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December 16, 2021

US to blacklist eight more Chinese companies including dronemaker DJI

The Biden administration will place eight Chinese companies including DJI, the world’s largest commercial drone manufacturer, on an investment blacklist for their alleged involvement in the surveillance of the Uyghur Muslim minority.

The US Treasury will put DJI and the other groups on its “Chinese military-industrial complex companies” blacklist on Thursday, according to two people briefed on the move. US investors are barred from taking financial stakes in the 60 Chinese groups already on the blacklist.

The measure marks the latest effort by US president Joe Biden to punish China for its repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim ethnic minorities in the north-western Xinjiang region.

This week, SenseTime, the facial recognition software company, postponed its planned initial public offering in Hong Kong after the Financial Times reported that the US was set to place the company on the blacklist.

The other Chinese companies that will be blacklisted on Thursday include Megvii, SenseTime’s main rival that last year halted plans to list in Hong Kong after it was put on a separate US blacklist, and Dawning Information Industry, a supercomputer manufacturer that operates cloud computing services in Xinjiang.

Also to be added are CloudWalk Technology, a facial recognition software company, Xiamen Meiya Pico, a cyber security group that works with law enforcement, Yitu Technology, an artificial intelligence company, Leon Technology, a cloud computing company, and NetPosa Technologies, a producer of cloud-based surveillance systems.

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DJI and Megvii are not publicly traded, but Dawning Information, which is also known as Sugon, is listed in Shanghai, and Leon, NetPosa and Meiya Pico trade in Shenzhen.

All eight companies are already on the commerce department’s “entity list”, which restricts US companies from exporting technology or products from America to the Chinese groups without obtaining a government licence.

The White House did not comment and the Treasury did not respond to a request for comment.

DJI declined to comment. But last year, it said it had “done nothing to justify being placed on the entity list” after it was added to the commerce department’s export blacklist at the end of former president Donald Trump’s term.

Zhao Lijian, foreign ministry spokesman, said: “China has always opposed the US’s generalisation of national security concepts and unreasonable suppression of Chinese companies.” He added that Beijing had presented the “facts and truth” of Xinjiang-related issues. “China will . . . resolutely defend the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese companies,” Zhao said.

The commerce department is also expected to place more than two dozen Chinese companies on the entity list on Thursday, including some involved in biotechnology, according to the people familiar with the pending action. The commerce department did not respond to a request for comment.

The sanctions action comes as the US has maintained a tough stance over China’s policies in Xinjiang, where more than 1m Uyghurs and other minorities have been held in detention camps. The White House last week announced a diplomatic boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.

The Biden administration on Thursday will also consider tightening rules on US companies selling technology to Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp, the largest Chinese chip manufacturer. The Trump administration put SMIC on the entity list a year ago, but the decision included a provision that critics said created a loophole that some companies had exploited.

Eric Sayers, head of the Indo-Pacific practice at consultancy Beacon Global Strategies, said Biden was moving into the implementation phase after reviewing many of his predecessor’s technology policies.

“It will be interesting to watch if these targeted but significant steps are just the beginning of a more aggressive approach being driven by the White House or the minimum the inter-agency can muster for now,” said Sayers. “If it’s the former, we could see further restrictions on SMIC and new outbound investment restrictions in the months ahead.”

In another example of Washington’s escalating confrontation with Beijing over Xinjiang, the US House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill on Tuesday that would ban imports from the region unless companies could prove the goods were not produced with forced labour.

The House and Senate earlier reached agreement on a compromise draft of the bill, setting the stage for a vote in the upper chamber of Congress before senators recess for the year-end holidays.

The White House welcomed the agreement over the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act.

Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch, called for Biden to “immediately” sign the legislation after it was passed by Congress.

“Beijing and businesses have long banked on a global willingness to put profits ahead of humans’ rights — even in the face of crimes against humanity,” she said. “Congress rightly shifted the burden of proof to Xinjiang authorities and to companies.”

