Papa John's To Hire 10,000 Workers To Meet Coronavirus Delivery Demand
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Papa John's is looking to hire an additional 10,000 workers over the next few months in order to meet the increased delivery demand brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.
The announcement marks the company's second hiring spree since the pandemic gripped the nation. Since March, the company has already hired 20,000 team members. The company ended 2019 with approximately 16,500 total workers, according to the company's 2019 annual report.
Ticker Security Last Change Change % PZZA PAPA JOHNS INTL 94.90 +1.85 +1.99%During the first three months of the year, system-wide sales in North America for stores open at least a year had increased 5.3 percent despite the company having to shift operations to non-contact delivery and takeout stem the spread of the virus.
DOMINO'S HIRING 10,000 EMPLOYEES AMID CORONAVIRUS DEMAND SURGE
"As seen in our April North America comparable sales, after the close of the first quarter, unprecedented numbers of families are relying on Papa John’s," Papa Johns CEO Rob Lynch said in an earnings report. "We are rising to this challenge, hiring thousands of new team members, safeguarding our supply chain and carefully managing our finances."
Papa John's International Inc. Signage is displayed on top of a delivery vehicle outside of the company's restaurant in Nashville, Tennessee, on Feb. 9, 2017. (Photographer: Luke Sharrett/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Papa John's wasn't the only major chain stepping up hiring efforts during the pandemic.
PAPA JOHN'S HIRING 20,000 AMID CORONAVIRUS DEMAND SURGE
In March, rival Dominos announced plans to hire 10,000 employees nationwide in response to a growth in delivery demands amid the public health crisis. Likewise, Pizza Hut also announced in March that it was looking to fill 30,000 positions nationwide.
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As of May 27, Papa John's announced that almost all of its traditional restaurants across North America remain open and fully operational.
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Two MLB Games Postponed After Coronavirus Outbreak Among Miami Marlins
© (Chris Szagola / Associated Press) Miami Marlins manager Don Mattingly looks out from the dugout during a game against the Philadelphia Phillies on July 25. (Chris Szagola / Associated Press)Four days into what was supposed to be a nine-week season, a coronavirus outbreak among the Miami Marlins has forced Major League Baseball to consider whether to pause the season for one team, or perhaps more.
With multiple media sources reporting that 12 players and two coaches on the Marlins had tested positive for the virus within the past two days, the league has postponed the Marlins’ home opener, scheduled for Monday night.
The league also has postponed the scheduled game between the Philadelphia Phillies and the New York Yankees in Philadelphia, where the Marlins played on Sunday. The facilities the Marlins used in Philadelphia need to be disinfected, and the Phillies personnel who worked the weekend series need to be tested.
The Marlins remain in Philadelphia, where their scheduled charter flight to Florida was postponed Sunday night and canceled Monday.
In a statement, the league said the Marlins were getting additional tests Monday.
“The members of the Marlins’ traveling party are self-quarantining in place while awaiting the outcome of those results,” the league said.
Four Miami players were unavailable Sunday after testing positive, including the Marlins’ starting pitcher. The game proceeded, but in accordance with the league’s health and safety protocol, testing was expedited for all other players.
In a July 2 interview, commissioner Rob Manfred told radio host Dan Patrick that the league would have to consider whether to continue operating in the face of an outbreak.
“I think the way that I think about it, Dan, is in the vein of competitive integrity, in a 60-game season,” Manfred said. “If we have a team or two that’s really decimated with a number of people who had the virus and can’t play for any significant period of time, it could have a real impact on the competition, and we’d have to think very, very hard about what we’re doing.”
Dodgers president Stan Kasten said Monday on SiriusXM that he was expecting an update on an MLB conference call later in the day.
“I don’t believe there is going to be any panic just yet,” Kasten said. “I think we understood that there might be occasions like this, which is why we had our player pool as big as it is.
“Hopefully, this is the worst outbreak we have for the rest of the season, because it will teach us some things. I do think we expected something like this at some point, and maybe getting it out of the way early will help teach us things to avoid the repetition of this going forward.”
In a statement, Marlins chief executive Derek Jeter called the postponement of Monday's game "the correct decision to ensure we take a collective pause and try to properly grasp the totality of this situation."
The Marlins’ season should be halted for at least two weeks, according to epidemiologist Zachary Binney of Emory University.
“I would recommend shutting the Marlins organization down for at least two weeks,” Binney said. “You need to let the virus clear itself out of the clubhouse, because it can sometimes take a long time for the virus to show itself, on a positive test or through symptoms.
“You have to wait it out. You have to assume everybody on the Marlins right now is potentially infected. The only way to get past that is time.”
Moderna Launches First Phase 3 Human Trial Of Coronavirus Vaccine In The US
Dr. Noubar Afeyan, co-founder and chairman of Moderna Therapeutics, said the biotech firm would become the first U.S. Company to enter Phase III of a clinical trial for a potential coronavirus vaccine.
Moderna is one of the top contenders in the global race to develop a vaccine to curtail the spread of the novel coronavirus.
“The plan is to start enrolling this morning, and this will continue over the next couple of months. We have a very strong demand of folks who volunteered to participate,” Afeyan told ABC News' chief anchor George Stephanopoulos Monday on "Good Morning America."
The blind trial is expected to include 30,000 volunteers. Half of the volunteers will receive Moderna’s vaccine and the other half will receive a placebo of sodium and water. Afeyan said countries will work to identify the most vulnerable people to ensure they receive a vaccine first.
Volunteers are needed for this vaccine trial and future clinical trials. People 18 years of age and older who are interested in participating in a trial can visit the Coronavirus Prevention Network or ClinicalTrials.Gov, with a search identifier NCT04470427 for specific locations.
