. They've got the relationships. Soul said, we want

to have a direct relationship with our consumers. And the other thing is that you find consumers want to ask questions versus they may just be looking at a menu, but this case they may want to ask a question about Hey, I'm a vegan, can you help me with that? And they asked different questions with the AI versus I just see stuff on a menu, I may or may not see what I like. Where is this is the beef grass fed? Is it not? And those are the types of things we can clad in. The experience is

what we call conversational commerce. So when you think about the vision of the company, is that you know, we know Alexa exists. Obviously, we've all used as so many people have. We're trying to bring that same experience to every brand in the world. What if every brand had their own Alexa and they had that you could talk to this machine and get help and get much more personal service than just a static menu. And that's the transition that's happening right now in digital commerce. Hey, Rob,

what's in the next seconds. What's the next category that you think is right for your technology where you think you can help. We we lost the bank called Bella Bank and partnership with another company and it's out there now and you go and see the Bella loves dot me and we built this AI to bring love, empathy,

trust to banking. And if you go an you download the app, there's this thing called Bella and it helps you and it it literally will like if you're getting a cup of coffee, sometimes it picks up your cup of a cup of coffee at she paid for a cup of coffee and says, look, this is on me. Maybe this will make your day brighter. And so we've built this technology because we wanted to change the banking world. Okay, that's a great that's a great thing. We just put

it out there. We now have close to eight thousand consumers that signed up in the last three weeks because they want that kind of trust and connection with something like a bank. Interesting. Interesting, Hey, Rob, thanks so much for joining us. Really interesting story. I saw your copy with public in two thousand's. You guys have been around for a long time. Good to see the company doing

well here in a very difficult environment. Rob Lacacio, founder and chief executive officer of Live Person based in Fairfield, Connecticut, just in a really extraordinary story there. Thanks so much for listening to Bloomberg Business Week. Download the podcast on iTunes, SoundCloud, or at Bloomberg dot com, and we sort of check out our daily radio show at two pm Eastern on Bloomberg Radio, and be sure to watch us too on YouTube by searching Bloomberg We Will News