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XVaccine Pause Sends LA Officials Scrambling
Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.
Los Angeles is scrambling to deal with the federal health officials' call for a pause in the use of single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccines that have helped speed up local inoculations.
L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti said city-run vaccination sites had more than 3,000 patient appointments scheduled for Tuesday that will now receive a first dose of Pfizer, instead of the planned Johnson & Johnson vaccine. It comes two days after Los Angeles County opened vaccinations to everyone 16 and older.
In Long Beach, officials said those with an appointment at mobile clinics where the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was scheduled to be given will be contacted and offered either a Pfizer and Moderna vaccination. So far, no local cases of the rare blood clotting that forced federal officials to stop use of the vaccination have been reported, Long Beach officials said in a statement.
The move comes after the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) reported six cases of blood clots among individuals who received one of the 6.8 million Johnson and Johnson vaccines distributed nationally.
Already, 900,000 of the vaccines have been distributed to people in California, making up roughly 40% of all vaccinated adults in the state. But, Gov. Gavin Newsom said on Twitter Tuesday that only 4% of the state's current supply is Johnson and Johnson.
In a joint statement, the CDC and the FDA said the recommendation to pause the vaccines was made "out of an abundance of caution." The agencies will use this time to understand and prepare treatments for these blood clots.
"The system is working as it should," said Shira Shafir, a public health professor at UCLA. "If we suspect something might be happening, then we do evaluate whether or not we have enough information."
Shafir said the CDC and FDA may decide to update recommendations to better avoid the serious blood clots. Neither agency has determined that the vaccine does cause the blood clots.
The move will largely impact vulnerable populations, such as those who are homebound or live in rural areas, or who cannot take time off work.
That's because the Johnson & Johnson vaccine did not need to be stored in sub-zero temperatures like Moderna and Pfizer vaccines and is administered in a single shot.
Get Out the Shot, a 400-person volunteer program in Los Angeles dedicated to booking vaccine appointments for people who may not have proper documentation or have a language barrier, are informing people if there is a vaccine change.
"One of the big concerns with a lot of the people that we're helping is the wage loss that accompanies time off in order to get to that vaccine appointment," said founder Liz Schwandt. "So we don't want to have to double someone's time that they have to spend away from providing care for their families or from working."
But, Schwandt said, smaller community clinics who cannot pivot quickly to a different vaccine are cancelling appointments, making it difficult for people who took time off work to recoup those lost wages.
It is unclear if this will affect California's goal of opening its economy June 15, though the California Department of Public Health said in a press release, "we do not expect a significant impact to our vaccination allocations."
Every state is allotted a certain number of the Johnson & Johnson, Moderna and Pfizer vaccines to distribute. About 4% of the state's vaccine supply for the week came from Johnson & Johnson. It's unclear what effect that will have for people getting vaccines in the future.
Garcetti said Los Angeles has received about 60,000 doses of the Moderna vaccine and 56,000 of the Pfizer vaccine this week.
A facility in Baltimore that was making AstraZeneca vaccines (which has also been linked to rare blood clots and is not authorized for use in the U.S.) is being investigated after it mixed up ingredients meant for the Johnson & Johnson vaccines. The New York Times reports the vaccines in circulation are not from that facility.
Still, Shafir said the news shouldn't deter those hesitant to receive the vaccine from scheduling an appointment. The AstraZeneca vaccine (which has also been linked to rare blood clots and is not authorized for use in the U.S.) and the Johnson & Johnson vaccine are adenovirus vector vaccines, while Moderna's and Pfizer's are mRNA vaccines.
Though the two effectively operate the same way once in the body, adenovirus vector vaccines introduce a weak version of the virus while mRNA vaccines introduce a peculiarly shaped protein — called the spike protein — into the body. It's similar to the coronavirus spike protein. There is no evidence that mRNA vaccines, like the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, have produced blood clots.
"The chances someone is going to get infected with COVID and get seriously ill as a result of being infected with COVID is still multiple times higher than the chance that they will develop this very serious complication as a result of COVID vaccination," Shafir said.
This story has been updated.
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Keerthi Vedantam is a bioscience reporter at dot.LA. She cut her teeth covering everything from cloud computing to 5G in San Francisco and Seattle. Before she covered tech, Keerthi reported on tribal lands and congressional policy in Washington, D.C. Connect with her on Twitter, Clubhouse (@keerthivedantam) or Signal at 408-470-0776.
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Activision Buys Game Studio Proletariat To Expand ‘World of Warcraft’ Staff
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter at @Samsonamore. Pronouns: he/him
Activision Blizzard intends to acquire Proletariat, a Boston-based game studio that developed the wizard-themed battle royale game “Spellbreak.”
VentureBeat first reported that the Santa Monica-based publisher was exploring a purchase, noting its ongoing mission to expand the staff working on Blizzard’s hit massively multiplayer online game “World of Warcraft,” which launched in 2004.
Proletariat’s team of roughly 100 people will be merged into Activision’s “World of Warcraft” team to work on its upcoming expansion game. Though there’s no release date as yet for the title, “World of Warcraft: Dragonflight” is expected to debut before the end of this year.