The authorization of Moderna's vaccine by the Food and Drug Administration will depend on how quickly some 150 cases of the infection occur, according to Afeyan.
He said 150 cases of infection "need to occur ... To statistically be able to compare the placebo ... And declare whether the vaccine" provides adequate protection.
"The trial will essentially reach its goals once we hit 150 cases," he noted.
If successful, the group receiving the vaccine should have a disproportionately lower portion of the cases than those would did not get the vaccine.
“We all want to have these answers. We have a certain number of cases that we need to see in the trial before we can demonstrate whether the vaccine arm [of the trial] gives us more protection than folks who are not in the vaccine part of the trial,” Afeyan said.
Ultimately, he explained, it is up to the FDA to ensure that all the safety and efficacy measures have been met before the vaccine can be broadly distributed. The FDA has mandated a protection value of at least 50% for any vaccine to be considered for authorization.
Afeyan added that Moderna hopes to have authorization by the FDA by the end of 2020 or early 2021. By 2021, Afeyan says the company expects to have between 500 million and 1 billion doses ready for distribution upon FDA authorization.
“We're talking late this year, next year, before the FDA can make this adjudication. It's difficult to predict hearing all of the intensification of this virus spreading in the U.S.,” Afeyan said. “Certainly, we will be doing the tests in areas where there is a significant viral challenge so that the test can actually very quickly see whether we're giving the protection so it could go quicker but it could also take longer.”
He added that he hopes Moderna will have additional clinical trial data available by the fall.
In responding to concerns that some Americans may be reluctant to be vaccinated, given the expedited nature of the development process, Afeyan said, "the notion that people would not avail themselves to the protection, to that kind of capability to have their immune systems have the chance to fight this disease, is no different than crossing the street at rush hour without looking at the traffic on either side. You can do that, and you'll risk significant bodily harm. As far as I'm concerned, people have every right to be cautious, until there's data."
Unlike some other companies that are developing vaccines using live or inactivated viruses, Moderna’s vaccine uses messenger RNA (mRNA), which are cells used to build proteins. Tailored mRNA can instruct other cells to produce specific protein and, in turn, prompt the body to produce antibodies to the coronavirus.
Moderna’s vaccine was among the first to begin testing in humans, with trials being conducted by the National Institutes of Health in collaboration with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. There are at least 25 vaccines that have advanced to human studies and another 141 that are being tested in a laboratory, according to the World Health Organization.
ABC News was at Meridian Clinical Research in Rockville, Maryland, for the first day of Moderna's Phase 3 trial. One participant, a man in his 70s from the Washington, D.C., area, told ABC News, “To me, it's obvious that a vaccine is the Holy Grail.”
He went on, “I think it's very important that a person steps up and tries to do something good for the world at this point on the biggest crisis facing the world in many, many centuries.”
Meridian said it is looking for volunteers to be part of the trial in eight locations in the U.S.
A pharmacist gives Jennifer Haller the first shot, March 16, 2020, in the first-stage safety study clinical trial of a potential vaccine for COVID-19, at the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle. The world's biggest COVID-19 vaccine test got underway July 27 with the first of 30,000 planned volunteers. The experimental vaccine is made by the National Institutes of Health and Moderna Inc., and it's one of several candidates in the final stretch of the global vaccine race.
A pharmacist gives Jennifer Haller the first shot, March 16, 2020, in the first-stage safety study clinical trial of a potential vaccine for COVID-19, at the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle. The world's biggest COVID-19 vaccine test got underway July 27 with the first of 30,000 planned volunteers. The experimental vaccine is made by the National Institutes of Health and Moderna Inc., and it's one of several candidates in the final stretch of the global vaccine race. Ted S. Warren/AP, FILEAccording to Phase 1 data released by Moderna earlier this month, COVID-19 antibodies were found in all 45 volunteers who received the vaccine.
Each group received different doses of the vaccine and two injections 28 days apart.
These early results, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed the vaccine was “generally safe and well-tolerated” and induced an immune response.
None of the participants experienced serious side effects from the vaccine, with more than half reporting overall mild side effects, such as fatigue, headache, chills or pain at the injection site. Symptoms were more common among those who received higher doses of the vaccine.
At a House Energy and Commerce Committee on the development of COVID-19 vaccines last Tuesday, Moderna’s president, Dr. Stephen Hoge, said Moderna selected a lower dose "to maximize the immune response while minimizing adverse reactions” for the Phase III trial.
Lawmakers asked the pharmaceutical executives to discuss pricing of the vaccines to guard against price gouging.
While AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson pledged they would produce hundreds of millions of doses of their vaccines at no profit to themselves, Hoge said “we will not sell it at cost.”
Afeyan, when asked Monday, would not specify how much a vaccine would cost every American.
“We and other companies have said that the pandemic is not a time where we intend to use kind of the price as a way to do anything but increase supply so we will certainly be in the market at a price level that allows us to ramp up our supplies and reach potentially up to a billion people next year,” he said.
The U.S. Government has pledged to purchase at least 100 million doses of a Pfizer vaccine -- if it is authorized by the FDA -- for $1.9 billion. This would put the price of vaccination at $40, but the government has vowed not to charge for those doses.
Afeyan, who is also CEO of Moderna’s parent company, Flagship Pioneering, co-founded Moderna in 2010.
With 15 non-COVID clinical development programs, the Massachusetts-based biotech company has yet to receive approval for any of its drugs.
Moderna currently has a market cap of more than $30 billion, based on the expectations of its COVID-19 vaccine success and employs over 820 people. It was granted $483 million from the federal government to develop its vaccine and on Sunday the company was awarded an additional $472 million to pursue the latter phases of the human trials.
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