Jewher Ilham, an activist whose father Ilham Tohti, an Uyghur rights advocate, was jailed for life by China on widely criticised charges of separatism, said it was “promising” that Congress had reached a deal to hold companies “accountable for their complicity in the world’s worst forced labour regime”.

Additional reporting by Maiqi Ding in Beijing

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December 8, 2021

China to tighten rules for tech companies seeking foreign funding

China is preparing a blacklist that is expected to tightly restrict the main channel used by start-ups to attract international capital and list overseas, in a bid to limit the role of foreign shareholders in the country’s next generation of tech companies.

The blacklist will target new companies in sensitive sectors that use so-called variable interest entities to run their China businesses, according to four people familiar with the matter. They did not expect the changes to apply to existing companies.

VIEs are a legal structure that has been used for decades by Chinese tech groups — including industry leaders Alibaba and Tencent — to circumvent foreign investment restrictions and raise billions of dollars from international investors.

The list, which is being formulated by Chinese authorities including the state planner, commerce ministry, securities regulator and central bank, follows a tech sector crackdown over the past year that culminated in an announcement last week by ride-hailing group Didi Chuxing that it would delist from the New York Stock Exchange.

It was not yet clear how wide-reaching the list will be, but people familiar with the matter said the new negative list for VIEs could include sectors that were data-intensive or involved national security concerns. The US has taken similar measures to restrict Chinese investment in Silicon Valley start-ups.

Chinese authorities have accused the country’s large consumer internet groups of focusing on eliminating competition instead of helping the country to catch up with the US in semiconductors and other advanced technologies.

Regulators have taken antitrust and data security measures against the main companies, starting with billionaire Jack Ma’s Ant Group, which was forced to cancel what would have been the world’s largest initial public offering last year.

Two people close to financial regulators said the negative list was not intended to affect existing companies that were using the VIE structure. Instead, it was aimed at ensuring that future national champions critical to the country’s economy would not be dominated by foreign shareholders.

“VIEs are not dead entirely, but essentially they are [for future purposes],” said one of the people.

“In the future, foreign investors can put money into traditional industries as opposed to tech,” the person said, adding that such industries did not need to use the VIE structure to bring in foreign capital.

Chinese tech groups turned to VIEs two decades ago but authorities have not officially addressed the complicated legal structures, preferring to leave them in a regulatory grey area.

The system has allowed large investors such as Japan’s SoftBank and Sequoia Capital China to funnel billions of dollars from foreign pension and sovereign wealth funds, family offices and university endowments into China’s most promising internet start-ups.

This is done by taking shares in offshore holding companies set up in the Cayman Islands, which then enter into a series of contracts with the onshore Chinese businesses and their Chinese national founders, who hold their shares.

When successful, such companies float their offshore shell companies in the US or Hong Kong. Of the 241 Chinese companies listed in New York, 79 per cent use VIEs to run their China businesses, according to a Financial Times review of Capital IQ data.

Chart explaining how variable interest entities work

Beijing could publish the blacklist as early as this month, two of the people said. Another person said the list’s publication might depend on how the US handled new rules for Chinese companies trading in New York.

China’s securities regulator said on Sunday that a report by Bloomberg News that the country was banning VIEs from foreign IPOs was untrue, adding that it was also not pushing companies using the structure to delist from US exchanges.

Chinese authorities banned VIEs from investing in the country’s education sector this year. Foreign investors have also generally avoided using the structure for the most sensitive industries, such as defence or biotech companies that deal with genetic data.

Lawyers and investors said a negative list that grandfathered existing structures could help to fully legitimise the VIE legal contracts governing hundreds of Chinese tech companies.

Alex Roberts, a lawyer at Linklaters in Shanghai, said the Chinese government attempted to regulate VIEs six years ago, drafting a law that would have recategorised them based on their ultimate controllers.

“But the proposal was eventually set aside . . . arguably because of the huge economic and social benefit that some of China’s biggest businesses that use these legal constructs bring to the country,” he said.