Activision did not immediately return a request for comment. Financial terms of the deal were not available.
This Proletariat deal is Activision's latest push to consolidate its family tree by folding its subsidiary companies in under the Blizzard banner. More than 15 years after it bought out New York-based game developer Vicarious Visions, Activision merged the business into its own last year, ensuring that the studio wouldn’t work on anything but Blizzard titles.
The deal could also have implications for workers at Activision who have looked to unionize. One subsidiary of Activision, Wisconsin-based Raven Software, cast a majority vote to establish its Game Workers Alliance—backed by the nationwide Communications Workers of America union—in May.
Until recently, Activision has remained largely anti-union in the face of its employees organizing—but it could soon not have much of a say in the matter once it finalizes its $69 billion sale to Microsoft, which said publicly it would maintain a “neutral approach” and wouldn’t stand in the way if more employees at Activision expressed interest in unionizing after the deal closes.
Each individual studio under the Activision umbrella would need to have a majority vote in favor of unionizing to join the GWA. Now, Proletariat’s workforce—which, somewhat ironically given its name, isn’t unionized—is another that could make such a decision leading up to the Microsoft deal’s expected closing in 2023.
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter at @Samsonamore. Pronouns: he/him
Snap Officially Launching ‘Snapchat Plus’ Subscription Tier
Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
Snap is officially launching Snapchat Plus, a paid subscription plan on Santa Monica-based social media company’s flagship app.
Snap is now the latest media company to tack a “plus” to the end of its name—announcing Wednesday that the new service will provide users with “exclusive, experimental and pre-release features” for the price of $3.99 a month. The first features available to paying subscribers include the ability to customize the style of app’s icon, pin a “BFF” to the top of their chat history and see which users have rewatched a story, according to The Verge.
The new product arrives after Snap confirmed reports earlier this month that it was testing Snapchat Plus—though the version that it has rolled out does not incorporate the rumored feature that would allow subscribers to view a friend’s whereabouts over the previous 24 hours.
Snapchat Plus will initially be available to users in the U.S., Canada, U.K., France, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. While certain features will remain exclusive to Plus users, others will eventually be released across Snapchat’s entire user base, Snap senior vice president of product Jacob Andreou told The Verge. (Disclosure: Snap is an investor in dot.LA.)
The subscription tier introduces a new potential revenue stream for Snap, which experienced a “challenging” first quarter marked by disruptions to its core digital advertising market. However, Andreou told The Verge that the product is not expected to be a “material new revenue source” for the company. He also disputed that Snap was responding to its recent economic headwinds, noting that Snap had been exploring a paid offering since 2016.
Despite charging users, Snapchat Plus does not include the option to turn off ads. “Ads are going to be at the core of our business model for the long term,” Andreou said.
Snap is not the first popular social media platform to venture into subscriptions: Both Twitter and Tumblr rolled out paid tiers last year, albeit with mixedresults.Kristin Snyder is an editorial intern for dot.la. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
Bling Capital’s Kyle Lui On How Small Funds Can Better Support Young Founders
On this episode of the LA Venture podcast, Bling Capital’s Kyle Lui talks about why he moved earlier stage in his investing and how investors can best support founders.
Lui joined his friend—and first angel investor—Ben Ling as a general partner at Bling Capital, which focuses on pre-seed and seed-stage funding rounds. The desire to work in earlier funding stages alongside someone he knew well drew him away from his role as a partner at multi-billion-dollar venture firm DCM, where he was part of the team that invested in Musical.ly, now known as TikTok.
Bling primarily focuses on entrepreneurs looking to raise around $1 million to $3 million who are often early in their careers as founders. Lui said Bling evaluates companies on characteristics that go beyond whether they like the founder or feel that the market looks good. Instead, he said they take a hard look at the available company data, and quickly respond.
“And we send it back to them and say, ‘Okay, this is what's working, what's not working’,” Lui said. “And then create the playbook for them on how to find product market fit and get to like, ‘These are the milestones you actually need to hit’.”
When considering companies, Lui said Bling looks at the founder, the market, the company’s current traction and differentiation while asking the founder the questions they would expect to get at Series A and Series B funding rounds.
“One thing that I really admire about what [Ling’s] built with Bling is the consistency and the processes and playbooks— everything from the way that we evaluate deals to the way that we work with our portfolio companies,” Lui said. “Everything is kind of around playbooks and operationalizing things and also iterating to do those processes better.”
As part of its work to support founders, Bling maintains an extensive product council, which connects tech executives with the founders in Bling’s portfolio. Bling also has created numerous self-serve resources for founders so they can easily tap into the fund’s network and shared knowledge.
“We have a bunch of playbooks that we introduce to companies around how to hire efficiently, how to negotiate with counterparties, how to think about the founding team, business development…We just have these different things that we start to train our entrepreneurs on,” Lui said.
dot.LA Editorial Intern Kristin Snyder contributed to this post.
Click the link above to hear the full episode, and subscribe to LA Venture on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
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