Raphael Stevens

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s independent panel of advisors raised doubts about the need to “periodically” update Covid vaccines, noting that it’s unclear if the virus is seasonal like the flu. 
The advisory panel’s concerns are the latest pushback against the FDA’s proposed shift to an annual coronavirus shot schedule earlier this year.
That approach is backed by former White House health officials Dr. Ashish Jha and Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Vaccine manufacturers like Pfizer are also preparing for a shift to yearly jabs.

A person receives a COVID-19 vaccination dose, during a free distribution of COVID-19 rapid test kits for those who received vaccination shots or booster shots, at Union Station on January 7, 2022 in Los Angeles, California.
Mario Tama | Getty Images

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s independent panel of advisors raised doubts about the need to “periodically” update Covid vaccines, noting that it’s unclear if the virus is seasonal like the flu.
Advisors on Thursday unanimously voted that new jabs for the fall should be monovalent — meaning they are designed against one variant of Covid — and target one of the omicron XBB strains. Those are now the dominant variants nationwide. 

But the original voting question included language about whether the panel recommends a “periodic update” to Covid shots. 
Dr. Peter Marks, head of the FDA’s vaccine division, asked the panel’s chair to strike the wording from the question after several advisors raised concerns. 
“As worded, it seems to be saying, do we agree that there’s gonna be a regular need to update? And I don’t think that’s clear,” said Dr. Arthur Reingold, professor of epidemiology at the University of California, Berkeley. 
The panel’s concerns indicate there is still uncertainty around what the Covid pandemic will look like in the years ahead, even as cases and deaths decline nationwide.
The worries are also the latest pushback against the FDA’s proposed shift to annual Covid shots earlier this year – a simplified approach to vaccination that would involve yearly updates to the jabs. That’s similar to how the U.S. rolls out new flu vaccines every fall and winter, which is the season when cases flourish. 

But several advisors cautioned against calling Covid seasonal like the flu.
“It’s not clear to me that this is a seasonal virus yet,” said Henry Bernstein, a pediatrician at Cohen Children’s Medical Center. 
Dr. Mark Sawyer, professor of clinical pediatrics at the University of California, San Diego, added that describing Covid as “seasonal” could ultimately confuse the public about “when and where they should get vaccinated, and how frequently.” 
“I’ll join the choir here. I think using the word season is equally problematic,” said. Dr. Sawyer. “It links the campaign to the influenza vaccine. I understand that it may be convenient and most efficient to give the vaccines together, but it’s only been a few years and we really don’t know what the Covid season is.” 
Unlike the flu, Covid’s spread has often been erratic. The virus constantly mutates into new variants and has yet to settle into a predictable seasonal pattern. 
In response to the advisors, FDA’s Marks emphasized that Covid shots will likely require another update “at some point.” 
“This is not going to be the final formulation for this vaccine forevermore,” he said.

A pharmacist prepares to administer COVID-19 vaccine booster shots during an event hosted by the Chicago Department of Public Health at the Southwest Senior Center on September 09, 2022 in Chicago, Illinois.
Scott Olson | Getty Images

Shifting to an annually updated Covid vaccine is backed by former White House health officials Dr. Ashish Jha and Dr. Anthony Fauci, who believe the country can benefit from adopting a similar approach to the flu shot.
Each year, researchers assess strains of the flu in circulation and estimate which will be the most prevalent during the fall and winter before updating jabs. 
“People go and get their annual flu vaccine, if they see this as a routine part of care.  I don’t — every time I get a flu vaccine, I don’t think, is this my 28th flu shot or 29th flu — I just think, it’s my annual flu shot,” Jha said Wednesday in an interview on PBS News Hour. 
“For most people, if they think of it as their annual COVID vaccine, they get it when they get their flu shot, I think it’ll make it an important difference,” he continued. 
Recent polling suggests the public is open to the idea. 
More than half of about 1,200 U.S. adult respondents said they would likely get an annual Covid vaccine if it were offered similar to a yearly flu shot, according to an April survey by health policy organization KFF. That includes 32% who would be “very likely” to do so.
It’s unclear how many Americans will roll up their sleeves to get updated shots this fall and winter. 
The uptake of the most recent bivalent boosters — which target the original Covid strain and omicron BA.4 and BA.5 — has been sluggish.
Only about 17% of the U.S. population — roughly 56 million people —have received Pfizer and Moderna’s boosters since they were approved in September, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Leading Covid shot manufacturer Pfizer told CNBC last month that an annual Covid schedule could encourage more people to vaccinate each year. 
The shift could help people view Covid shots as just another “very natural part” of protecting their health, said Dr. Mikael Dolsten, Pfizer’s chief scientific officer.
Pfizer is already preparing to shift to an annual schedule by developing “next-generation” versions of its shot, which aim to broaden and extend the protection people get from the virus to a full year. More