China’s state planner, commerce ministry, securities regulator and central bank did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Additional reporting by Andy Lin in Hong Kong

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December 7, 2021

Metaverse will disrupt human life — here are 7 companies that may win big

The metaverse will be disruptive to society once it gains its true form over the next decade Jefferies analyst Simon Powell argues. But several companies could be poised to benefit greatly from the new digital ecosystem.

“A single metaverse could be more than a decade away, but as it evolves it has the potential to disrupt almost everything in human life that has not yet already been disrupted,” said Powell in a lengthy research note on Monday titled “The Digitization of Everything.”

“The pandemic accelerated the adoption of various technologies. Many people were forced to spend even more of their lives online from socializing to working, from education to entertainment. This shift to an online world will continue.”

The metaverse arguably burst into the public lexicon for the first time this year as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has hyped the digital world’s potential (and changed its holding company name to Meta in a show of support). Microsoft (Yahoo Finance’s Company of the Year) has also talked increasingly about the metaverse and how it will play in it moving forward.

In its simplest form, the metaverse is an online world that includes augmented reality, virtual reality, and 3D avatars. As this world takes form, how things are done stand to change dramatically. Explains Powell, “The digitization of everything will create a new world that we can all move in and out of. The metaverse can be viewed as a new platform for the digital age. We see it as a wrapper that will roll up other digital platforms. It will not replace the internet, but instead build on top of it and, when combined with other technologies and interfaces, will allow us to essentially step into, and perhaps live in it.”

INDIA – 2021/11/30: In this photo illustration, a Metaverse logo seen displayed on a smartphone with a facebook logo in background. (Photo Illustration by Avishek Das/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

This virtual environment is not only expected to change how people interact with the physical world, but also how we work with other.

“We are building towards a metaverse. I am really excited about the vision,” said Dropbox founder and CEO Drew Houston recently on Yahoo Finance Live. “Where Dropbox fits in if you are working in that kind of environment or in the metaverse, you need stuff. So for your digital content, Dropbox could help and that is what we are building towards. It is very early. It is a long journey, but it is exciting.”

Jefferies’ Powell acknowledges it’s still early for investors to pick definitive metaverse winners. But investors could begin mapping out a plan of attack.

“Focus initially on the hardware needed to lift the internet to become the metaverse. Then look at the software that will design and host it, and ultimately the businesses that create use cases on it,” adds Powell.

The analyst outlines several potential winners from the metaverse, mostly relegated to the social media and gaming sectors.

“Facebook (Meta) /SNAP are both working on hardware to access the metaverse while having social platforms with significant reach. Roblox (RBLX) is the closest to being an early stage metaverse. TakeTwo (TTWO) is currently running three games that arguably could be early stage metaverses. Electronic Arts (EA) has several IPs that would be ripe to be turned into walled garden metaverses: Skate, Sims, SimCity, and even its sports franchises. Activision Blizzard (ATVI) has one of the innovators in early metaverse with World of Warcraft in its library. Moreover, Call of Duty could use many of the tools in building a metaverse to better monetize and engage users (cross platform, cross universe, single currency economy). Music will likely play a role along the way from here to there … Warner Music (WMG) already sees this as it has invested in several start ups that are building tools/platforms in the metaverse,” notes Powell.

Brian Sozzi is an editor-at-large and anchor at Yahoo Finance. Follow Sozzi on Twitter @BrianSozzi and on LinkedIn.

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December 5, 2021

We Wouldn’t Be Too Quick To Buy The Williams Companies, Inc. (NYSE:WMB) Before It Goes Ex-Dividend

It looks like The Williams Companies, Inc. (NYSE:WMB) is about to go ex-dividend in the next four days. The ex-dividend date is usually set to be one business day before the record date which is the cut-off date on which you must be present on the company’s books as a shareholder in order to receive the dividend. It is important to be aware of the ex-dividend date because any trade on the stock needs to have been settled on or before the record date. This means that investors who purchase Williams Companies’ shares on or after the 9th of December will not receive the dividend, which will be paid on the 27th of December.

