The preliminary results presented by the pharmaceutical companies Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna on the effectiveness of their respective experimental vaccines against covid-19 have opened a hopeful horizon for the economic sectors most affected by the health crisis.

Bars, hotels and airlines, among other businesses , see the end of mobility restrictions and capacity limitations a little closer after many months of the pandemic.

A journey that happens, necessarily, because the clinical trials end successfully, the Spanish Medicines Agency (AEMPS) approves the antigens and there are enough doses to immunize a very relevant percentage of the population.

However, in this process towards the old normality prior to the coronavirus, the management of the companies may run into a stumbling block: the resistance of the workforce to be vaccinated . The scenario is not ruled out.

According to a survey published by EL PAÍS, one in three Spaniards is reluctant to inject antigens against Sars Cov-2, either because they prefer to wait for a certain time to pass (37%) or because they do not even consider doing so (13, 1%). In this context, the question of whether it is possible to impose immunization to preserve safety in the workplace is timely.

In the legislation, the only rule that explicitly refers to vaccination in the workplace is Royal Decree 664/1997, on the protection of workers against the risks related to exposure to biological agents.

In a brief mention, the decree establishes that when employees are exposed to a disease for which there are effective vaccines, “these must be made available to them.”

However, as Rosario Rodríguez, Garrigues associate lawyer, points out, “this regulation is strictly applied to a specific list of professions in the biosanitary sector, such as doctors, nurses and laboratory technicians, and always under the principle of voluntariness”.

In other words, the company has a duty to offer the treatment, but ultimately, it is the employee who decides whether to submit to it or not.

On the other hand, the Occupational Risk Prevention Law (LPRL) provides that companies, as ultimately responsible for ensuring the safety and hygiene of their employees at work, may schedule medical check-ups.

“These reviews will be mandatory when provided for by agreement, but will only serve to check the health status of the worker and, if necessary, terminate him,” says Félix Pinilla, coordinator of the UGT legal services.

It is obvious, therefore, that the current legal framework puts the right of the employee to decide on his body before the protection of the health of colleagues and clients. However, should this criterion be maintained in a pandemic context such as the current one?

The professor of Labor Law at the University of Valencia, Adrián Todolí, understands that yes, except in the “most extreme” cases where the covid represents a serious and imminent danger to the lives of third parties, as occurs in the residences of elderly or in health centers.

“Obviously, in these cases it would be legitimate to go a step beyond medical check-ups and demand vaccination,” says Todolí.

The jurist, however, clarifies that if there were a conflict (due to an employee’s refusal to inject himself) and this resulted in a disciplinary dismissal, the termination would probably end up being declared inadmissible “as there is no legal basis to justify the termination of the contract”.

Precisely, in order to compensate for the regulatory void, some specialists are betting on requesting forced vaccination before the courts in advance through the Organic Law of Special Public Health Measures, alleging reasons of urgency and necessity.

“If the judge accepts the petition, the worker has no choice but to inoculate himself to keep his job,” says Eduardo Gómez, a partner at Dentons. The lawyer points out, yes, that only businesses that have a strong health reason would have access to the judicial process. Or put another way, “simple economic or productive reasons cannot be alleged.”

Federico de Montalvo, president of the Bioethics Commission of Spain, adds that the voluntary regime on vaccinations also ceases to be applied if the Ministry of Health orders the administration of the drug to the whole of society or to certain workers based on the aforementioned public health law.

De Montalvo, an expert in constitutional law, is convinced that this would be the most appropriate way to tackle resistance in companies, since it would avoid “many legal and ethical dilemmas”.

An opinion shared by the labor worker Enrique Ceca, partner of the Ceca Magán law firm, who is committed to an immunization decree that allows companies to “proceed to the objective dismissal of those people who insist on disobeying due to supervening ineptitude.”

Both experts stress, however, that a coercive labor measure would be the last option and should be applied in a very restricted way, taking into account the rights at stake.

At the moment, the Government is not considering imposing the future inoculation against COVID either inside or outside the work centers because, according to the Minister of Health, Salvador Illa, this strategy has not yielded good results in other countries.

“We think that giving the citizens correct information and telling them the truth will be enough to achieve high vaccination rates,” he said this week in the Senate. Many companies keep their fingers crossed that this is the case.

The investment platform considers that the measures of regulators and supervisors put the value of the quality, safety and potential of crypto assets, as well as the protection of investors
etoro

eToro describes as positive and necessary the new measures adopted by global regulators and supervisors, in addition to those that are yet to come as Mica in Europe . The investment platform understands that this legislation protects the investor while crypto assets raise their visibility to the level of the rest of listed assets.

Such is the case as the new regulations of the British supervisor, the FCA , which ensures that excessive leverage is avoided and not allowed in assets that involve high volatility, such as bitcoin.

