Oct. 28, 2021, 1:49 p.m. ET

Daily Business Briefing

Follow our latest coverage of business, markets and economy.

The S.E.C. has opened an investigation into Activision Blizzard.

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In July, Activision workers staged a walkout and protested the company’s initially dismissive response to the allegations of misconduct.Credit...Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Activision Blizzard, the video game maker behind Call of Duty and other major franchises, said on Monday that the Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating the company over “disclosures regarding employment matters and related issues.”

A press officer for Activision said the S.E.C. had issued subpoenas to the company and several current and former employees, but did not offer more details on the focus of the investigation. The company is cooperating with the inquiry, the official said in an emailed statement.

A representative for the S.E.C. declined to comment on the investigation, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.

Activision spent the summer grappling with accusations of sexual misconduct and workplace discrimination. In July, it was sued by a California employment agency, which accused it of fostering a “frat boy workplace culture” in which men joked about rape and women were harassed and underpaid compared with their male colleagues. Later that month, over 1,500 workers staged a walkout and signed a letter protesting Activision’s initially dismissive response to the accusations of misconduct.

Activision’s chief executive, Bobby Kotick, apologized for the company’s initial response to the lawsuit on the eve of the walkout. Since then, the head of Activision’s Blizzard Entertainment subsidiary, where many of the allegations in the lawsuit were centered, has stepped down. Activision announced last week that it was hiring two new executives, including a new head of human resources.

This month, the Communications Workers of America, a labor union, also filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, accusing Activision of violating labor law by intimidating workers.

The Chinese property developer Evergrande is reeling and making investors nervous.

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A housing complex being developed by Evergrande in Guangzhou, China's southern Guangdong province.Credit...Noel Celis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The troubled property giant Evergrande, once China’s most prolific developer, has become the country’s most indebted company, a position that means its default could ripple across the country’s economy.

The company, which was founded in 1996, rode China’s property boom that urbanized large swathes of the country and resulted in nearly three-quarters of household wealth being tied up in housing. This put Evergrande at the center of power in an economy that came to lean on the property market for supercharged economic growth.

But Chinese regulators are cracking down on the reckless borrowing habits of property developers. Adding to the company’s misery, China’s property market is slowing and there is less demand for new apartments.

Today, Evergrande is seen as a rickety threat to China’s biggest banks:

  • It owes money to lenders, suppliers and foreign investors.

  • It owes unfinished apartments to home buyers and has racked up more than $300 billion in unpaid bills.

  • It faces lawsuits from creditors and has seen its shares lose more than 80 percent of their value this year.

A failure on the scale of Evergrande would hit the economy, and spell financial ruin for ordinary households. The ratings agency Fitch said this month that default “appears probable.” Moody’s, another ratings agency, said Evergrande was out of cash and time.

Panic from investors could also shake global financial markets and make it harder for other Chinese companies to continue to finance their businesses with foreign investment.

On Monday, the company’s woes began to bleed into the broader market. Investors sold off the Hong Kong-listed shares of some of China’s biggest property developers as worries grew that Evergrande’s spiraling debt woes could affect the financing abilities of other developers at a time of heightened regulatory scrutiny.

But economists did not expect the situation to upend the Federal Reserve’s meeting this week. “It’s a risk, certainly,” said Gennadiy Goldberg, a rates strategist at T.D. Securities. But he noted that it was unlikely that the Fed would commit clearly this week anyway, instead signaling that it was likely to slow bond purchases by the end of the year without giving a clear date.

Jeanna Smialek contributed reporting.

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Emmys avoid record-low TV audience for the first time in six years.

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The cast of “Ted Lasso” at the Emmy Awards in Los Angeles on Sunday.Credit...Rich Fury/Getty Images

For the first time in six years, the Emmys did not set or tie a record low for ratings, as 7.4 million viewers tuned in to the awards show on Sunday night, according to Nielsen.

The audience was the highest in three years and will be a relief to CBS, which broadcast the event, and to the TV executives who have watched in horror as awards show ratings have fallen off a cliff in recent years.