The company’s upcoming dividend is US$0.41 a share, following on from the last 12 months, when the company distributed a total of US$1.64 per share to shareholders. Last year’s total dividend payments show that Williams Companies has a trailing yield of 6.0{21df340e03e388cc75c411746d1a214f72c176b221768b7ada42b4d751988996} on the current share price of $27.11. Dividends are a major contributor to investment returns for long term holders, but only if the dividend continues to be paid. As a result, readers should always check whether Williams Companies has been able to grow its dividends, or if the dividend might be cut.

Check out our latest analysis for Williams Companies

Dividends are typically paid out of company income, so if a company pays out more than it earned, its dividend is usually at a higher risk of being cut. Williams Companies distributed an unsustainably high 196{21df340e03e388cc75c411746d1a214f72c176b221768b7ada42b4d751988996} of its profit as dividends to shareholders last year. Without more sustainable payment behaviour, the dividend looks precarious. That said, even highly profitable companies sometimes might not generate enough cash to pay the dividend, which is why we should always check if the dividend is covered by cash flow. Over the last year it paid out 75{21df340e03e388cc75c411746d1a214f72c176b221768b7ada42b4d751988996} of its free cash flow as dividends, within the usual range for most companies.

It’s good to see that while Williams Companies’s dividends were not covered by profits, at least they are affordable from a cash perspective. Still, if the company repeatedly paid a dividend greater than its profits, we’d be concerned. Very few companies are able to sustainably pay dividends larger than their reported earnings.

Click here to see the company’s payout ratio, plus analyst estimates of its future dividends.

Have Earnings And Dividends Been Growing?

Businesses with strong growth prospects usually make the best dividend payers, because it’s easier to grow dividends when earnings per share are improving. If business enters a downturn and the dividend is cut, the company could see its value fall precipitously. This is why it’s a relief to see Williams Companies earnings per share are up 4.8{21df340e03e388cc75c411746d1a214f72c176b221768b7ada42b4d751988996} per annum over the last five years.

Many investors will assess a company’s dividend performance by evaluating how much the dividend payments have changed over time. Since the start of our data, 10 years ago, Williams Companies has lifted its dividend by approximately 13{21df340e03e388cc75c411746d1a214f72c176b221768b7ada42b4d751988996} a year on average. We’re glad to see dividends rising alongside earnings over a number of years, which may be a sign the company intends to share the growth with shareholders.

The Bottom Line

Should investors buy Williams Companies for the upcoming dividend? Earnings per share have not grown all that much, and the company is paying out an uncomfortably high percentage of its income. Fortunately it paid out a lower percentage of its cash flow. With the way things are shaping up from a dividend perspective, we’d be inclined to steer clear of Williams Companies.

So if you’re still interested in Williams Companies despite it’s poor dividend qualities, you should be well informed on some of the risks facing this stock. Our analysis shows 2 warning signs for Williams Companies and you should be aware of them before buying any shares.

A common investment mistake is buying the first interesting stock you see. Here you can find a list of promising dividend stocks with a greater than 2{21df340e03e388cc75c411746d1a214f72c176b221768b7ada42b4d751988996} yield and an upcoming dividend.

Have feedback on this article? Concerned about the content? Get in touch with us directly. Alternatively, email editorial-team (at) simplywallst.com.

This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. We provide commentary based on historical data and analyst forecasts only using an unbiased methodology and our articles are not intended to be financial advice. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned.

November 30, 2021

Litigation Finance Companies Eye Law Firm Ownership in Arizona

Two major litigation finance companies say Arizona’s loosening of legal industry regulations opens the door for them to co-own law firms.

Burford Capital Ltd. and Longford Capital Management LP executives said that with Arizona no longer requiring lawyers to own firms—and other states considering similar steps—law partners will increasingly consider the benefits of non-attorney ownership stakes.

“Equity investors will start to take notice,” said William Farrell Jr., Longford’s co-founder and managing director, in an interview. “The first of those groups will likely be large-scale litigation funders like Longford Capital because we have the greatest relationships and insights into what makes law firms successful.”

Litigation finance ownership would be a radical shift in how firms are structured and run. Currently, the financiers pay for individual lawsuits—or tranches of them—with a profit goal if their parties win. But ownership would give the funders more say in how firms spend money and which cases they take.

