Got a note this morning from Greg Brooks, headmaster of the Drakensberg Boy’s Choir school. Yesterday the lads produced a video rendition of a traditional Xhosa prayer to salute those helping restore the looting damage. Click here – it’s four and a half minutes well invested.
On the subject of videos, being forced into a virtual studio has unexpectedly accelerated our strategy to engage more with the BizNews community. We now live broadcast most of our interviews on the BizNews TV YouTube channel. There’s usually four of them Monday to Thursday, mostly determined by the news flow. But we’re a little ahead today with two booked in advance – at 11am I’m talking to Ralph Mathekga, a respected SA political analyst often quoted by the FT and other leading global publications. Then at noon it’s James Martin, head of Economic Development at the uMgungundlovu (PMB) District Municipality for an insight into the role played over the past week by taxi associations.
If you’re interested in seeing BizNews content sausage being made, go to our channel on YouTube, click on both the “subscribe” button and the “notifications” bell – and you’ll be pinged whenever we’re about to start a live interview. So if you’ve got a gap at that time, you’ll be the very first to catch the news as it happens. The wonders of technology!
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I’m halfway through Empire of Pain, a brilliantly researched book about the Sackler family’s Big Pharma company Purdue. Reading it will give anyone pause about an industry into which the world is now putting so much trust. In a nutshell, the book tells how Purdue created and sold an opium-based drug called OxyContin, a painkiller more powerful and addictive than heroin (which was itself initially marketed as a legal product by Bayer). Where OxyContin went, other Pharma companies followed. The US estimates this profit-driven spree is directly responsible for a least 500 000 American drug overdose deaths, the bulk of them of people who became addicted after being prescribed the opioids by their doctors. Purdue has been bankrupted and the Sacklers, celebrated for their philanthropy, are close to concluding a $4.6bn payoff. Today’s news is that four other opioid-flogging Big Pharma businesses which followed Purdue – including Johnson & Johnson – are now about to reach a $26bn settlement with US states.
Stock markets took a hit yesterday as the Delta variant of Covid-19 raised concerns of more lockdowns. On Wall Street, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 725 points, its biggest reverse since last October. The market decline is especially hurting “meme stocks” the social-media driven shares favoured by ignorant punters. The WSJ’s Editorial Board comments in today’s newspaper, the panic is being caused by misunderstanding and it pleads to the political class to avoid the lockdown mistake. While the Delta variant is clearly highly contagious, vaccines are working – and although they won’t prevent us getting infected, they substantially reduce the symptoms and mortality risks.