The increase in Emmys viewership follows a trend for live sports events, which have also rebounded in recent months.

Sports could actually help explain the audience increase. The ceremony most likely benefited from the broadcast of a National Football League game on CBS, which wrapped up only a few minutes before the awards show began. According to preliminary Nielsen data, audience numbers for the Emmys were at their highest when the show began, and then petered out about an hour into the show.

Still, the ratings growth will comfort the Television Academy, and does not represent the full breadth of the audience, either. CBS offered a livestream of the event on its Paramount+ service. When Nielsen releases out-of-home viewing numbers later, the total could be closer to eight million viewers.

Though that’s good news for awards shows it is still roughly half the audience that watched the 2014 ceremony, which had 15.6 million viewers. In 2018, the Emmys had 10.2 million viewers, which had been a low, and these days would be regarded as a very strong performance.

The Emmys were hosted by Cedric the Entertainer, and featured an in-person ceremony for the first time in two years. Unlike other recent hosts, Cedric the Entertainer stayed away from political material, and opened the show with a song-and-dance number.

Because of the pandemic, the ceremony was more intimate than usual. Producers skipped out on the 7,100-seat Microsoft Theater, the Emmys’ usual home, and instead staged the event inside a tent with a few hundred people gathered around tables and surrounded by food and drink.

Streaming services were the big winners. Netflix’s “The Crown” won best drama and “The Queen’s Gambit” took best limited series, the first time the streaming service ever won top show awards. Between Sunday’s event and the previous weekend’s Creative Arts Emmys, Netflix took home 44 awards, tying a record set by CBS in 1974. Apple TV+, the 22-month old streaming service, won for best comedy with “Ted Lasso.”

“It was a very historic night for streaming,” Bela Bajaria, the head of global TV for Netflix, said at a news conference on Monday.

Twitter agrees pay $809 million to settle a lawsuit from 2016.

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Twitter was accused in a lawsuit of misleading investors about its growth.Credit...Cayce Clifford for The New York Times

Twitter agreed to pay $809.5 million to settle a 2016 class action lawsuit that accused the company of misleading investors about its growth, the social media company said on Monday.

As part of the settlement, which is still pending approval from a federal court, Twitter will not admit any wrongdoing, the company said in a regulatory filing. Twitter plans to record a charge for the settlement in the third quarter of this year and to pay it in the fourth quarter. A Twitter spokesman declined to comment.

The settlement stems from a lawsuit filed by a shareholder, claiming that Twitter’s top executives misled investors about its sluggish user growth in late 2014 and early 2015. During that period, Twitter publicly projected that monthly active user numbers would continue to grow, while the company had internal daily active user statistics that showed declining growth, the lawsuit said.

Twitter has shifted its user growth and engagement the statistics several times. In 2019, the company began disclosing the number of people who used its service on a daily basis, a number that painted a brighter picture of its growth as monthly active users declined. Today, Twitter reports only the daily active users that it considers “monetizable” — users who see ads on the Twitter platform.

In its most recent earnings report in July, Twitter said it had 206 million daily active users, an 11 percent increase over the previous year. The company has not yet set a date for its third-quarter earnings report.

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Coinbase ends its interest-bearing cryptocurrency program after S.E.C. scrutiny.

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Coinbase went public in April on the Nasdaq exchange.Credit...Gabby Jones for The New York Times

Securities regulators scored a victory in the battle to bring some order to the fast-growing cryptocurrency industry as Coinbase, the crypto exchange, said it would not go ahead with an interest-generating financial product called Lend.

The company made the announcement not long after it said the Securities and Exchange Commission had warned it could face a lawsuit if it went forward with the product.

In an update to a June blog post announcing Lend, Coinbase said it had decided not to offer the new product, which would have allowed customers to earn up to 4 percent interest on holdings of USD Coin, a dollar-pegged stablecoin created with the payments company Circle.

Hundreds of thousands of customers had signed up for Lend over the past few months, Coinbase said.