Arizona’s model would let Burford work across all of parts of a law operation, said Emily Slater, Burford’s managing director. Burford would “be a broader investor in the firm’s profitability over time,” she said, and it could “take that risk with the firm as it continues to grow or contract.”

Mid-size firms and litigation boutiques may be willing to take up litigation funders on ownership offers, said Marcie Borgal Shunk, president of Houston-based The Tilt Institute, a law firm consultancy.

“I see opportunities for collaboration, especially at the behest of clients or in pursuit of market disruption,” Shunk said. “There are plenty of break-off firms and forward-thinkers looking to find a new, better way to deliver legal services. There is no reason why litigation funders cannot be part of that equation.”

Arizona Experiment

The Arizona experiment took root when the state’s supreme court last year eliminated its version of ethics Rule 5.4. That rule barred non-lawyers from having an economic interest in law firms or other legal service operations.

The supreme court’s goal with the move was to try to increase low- and middle-income Arizonans’ access to legal services.

The state so far has approved 12 legal companies to take part in its alternative business structure program since the regulatory changes took effect Jan. 1. The companies include LZ Legal Services, an Arizona-focused subsidiary of the online consumer and business law giant LegalZoom.

Graphic: Jonathan Hurtarte/Bloomberg Law

Other businesses have applied, including Rocket Lawyer, which is already part of legal services experiment in Utah. Other states considering legal regulatory changes include California, New York, Illinois, Michigan and North Carolina.

Longford’s Farrell said his company most likely will refrain from acting on law firm co-ownership until other states beyond Arizona loosen their rules.

He said he hasn’t spoken with any of the 12 companies that are part of Arizona’s program, though he discussed related topics over the last year with attorneys from several law firms. Farrell declined to name them.

‘Split Loyalties’

The AmLaw 200 firm Lewis Roca Rothgerber Christie, which has two offices in Arizona, has received about a dozen calls and emails from mostly smaller private equity groups eager to discuss possible investments, said Ken Van Winkle, the firm’s managing partner.

They all got the same answer—no. “It doesn’t work for us,” Van Winkle said.

Lewis Roca would need to create a separate entity in Arizona because its offices in Colorado, Nevada, California, and New Mexico are in states that prohibit non-lawyer ownership of firms, Van Winkle said.

He also said he’s worried about the drive for profits a litigation funder or private equity investor would bring to a law firm partnership.

“Our job, our loyalty, our commitment is to our clients and not to an investor,” Van Winkle said. “I would worry about the possibility of split loyalties.”

Such ownership could also compromise lawyer independence, said Stephen Younger, a Foley Hoag partner and past president of the New York Bar Association.

“If they were there,” he said of litigation funders, “around the table at a partners meeting, that’s a much different dynamic.”

_VIDEO_{: Bloomberg Law’s Roy Strom gives a peek inside the growing practice of litigation finance and explains what it means for the future of the business of law.}

Profit Motive

Longford and other litigation funders argue their co-ownership roles would spur firms to make sustained investments in innovations like legal technology that would aid them over the long haul.

Farrell said partnerships would benefit clients through reduced legal fees and by luring top-level C Suite executives, including non-lawyers, to manage the new companies.

Clients shouldn’t worry that profit motives might trump lawyer independence under new ownership models, said Burford Director Andrew Cohen in a written statement.

Arizona ethics Rule 2.1, for example, already requires that lawyers “exercise independent professional judgment” regardless of external factors such as financing, he said.

“So where non-lawyer ownership is allowed, when a lawyer is advising a client, their ethical obligation is first and foremost to that client—as in every other type of funding situation,” Cohen said.

Industry Growth

Litigation finance became a $39 billion industry worldwide in 2019, according to the AmLaw 200 firm Brown Rudnick. While funders typically only get paid if the suits result in monetary awards, the returns can be as high as two-to-three times their investment.

Burford said earlier this year it will receive $103 million as a result of funding litigation by Tatiana Akhmedova, the ex-wife of billionaire Farkhad Akhmedov, in the largest financial dispute Britain’s divorce courts have ever seen, Bloomberg News reported. Akhmedov agree to pay 135 million pounds ($186 million).