“EToro does not allow excessive leverage, so it was already seeking investor protection. Brokers have to avoid this type of option, ”said eToro spokesperson for Spain , Javier Molina .

With its 2018 guideline, the Spanish National Securities Market Commission ( CNMV ) seeks the fiscal security of operations and constant warning to the user of the complexity of certain financial products.

“All operators must comply with these types of obligations beyond taxation. But what is dangerous is not the product itself, but the users who operate with the product without the necessary knowledge ”, adds Molina.

eToro describes as positive and necessary the new measures adopted by global regulators and supervisors, in addition to those that are yet to come as Mica in Europe . The investment platform understands that this legislation protects the investor while crypto assets raise their visibility to the level of the rest of listed assets.

A definitive step towards maximum regulation, they point out from eToro, is the future European regulation, Mica. The purpose of Mica is the creation of a common European framework to prevent abuse in the operation of this asset class.

New thematic portfolio . eToro launches a new thematic wallet for the “new normal”.

Its name is RemoteWork CopyPortfolio and it is focused on companies that are at the center of the telecommuting boom

It is made up of 25 securities among which are known as Apple, Alphabet or Zoom and others focused on the business market that offer services that are vital for companies to cover teleworking.

Dani Brinker, head of investment portfolios at eToro pointed out that the advantages are “numerous” as these companies “will experience a permanent increase in the demand for their services, which in most cases should translate into higher profits.”

The founders of Mimetis Biomaterials joke that the field in which the company worksSuddenly, it worries those who do not know anything about this world: biomimetic synthetic bone regeneration.

Although in the end, fortunately, it is better understood. “Synthetic because the material that we graft onto the patient is not bone of animal origin; and biomimetics because, to produce this material, we replicate as much as possible the way bone is generated in nature ”, says Ana Chinea, biomedical engineer and CEO of the company.

Chinea joined in 2017 a project launched in 2013 by four researchers from the biomaterials area of ​​the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, among them the expert in bone regeneration María Pau, president of the company, and David Pastornino, who accompanies Chinea in the video call.

In 2015, the company launched its first product, calcium phosphate-based granules that, after being hydrated by the surgeon, are injected into the patient.

“It is a product that avoids the disadvantages linked to the use of human or animal bone, such as the eventual transmission of diseases, and that improves current synthetics”, Pastornino argues. Mimetis sells to the dental sector, which uses its product to regenerate the gum bone before performing implants , and to the orthopedic.

Its business model is based on closing contracts with distributors. “We do not have a direct sales force,” Chinea concedes, but that does not prevent 50% of their income from being obtained through their own channels, since part of the company’s 16 investors are also clients.

Although they sell more to surgeons in the dental sector, the higher volumes demanded by orthopedic professionals mean that these contracts represent most of the 120,000 euros that they billed in 2019. At the moment they lack profits.

Mimetis has nine employees and has its small factory in Cerdanyola del Vallès (Barcelona). They started the year by launching a second product on the market – customized solutions based on the patient’s medical image and printed in 3D – but the coronavirus has left them “almost without activity,” Chinea concedes.

“The sectors we work for went into shock and we were especially hit by not carrying out emergency interventions, since regeneration comes after a first stage of containment,” he explains.

The company has been financed thanks to 2.5 million public grants and one million private investment.

They are helped by resisting the loss of income by “an exclusive distribution agreement” signed with Nobel Biocare, one of the main distributors in the dental sector, explains Pastorino. Your next step is to reach a similar pre-agreement in the orthopedic market.

Social networks have already become a repository that stores how citizens are experiencing historical moments. In the case of the pandemic, they have served as an outlet for millions of users who have used them to share their concerns, concerns and discomfort in the face of such a dramatic and uncertain situation.

Based on this idea, several teams from MIT and Harvard University have analyzed the conversations that have been published during these months to find out how the mental health of users has been affected.

Their research, published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research , concludes that users make more references to their anxiety and talk more about suicide than before the coronavirus.

This conclusion also fits with the perception that psychologists have about the consultations that their patients have made so far this year.

Since the confinement began, the most common consultations that mental health professionals have are focused on anxiety, grief management and relationship problems.

“We have seen, above all, difficulties with grief, due to the death of relatives or acquaintances, loss of work and deep feelings of loneliness,” explains Martín Villanueva, co-founder of iFeel, one of the mobile applications that offer psychological help.

Given the recommendations to reduce social contact as much as possible, the use of these apps has skyrocketed. Since March, iFeel, with more than 300,000 users, has noticed an increase in queries of 203%, 90% of them from Spain.

These changes in the needs of patients have been noticed in the networks. Using machine learning techniques to analyze the content of more than 800,000 posts, Harvard researchers found changes in the tone and content of the language that citizens were using as the first wave of the pandemic progressed, from January to April.