Sports gambling powerhouse DraftKings has made a $195 million, all-cash offer for PointsBet’s U.S. assets.
The offer comes a month after Fanatics agreed to buy the Australian company for $150 million in an effort to boost its presence in sports gambling.
Fanatics CEO Michael Rubin told CNBC after the announcement that he’s highly skeptical of the deal, which he views as DraftKings attempting to slow Fanatics down.

Omar Marques | LightRocket | Getty Images

Sports gambling powerhouse DraftKings has made a $195 million, all-cash offer for PointsBet’s U.S. assets, it said on Friday, topping an earlier bid by Fanatics.
Last month Fanatics agreed to buy the Australian company’s U.S. operations for $150 million in an effort to boost its presence in sports gambling.

“While we continue to focus on operating more efficiently and driving substantial organic revenue growth in the United States, we will also look to prudently capitalize on compelling opportunities at attractive valuations, as is the case with PointsBet’s U.S. business,” said DraftKings CEO Jason Robins in a statement. “We believe DraftKings is uniquely positioned to submit this superior proposal due to our scale and corresponding ability to generate meaningful synergies from the acquisition.”
DraftKings, which is publicly traded, has a market cap of about $10 billion.
Robins told CNBC, while the deal wouldn’t be transformative for DraftKings, it would allow the company to grow market share.
“We do not expect this to have any impact on the path to profitability,” he added.
PointsBet is the seventh-largest sports betting operator in the U.S., but it’s rapidly been shedding cash. The company previously forecast a loss of between $77 million and $82 million for the second half of the year. 

If the deal moves forward, it would be a major blow to Fanatics’ sports betting efforts, as the company was looking to expand its reach ahead of the NFL season. The deal with Fanatics would have given the company access to at least 15 states where PointsBet already operates.
Fanatics CEO Michael Rubin told CNBC after the DraftKings announcement that he’s highly skeptical of the deal, which he views as DraftKings attempting to slow Fanatics down.
“It’s a move to delay our ability to enter the market,” Rubin said. “I guess they are more concerned about us than I would have thought.”
There are still some hurdles, though, for DraftKings. First, the deal has to be approved by the PointsBet board, which will review the new proposal and determine its next steps, according to the company.
The company said Friday, “subject to the outcome of the review being undertaken of the DraftKings Proposal, the Board continues to recommend that Shareholders vote in favour of the FBG (Fanatics Betting and Game) Transaction.”
And then there’s the potential for regulatory challenges: DraftKings and FanDuel dominate the U.S. sports betting market, which could make a deal to grab even more market share contentious. More

Andy Dunn, who co-founded men’s clothing company Bonobos in 2007, is rejoining the retailer as its brand advisor.
Bonobos is looking to get back to its roots after it was acquired by WHP Global from Walmart in a $75 million deal that closed in May.
“You get the opportunity to dive deep into why the brand was created in the first place, the success it enjoyed in the beginning years and how that happened,” WHP Global CEO Yehuda Shmidman told CNBC.

A Bonobos ‘guideshop’ stands in lower Manhattan on April 18, 2017 in New York City.
Getty Images

Bonobos co-founder Andy Dunn is returning to the retailer as brand advisor as the company looks to get back to its roots after it was sold by Walmart earlier this year, Bonobos and new parent company WHP Global announced Friday. 
Dunn, who founded the men’s clothing brand in 2007, will report to WHP Global CEO Yehuda Shmidman but will work closely with Bonobos president John Hutchison and Express Inc. CEO Tim Baxter. 