Burford’s investment in a lawsuit seeking damages from Argentina’s 2012 nationalization of state-run oil producer YPF SA, known as the “Peterson” case, had brought in $236 million for the company as of March.

But deals don’t always end happily. Pravati Capital, which works with individual attorneys and small firms, has been forced to arbitrate with at least 14 of its clients in part over claims that the deals they struck with law firms ensured that the company gets paid back even if the case being funded loses, according to a Bloomberg Law account.

Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Pravati declined to respond to questions about whether the company is considering Arizona ventures because of the state law firm ownership rule change.

Another litigation financer, Omni Bridgeway, also declined comment.

Overseas Owners

There is precedent for litigation funders becoming co-owners of law firms—overseas. In mid-2020, Burford gained equity when it assumed a minority ownership stake in the boutique U.K. law firm, PCB Litigation.

But in the U.S., other jurisdictions with larger legal markets need to join Arizona in scrapping Rule 5.4—or at least approve experimental programs like Utah has, litigation finance executives said.

This could happen within two-to-three years, said Farrell, given that California and other large states also have begun to weigh the benefits of rule changes.

“It might become a popular trend,” Farrell said. “We want to be ready to seize opportunities.”

November 28, 2021

Fighting disinformation ‘requires a little bit of courage’ for social media companies: Doctor

Combatting misinformation has become one of the most important issues the medical community faces, according to experts like Dr. Megan Ranney, an emergency room physician in Providence, R.I.

Just as a new coronavirus variant of concern, Omicron, has been identified, the rush of information shared and discussed on social media sites once again shows how quickly information, and in some cases misinformation, can spread. It’s a problem that has been ongoing throughout the pandemic.

Though social media can be a force for good, “the worst of social media has come to the forefront over the course of the pandemic,” she told Yahoo Finance.

This time, more public health, virus and medical experts are on social platforms quickly churning out facts and verified information. But even so, with greater knowledge of the social media companies’ abilities to control false information, the call for more accountability is growing louder.

More than 800 doctors and health experts have signed onto a letter asking Meta Platforms (FB) CEO Mark Zuckerberg to disclose data and strategies that Facebook is using to help stop the spread of false information about the vaccines and virus. The letter was sent through Doctors for America, a non-profit physician-led advocacy group.

“So many deaths could have been prevented, and we must act with haste to prevent more, particularly with vaccines becoming imminently available for young children. We simply cannot afford another deadly round of COVID and vaccine misinformation,” the doctors wrote.

Ranney, and others that signed, said the letter to Facebook signals an attempt to “diagnose” the problem.

“It requires a little bit of courage, and looking beyond potentially the immediate bottom line, to the larger societal good,” she said.

‘There’s a need to regulate algorithmic engagement’

Dr. Céline Gounder, an infectious diseases expert in New York City who formerly served on President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 transition team, is the letter’s first signatory.

“I think there’s no question that having a whistleblower like Francis Haugen has really energized efforts around the spread of disinformation,” she said. Haugen is the former Facebook employee who disclosed tens of thousands of the company’s internal documents to the Securities and Exchange Commission and The Wall Street Journal in 2021.

“There’s a need to regulate algorithmic engagement,” she added, noting it’s easier said than done.

Another signatory, Dr. Robert Davidson, executive director of The Committee to Protect Health Care, and a doctor in the Midwest, said that while it is easy for anyone to unwittingly share false information, there should be a way to stop harmful information — especially in the middle of a deadly outbreak.

“Facebook and other social media outlets have the ability to amplify (information), and to concentrate it in front of a group of people that algorithms have pre-selected will be receptive to that information…so it almost makes it easier for the viral spread of misinformation,” he said.

Davidson said that the sharing of the information isn’t necessarily intentional, some people just genuinely share information that they think is interesting. Usually they don’t know any better and it reaffirms some pre-conceived notion, and then within the echo chamber — which could be a different echo chamber from a doctor or expert —it continues to circulate and spread wider, he said.