Coinbase made no mention of the S.E.C.’s warning — called a Wells notice — in the brief blog update and offered no explanation for its decision to pull the product.

“We continue our work to seek regulatory clarity for the crypto industry as a whole,” Coinbase said in the posting. The company declined a request for comment.

The S.E.C., which declined to comment, has indicated that it considers some interest-bearing products like Lend to be securities, making them subject to strict oversight. Coinbase does not consider Lend to be a security. It and others in the crypto industry have warned against overly restrictive regulation, contending that such moves would stifle the industry’s growth in the United States.

Coinbase initially responded to the S.E.C. warning with a defiant stance. Brian Armstrong, Coinbase’s chief executive, blasted regulators in a series of posts on Twitter. He said the S.E.C. showed “sketchy” behavior and noted that other crypto companies offer interest-generating products.

Coinbase, which went public on the Nasdaq exchange in April, had long taken the position that it embraced regulation for cryptocurrency. The company’s public feud with the S.E.C. seemed out of step with the shifting mood in the industry. Crypto companies may just be resigned to the inevitability of new rules as financial regulators are preparing to issue reports in the coming months on various regulatory pathways.

Gary Gensler, the S.E.C. chair, last week repeated his belief at a Senate Banking Committee hearing that the crypto industry was akin to the “Wild West” and needed more investor protection. He said legal precedents gave regulators the ability to determine when a new crypto product crossed the line from a largely unregulated commodity to a security or investment product subject to stricter rules.

“The Supreme Court has weighed in many times,” Mr. Gensler told the Banking Committee. “There is a fair amount of clarity.”

Crypto companies have also faced scrutiny from financial regulators at the state level.

BlockFi, a company that offers high interest on crypto holdings, as Lend would have done, is the focus of securities regulators in multiple states, including its home state, New Jersey, for failing to register these accounts as securities. The company was served with a cease-and-desist order in late July. Gurbir Grewal, the former New Jersey attorney general, took on a new role as the chief of enforcement at the S.E.C. in late July, as well. The New Jersey Attorney General’s Office declined to comment.

The Daily News gets an ‘as-needed’ editor until a new one is found.

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The Daily News, the tabloid that was once the country’s largest-circulation newspaper, and The Hartford Courant are under new ownership.Credit...Karsten Moran for The New York Times

Robert York, the editor in chief of The Daily News of New York, is being replaced on an interim and “as-needed” basis by Andrew Julien, the editor and publisher of its corporate sibling The Hartford Courant, who will remain in that job while a search for a permanent editor takes place, an executive at the publisher of the newspapers said.

The change, which was effective immediately, was announced on Monday in memos sent to Daily News and Courant staff members by Toni Martinez, a human resources executive at the newspapers’ parent company, Tribune Publishing. A Tribune spokesman confirmed the news but did not give a reason for Mr. York’s departure.

Mr. York, who was the editor and publisher of The Morning Call of Allentown, Pa., another Tribune title, before taking the Daily News editorship in 2018, declined to comment on Monday.

Mr. Julien “grew up in New York and is eager to work with the talented staff of The Daily News,” Ms. Martinez wrote.

The Daily News, the tabloid that was once the country’s largest-circulation newspaper (and the inspiration for The Daily Planet, where Superman’s alter ego, Clark Kent, worked), and The Courant are under new ownership. In May, Tribune was bought by the New York hedge fund Alden Global Capital in a deal worth $633 million.

Other Tribune papers include The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun and The Orlando Sentinel. The deal effectively made Alden, which also owns newspapers through its MediaNews Group subsidiary, the second-largest newspaper chain in the United States after Gannett.

Both The Daily News and The Courant have shed staff through buyouts offered shortly after the acquisition was completed. Eight Daily News staff members and five Courant staff members had buyouts approved in May, according to figures compiled by the NewsGuild, the union representing journalists at both papers.