WHP Global and Express Inc., which runs the Express brand, bought Bonobos from Walmart in a $75 million deal that was announced in April and closed last month. Walmart originally bought Bonobos in 2017 for $310 million while it was working to grow its online presence under former e-commerce president Marc Lore.
“It’s almost unlimited opportunity, right?” Shmidman told CNBC of the decision to bring Dunn back to the brand. “You get the opportunity to dive deep into why the brand was created in the first place, the success it enjoyed in the beginning years and how that happened and sort of learn from that to inspire the next chapter of growth.” 
Shmidman said WHP Global has no plans to change the Bonobos DNA and said the firm’s decision to appoint Dunn is part of its plan to center the brand on its core identity. 
“It’s very important to know that we’re not changing. In fact, if anything, we’re doubling down on that very same DNA that made Bonobos successful in the first place,” said Shmidman.
One area where Shmidman does want to see a change is Bonobos’ physical footprint: The brand currently runs brick-and-mortar Guideshops, where customers can try on clothes and then order them online, but only in the U.S. Under WHP Global, Bonobos can expand internationally, he said.

“How about a Bonobos in Dubai? How about a Bonobos in Hong Kong?” said Shmidman. “How cool would that be?” 
Dunn said he’s excited to “have a seat at the table” and that this time around he’ll just be advising the brand — not running it. 
“I’m here to serve in whatever way called upon and the way that I think about that is just staying really close to the customer. I’m a lot older than when Bonobos started, you know, I’m 43 now, I was 28 then,” Dunn said. “So, I’ve gotten a lot of perspectives about the product and the customer and how do we just begin this new chapter and just get bigger.” 
Bonobos started out as a purely digital retailer in the early aughts and grew to be a pioneer in the direct-to-consumer space after it managed to scale, achieve profitability and garner national recognition. 
When Walmart decided to acquire the brand, some thought the partnership didn’t make sense because the giant retailer’s focus on value didn’t seem to mesh with Bonobos’ identity as a premium menswear line. 
While Walmart sold Bonobos for a significant discount compared to what it paid, the acquisition wasn’t necessarily a losing one for Walmart. The tie-up helped boost its digital sales.
Online sales accounted for about $53.4 billion — or nearly 13% — of Walmart U.S.′ total net sales in the past fiscal year, which ended in late January, according to company filings. That’s a jump from $15.7 billion, or roughly 5% of Walmart U.S.′ total net sales, in 2019.

Andy Dunn, Bonobos co-founder
Source: Brian McConkey

But how Bonobos fared — and what it gained — from its time under Walmart’s massive tent isn’t as black and white. 
At the time of the acquisition, Dunn wrote in a blog post that the sale to Walmart gave Bonobos an opportunity to reach a wider ecosystem, arguing the deal fit in with its goal to “become the market leader in all of premium menswear.” 
It also gave Dunn an opportunity to work alongside Lore, his longtime mentor who he considered “the best in the world at building upstart third-party brand e-commerce properties.” 
Six years to the day after that blog post was written, Dunn told CNBC he stands by his decision to sell to Walmart and “vociferously” disagrees with critics who say the brand was diluted by the acquisition. 
“From a premium positioning standpoint, the Bonobos business is still up and to the right and growing,” said Dunn. “From the vantage point of the customer, I don’t think it changed much, you know, would be my read, and I think the proof is in the pudding on the continued growth of the brand.” 
The Walmart umbrella offered Bonobos exposure to a wider customer base and also protection from the pandemic-related headwinds that plagued other independent retailers during the global health crisis. 
“With the pandemic, and how hard that was on retail, that to me was the moment where I stepped back and thought, wow, we made the right decision putting Bonobos inside of such a strong house,” Dunn said.  
These days, Bonobos is still delivering double-digit sales growth, WHP Global said. More

GoDigital plans to bid for Vice Media on Tuesday.
Vice is selling itself out of bankruptcy. If there’s more than one bid for the company, an auction will take place June 22.
GoDigital’s ethos of happiness and tapping into the “Zone of Genius” is far different than Vice Media’s original culture of in-your-face debauchery.

Vice Media Group logo
Pavlo Gonchar | Lightrocket | Getty Images

When Suroosh Alvi, Gavin McInnes and Shane Smith founded Vice magazine, which later expanded to Vice Media, they built a business based on a punk rock, counterculture image. Smith once had himself recorded, nearly naked and drinking alcohol, giving a tour of the media organization’s Brooklyn, New York, headquarters.
The company’s name is Vice. It’s self-explanatory.