Which is why more experts have increasingly taken to social media to fight back.

“It feels like a Sisyphean task. At the end of the day, yeah, you can keep fighting those micro battles, but the only way to really solve it is to tackle what is really driving it,” Gounder said, pointing to social media companies as ground zero.

Both sides

According to the doctors, Facebook cited the quickly changing information throughout the pandemic as a hurdle for fact-checkers.

Delays in addressing false information helps fan the flames of mistrust in official sources and mainstream media, which is a prominent among those willing to believe the misinformation. Examples throughout the pandemic include the doctors who supported the use of hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin to treat covid, when neither was proven efficacious.

In those instances, individuals see the discord among people with equivalent titles, and can pounce on it as proof of conspiracy theories, Davidson said.

“You might have 2{21df340e03e388cc75c411746d1a214f72c176b221768b7ada42b4d751988996} of doctors saying something that is patently false. But this person has MD after their name … so it gives them this degree of credibility,” and gives the broader public the perception that there is no right answer, he said.

One example of an ongoing debate between experts is the need for boosters for all adults — recently greenlit by FDA, supporting the White House strategy to combat an anticipated winter surge.

“There’s widespread agreement that certain populations would benefit from an additional dose of vaccine. Right now, the question is, is that the case for everybody? And what is it you’re trying to achieve with (an additional dose)?” Gounder said.

Some believe that indications of waning immunity mean better protection against symptomatic cases, while others believe that the body can be relied on to do a decent job fighting against an infection even if it is symptomatic.

And general anti-vaccine sentiment is visibly higher than before, which pits doctors against their peers.

“I have a harder time convincing some patients to take a vaccine than I did before COVID,” said Dr. Stella Safo, founder of Just Equity for Health and a physician in New York City.

“We’ve gone from things being accepted to questioning some of the most basic things. It’s scary,” Safo told Yahoo Finance.

Lending a hand

Hiring experts to be fact-checkers, especially for the duration of the pandemic, could be a solution, though costly, for social platforms.

“There’s never been a time where someone has ever said there are microchips in the vaccines, and yet that kind of information has been shared in the past. There’s never been credible research or studies that have shown anything about infertility with the vaccines, but that is a pervasive and widely-held belief amongst folks who don’t believe in getting the vaccine,” Davidson said.

“If they could have some trusted source to help them filter through this as they put the brakes on these posts, and then they can prevent these things from getting out there in the first place,” Davidson said.

Safo said more needs to be done to help craft easier-to-digest messaging.

“We have proven ourselves, unfortunately, to be very bad at health care communication,” Safo said.

“We’ve put ourselves back, I would say, in terms of public health communications, by a decade,” she added.

More doctors, more voices

The pandemic saw a groundswell of vocal doctors, scientists and public health experts on social platforms, some of whom might have been in the shadows or relied on trade groups or large organizations to be their mouthpieces in the past.

“I think a lot more are choosing to get out there … and I think that has to do a lot, probably, with the changing demographics and the changing business aspect of what being a health care professional is. There are many more women in health care, there are many more people of color in health care,” Davidson said.

“We could have done this sooner. I think in some ways, the health care and public health communities are finally at least a little bit coming up for a breath of air. It feels like we have been drowning underwater…for the last few years. And it’s hard to tackle everything at the same time,” Gounder said.

As more is now known about the virus, how it spreads, and with just over half the U.S. population vaccinated, experts have a chance to fight harder against misinformation.

“I think we’re finally sort of in a place of being able to take on these bigger macro issues in a more significant way,” Gounder said.

And with the U.S. Surgeon General’s Office supporting a movement to address misinformation, calling it a public health issue earlier this year, the timing is right to attack the issue. But that is also if doctors, who have found their voices on social platforms throughout the pandemic, can continue to do so without organizations and trade groups taking over the messaging.

“I would hope that that continues,” Ranney said.

“If we don’t turn this ship,” she added, “I think this is only the beginning of the harm that we’ll face.”

Follow Anjalee on Twitter @AnjKhem

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