Tribune’s acquisition by Alden was opposed by journalists at Tribune newspapers, who urged the previous management to seek local, benevolently minded owners for Tribune’s newspapers. A Maryland businessman who wished to give The Sun to a new local nonprofit group mounted an alternative bid, but its financing failed to come through and Tribune shareholders approved Alden’s proposal in May.

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The Washington Post is adding 41 new editing jobs as part of its expansion.

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Sally Buzbee, the former top editor of The Associated Press who took the helm at The Washington Post in June, announced the creation of 41 editing roles in a note to staff on Monday.Credit...Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

The Washington Post is expanding its editor ranks as it pushes forward with plans for growth in national and international coverage under its new executive editor, Sally Buzbee.

Ms. Buzbee, the former top editor of The Associated Press who took the helm at The Post in June, announced the creation of 41 editing roles in a note to staff on Monday, saying the positions will increase The Post’s capacity to cover global news as it breaks.

The roles include two new deputy managing editors to The Post’s masthead to work alongside the existing two, one of whom will oversee The Post’s live coverage of developing news. A number of positions for assignment editors, breaking news editors and multiplatform editors will also be created, as well as two roles for editors charged with upholding newsroom standards.

The new positions will increase the number of journalists of color in editing roles, Ms. Buzbee said in an interview.

“A real benefit toward us in a situation like this is ensuring that this will also improve the diversity of our staff, provide career paths across the newsroom for a more diverse group of people, for people from a wide variety of backgrounds and skill sets,” she said.

The jobs are mostly based in Washington, she said.

“I could see some of these jobs potentially being filled outside of Washington, and I could see future jobs around a national expansion potentially that way, but I also think that the vast majority of our leadership is going to be here,” Ms. Buzbee said.

The Post has undergone a rejuvenation in the last decade with the investment of Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and billionaire, who bought the newspaper in 2013 for $250 million. Under Martin Baron, the executive editor who retired in February, the newsroom nearly doubled to more than 1,000 journalists.

In December, the publication announced the creation of breaking-news hubs in Seoul and London as part of its efforts to become a global newsroom.

“To become a 24/7 news organization, you have to empower people across the globe to be able to make decisions,” Ms. Buzbee said. “I would say that we’re in the process of making progress toward that, maybe not quite there.”

A correction was made on 
Sept. 21, 2021

An earlier version of this article misstated the timing of The Washington Post's plan to add breaking news hubs in London and Seoul. The plan was announced in December, not June.

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Retail landscape changes in pandemic-battered Manhattan.

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Many ground-floor storefronts in Midtown are vacant, including 1500 Broadway, where the Philippines-based chicken chain Jollibee plans to open a flagship restaurant.Credit...Hilary Swift for The New York Times

While the Delta variant of the coronavirus has delayed plans by many U.S. companies to bring employees back to offices en masse, New York City workers who have been trickling into Midtown Manhattan are discovering that many of their favorite haunts for a quick cup of coffee and a muffin in the morning or sandwich or salad at lunchtime have disappeared. A number of those that are open are operating at reduced hours or with limited menus.

By the end of 2020, the number of chain stores in Manhattan — everything from drugstores to clothing retailers to restaurants — had fallen by more than 17 percent from 2019, according to the Center for an Urban Future, a nonprofit research and policy organization.

Across Manhattan, the number of available ground-floor stores, normally the domain of busy restaurants and clothing stores, has soared. A quarter of the ground-floor storefronts in Lower Manhattan are available for rent, while about a third are available in Herald Square, according to a report by the real-estate firm Cushman & Wakefield.

Starbucks has permanently closed 44 outlets in Manhattan since March of last year. Pret a Manger has reopened only half of the 60 locations it had in New York City before the pandemic. Numerous delicatessens, independent restaurants and smaller local chains have gone dark.

But in a city where one person’s downturn is someone else’s opportunity, some restaurant chains are taking advantage of the record-low retail rents to set up shop or expand their presence in New York City.

In the second quarter, food and beverage companies signed 23 new leases in Manhattan, leading apparel retailers, which signed 10 new leases, according to the commercial real estate services firm CBRE.