Their analysis revealed several key changes in conversations about mental health: They found a general increase in references to anxiety and suicide.

“We discovered that threads related to suicide and loneliness emerged. The number of posts in these groups doubled during the pandemic compared to the same months last year, which is a great concern,” says Daniel Low, graduate student of the Harvard and MIT Speech and Hearing Technology and Bioscience Program and lead author of the study.

Although the authors clarify that they cannot point to the pandemic as the sole cause of the observed linguistic changes, they point out that there was a much more significant change during the period from January to April 2020 than in the same months of 2019 and 2018, ” indicating that the changes cannot be explained by normal annual trends. “

Using various types of natural language processing algorithms, the researchers measured the frequency of words associated with topics such as anxiety, death, isolation, and substance abuse, and grouped posts based on similarities in the language used.

They found that most users started talking about COVID-19 in March, but those who said they had health anxiety started much earlier, in January. As the pandemic progressed, the language used by all users began to look more alike.

The analysis also revealed the impact of the coronavirus on people who already suffered from some type of mental illness before the pandemic. The mental health groups most adversely affected at the beginning of the pandemic were those related to ADHD and eating disorders.

Researchers hypothesize that without their usual social support systems, due to quarantine, people with these disorders find it much more difficult to control their conditions. In those groups, the researchers found posts about hyperfocus on the news and relapse into anorexia-like behaviors, as other people were not monitoring meals.

The findings could help professionals, and even those responsible for different social networks, to better identify and help users who are suffering from some type of problem related to mental health, the researchers say.

“This type of analysis could help mental health care providers identify the segments of the population that are most vulnerable when something serious happens, like a pandemic or natural disaster,” says Low.

The Eurostoxx600 of banks has fallen by almost 40% so far this year and reflects the impact that the coronavirus crisis has had on financial institutions. But European banks, and in particular Spanish banks, already did their homework in the second quarter, by strengthening provision levels and limiting the cost of risk.

In addition, the recent merger agreed between Caixabank and Bankia, together with the open negotiations between Unicaja and Liberbank, seem to be the catalysts that the sector needs to take flight. As the European Central Bank (ECB) has repeatedly warned, the sector needs to accelerate concentration to emerge stronger from the pandemic.

With interest rates at zero and margins under pressure, accelerating bank consolidation is imperative to enhance efficiency and keep costs under control. From this point of view, both operations should underpin investor confidence and boost bank stocks.

Clearly, the market cannot indefinitely ignore that bank stocks are trading at historically low multiples. Giants such as Santander or BBVA trading with a price / book value ratio of 0.3 times, “ratios that can help capture some investor interest,” says Javier Molina, eToro spokesperson in Spain.

Likewise, and based on very long-term technical support, “the ground may have already been seen, leaving the way open for a certain consolidation of current levels”, emphasizes Molina.

This confluence of low fundamental valuations and technical floors is rare and could be an opportunity for investors who want their entry strategies by taking advantage of the eToro platform and the ability to emulate the portfolios of the best traders.

The likely return of dividends

After the outbreak of the pandemic, one of the first recommendations of the ECB was the suspension of dividends in banking. However, within the European issuer they are beginning to consider that the measure harms more than benefits. The entity has already warned that it will review its position in the fourth quarter and the market expects it to lift the restrictions in early 2021.

Furthermore, banks’ capital positions are much stronger than they were after the previous financial crisis. And this is the differential nuance that should end the veto. Without going any further, Santander recently became the first major European bank to propose the distribution of dividends charged to the results of this year, as long as the ECB allows it. And BBVA has also reiterated its intention to resume shareholder remuneration.

Therefore, the return of bank dividends is closer than ever and its effect could be amplified on portfolios as investors monitor other factors that could reduce profitability. For example, commissions, which could be reduced to 0%.

Beyond the stock market, the European sector faces the risk of new restrictions to curb the second wave of the coronavirus. But it is also likely that this impact will be offset by the ECB’s commitment to maintain its measures to support the financial system until the exit from the crisis is no more clear.

In fact, the ECB made it clear that it will pay close attention that the pandemic does not translate into a credit crunch. The role of the bank has been fundamental in this crisis. They have absorbed much of the impact, rather than amplifying it. To get out of the crisis, once entities have strengthened their efficiency and controlled risk, it is essential that money continues to flow into the real economy.

This content is for informational purposes only and cannot be considered investment advice or recommendation.

Past performance is not an indication of future performance. CFDs are leveraged products and carry great risk to capital. eToro is an entity regulated in Europe by the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission under license #109/10 and registered with the CNMV within the Investment Services Companies section of the European Economic Area in Free Service. Your capital is at risk