Shake Shack and Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen were among those signing new rental agreements this year. The burger chain Sonic signed a lease for its first New York City outpost. The Philippines-based chicken joint Jollibee, which enjoys a committed following, plans to open a huge flagship restaurant in Times Square.

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Monoclonal antibodies are in high demand for Covid, especially among those who reject the vaccine.

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Monoclonal antibody infusions at Houston Methodist Hospital in Texas on Wednesday.Credit...Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times

Lanson Jones, an avid tennis player in Houston, did not want to spoil his streak of good health during the pandemic by getting a vaccine.

Then he contracted Covid. Still, he chose not to get vaccinated. Instead, he turned to another kind of treatment: monoclonal antibodies, a year-old, laboratory-created medicine no less experimental than the vaccine.

In a glass-walled enclosure at Houston Methodist Hospital this month, Mr. Jones, 65, became one of more than a million Covid patients, including Donald J. Trump and Joe Rogan, to receive an antibody infusion.

The federal government covers the cost of the treatment, currently about $2,100 per dose, and has told states to expect scaled-back shipments because of the looming shortages. Seven Southern states account for 70 percent of orders.

Amid the din of antivaccine falsehoods circulating in the United States, monoclonal antibodies have become the rare coronavirus medicine to achieve near-universal acceptance. Championed by mainstream doctors and conservative radio hosts alike, the infusions have kept the country’s death toll — nearly 2,000 per day and climbing at a rapid rate — from soaring even higher.

“The people you love, you trust, nobody said anything negative about it,” Mr. Jones said of the antibody treatment. “And I’ve heard nothing but negative things about the side effects of the vaccine and how quickly it was developed.”

But the treatment’s popularity is straining the U.S. healthcare system.

The infusions take about an hour and a half, including monitoring afterward, and require constant attention from nurses at a time when hard-hit states often cannot spare them.

“It’s clogging up resources, it’s hard to give, and a vaccine is $20 and could prevent almost all of that,” said Dr. Christian Ramers, an infectious disease specialist and the chief of population health at Family Health Centers of San Diego, a community-based provider. Pushing antibodies while playing down vaccines, he said, was “like investing in car insurance without investing in brakes.”

Accounting firms’ lawyers take government stints to steer tax rules.

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The Treasury Building in Washington.Credit...Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times

The largest U.S. accounting firms have perfected a remarkably effective behind-the-scenes system to promote their interests in Washington, Jesse Drucker and Danny Hakim report in The New York Times.

Their tax lawyers take senior jobs at the Treasury Department, where they write policies that are frequently favorable to their former corporate clients, often with the expectation that they will soon return to their old employers. The firms welcome them back with loftier titles and higher pay, according to public records reviewed by The Times and interviews with current and former government and industry officials.

From their government posts, many of the industry veterans approved loopholes long exploited by their former firms, gave tax breaks to former clients and rolled back efforts to rein in tax shelters — with enormous impact.

Even some former industry veterans said they viewed this so-called revolving door as a big part of the reason that tax policy had become so skewed in favor of the wealthy, at the expense of just about everyone else. President Biden and congressional Democrats are seeking to overhaul parts of the tax code that overwhelmingly benefit the richest Americans.

This revolving door, with people cycling between the public and private sectors, is nothing new. But the ability of the world’s largest accounting firms to embed their top lawyers inside the government’s most important tax-policy jobs has largely escaped public scrutiny.

“Lawyers who come from the private sector need to learn who their new client is, and it’s not their former clients. It’s the American public,” said Stephen Shay, a retired tax partner at Ropes & Gray who served in the Treasury during the Reagan and Obama administrations. “A certain percentage of people never make that switch. It’s really hard to make that switch when you know where you are going back in two years, and it’s to your old clients. The incentives are bad.”

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The latest: Airline fares drop as the Delta variant weighs on travel.

  • Airlines sold tickets in June and July at prices on par with what they charged in 2019, but fares dropped in August and early September as the spread of the Delta variant of the coronavirus weighed on travel, according to the Adobe Digital Economy Index. In August, when holiday planning typically begins in earnest, flight sales for Thanksgiving were down about 18 percent in August compared with the same month in 2019.

The Biden administration will lift restrictions on fully vaccinated international travelers in November.

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U.S. to Require International Travelers Be Fully Vaccinated

The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said strict protocols would be put in place to prevent the spread of the coronavirus as the Biden administration prepared to lift travel restrictions for fully vaccinated international travelers in November.

Starting in November we will be implementing, I should say, in early November we’ll be putting in place strict protocols to prevent the spread of Covid-19 from passengers flying internationally into the United States by requiring that adult foreign nationals traveling to the United States be fully vaccinated. Obviously, this is the conclusion of a policy process on that particular issue, an important one facing many people around the world. This was an ongoing process, as you all know, that we discussed pretty extensively here. C.D.C. is going to issue a contact-tracing order that will require airlines to collect comprehensive contact information for every passenger coming to the United States and to provide that information promptly to the C.D.C. upon request to follow up with travelers who have been exposed to Covid-19, variants or other pathogens. And these requirements will apply globally.

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The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, said strict protocols would be put in place to prevent the spread of the coronavirus as the Biden administration prepared to lift travel restrictions for fully vaccinated international travelers in November.CreditCredit...Frederic J. Brown/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The Biden administration will lift travel restrictions starting in November for foreigners who are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, reopening the country to thousands of people, including those who have been separated from family in the United States during the pandemic, and easing a major source of tension with Europe.

The halt to the 18-month ban on travel from 33 countries, including members of the European Union, China, Iran, South Africa, Brazil and India, will help rejuvenate a U.S. tourism industry that was left crippled by the pandemic. The industry suffered a $500 billion loss in travel expenditures in 2020, including a 79 percent decease in spending from international travel, according to the U.S. Travel Association, a trade group that promotes travel to and within the United States.

Foreign travelers will need to show proof of vaccination before boarding and a negative coronavirus test within three days of coming to the United States, Jeffrey D. Zients, the White House pandemic coordinator, said on Monday. Unvaccinated Americans who want to travel home from overseas will have to clear stricter testing requirements. They will need to test negative for the coronavirus one day before traveling to the United States and show proof that they have bought a test to take after arriving in the United States, Mr. Zients said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will also soon issue an order directing airlines to collect phone numbers and email addresses of travelers for a new contact-tracing system. Authorities will then follow up with the travelers after arrival to ask whether they are experiencing symptoms of the virus.

“I am trying not to cry because it’s such a beautiful day,” said Giovanni Vincenti, 42, an Italian professor who lives in Baltimore. Mr. Vincenti’s daughter, who was born last May, has never met her grandparents because of the travel ban.

On Monday, Mr. Vincenti’s wife, who is a Polish researcher on vaccines, was already on her computer trying to book a flight for her mother. “We are going to cook something nice tonight,” Mr. Vincenti said, “but for Champagne we are going to wait for the grandparents.”

The changes announced on Monday apply only to air travel and do not affect restrictions along the land border, Mr. Zients said. He referred a question about which vaccines would qualify under the new rules to the C.D.C., which did not directly answer inquiries on the topic.

“International travel is critical to connecting families and friends, to fueling small and large businesses, to promoting the open exchange of ideas and culture,” Mr. Zients said. “That’s why, with science and public health as our guide, we have developed a new international air travel system that both enhances the safety of Americans here at home and enhances the safety of international air travel.”

But along with opening up travel for some, the new rules shut it down for others. Unvaccinated people will soon be broadly banned from visiting the United States even if they are coming from countries such as Japan that have not faced restrictions on travel to America during the pandemic.

The Trump administration began enforcing the bans against foreign travelers in January 2020 in the hopes of preventing the spread of disease. The effort was largely unsuccessful.

Emma Bubola contributed reporting from Rome, and Stephen Castle from London.

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