Next week, Vice, once valued at $5.7 billion, is planning to sell itself out of bankruptcy. A little-known Los Angeles-based company that wants to buy it has a quixotic culture that would be incomparable to those early days of Vice, and it would almost certainly be derided.
GoDigital Media Group is a privately held conglomerate that owns video and music rights, especially in the Latin genre, and an array of different businesses. The company has such a low profile, it currently doesn’t have a physical headquarters after shutting down its Los Angeles office during the pandemic. GoDigital plans to open up a new LA office later this year. Its executives have been running the business remotely since 2020.
Initially, co-founders Jason Peterson, 41, and Logan Mulvey, 38, used cash flow from music-licensing rights to establish a business around digital media distribution, connecting content creators to retailers by developing a cloud software company called ContentBridge in 2010. GoDigital later expanded its rights business to include those from Jason DeRulo and T.I. Last year, GoDigital invested $100 million into that division for future growth. Music rights ownership makes up the bulk of the company’s revenue and valuation.
In recent years, Peterson, GoDigital’s chief executive officer and chair, has modeled the company as a mini-Berkshire Hathaway as he attempts to play what’s called “the infinite game” — owning durable businesses that hit passion points for consumers.
GoDigital has made eight different acquisitions since 2020 that have spanned media and commerce. Peterson and Mulvey have pursued distressed assets with consumer brand recognition. They acquired YogaWorks for $9.6 million in 2021 after it filed for bankruptcy in October 2020. And last year, the pair plucked assets out of bankruptcy, scooping up retailers Eastern Mountain Sports and Bob’s Stores for $70 million.

The total portfolio now includes seven companies after it merged two of its companies, Latino-focused media companies Mitu and NGL Collective, co-founded by actor John Leguizamo. GoDigital employs about 1,300 people through its subsidiaries and generates annual revenue in the high hundreds of millions.
The company wants to “inspire happiness” along the way, said Peterson in an interview that evoked the opposite of the in-your-face culture that Smith brought to Vice.
“Our goal is to create emotions of joy and happiness in our customers and our employees,” said Peterson. “What differentiates us is our long-term perspective. The goal of the infinite game is simply continuity of play to make sure the game goes on. And when you live and work in that kind of a paradigm, you’re living and working in a compound interest paradigm.”

GoDigital co-founders Logan Mulvey (L) and Jason Peterson (C) with chief strategy officer Craig Greiwe (R)
Source: GoDigital

Vice’s bankruptcy sale

Vice would be GoDigital’s largest acquisition to date. GoDigital plans to bid for Vice on Tuesday at a price between $300 million and $400 million, according to people familiar with the company’s thinking. GoDigital’s executives wouldn’t comment on the specifics of their planned bid.
If another buyer makes a bid or offers to purchase part of the company but not the whole, an auction would be held on June 22. The next day a judge would confirm a potential acquisition during a court hearing.
Sean “Diddy” Combs’ Revolt is also considering a bid, said a person familiar with the matter. A spokesperson for Revolt couldn’t be reached for comment.
Fortress Investment, Vice’s largest creditor turned equity holder, is running the sale process and has pledged to back a portion of GoDigital’s bid and other potential offers, said the people, who asked not to be named because the details of the bids are private. Fortress, along with Soros Fund Management and Monroe Capital, has committed to a stalking horse bid of $225 million.
A spokesperson for Fortress declined to comment.
GoDigital’s opaque finances and hodgepodge of smaller assets is stirring skepticism about its ability to acquire a company of Vice’s size. Chief Strategy Officer Craig Greiwe, who was tasked with finding acquisition targets when he joined the company last year, said GoDigital is holding talks with other equity partners on a bid. He declined to provide any names.
“I can understand the skepticism if people haven’t heard of us,” said Greiwe.  “We do have the money to buy it.  We are serious in our bid.  We are also confident that the sellers view us as a legitimate and credible bidder.  We are confident that we can run the company and do so profitably.”

‘The Zone of Genius’

Peterson and Mulvey said they want to own Vice because think it’s been run poorly. They cite the company’s profligate spending, specifically wondering why it’s leasing 20 offices and production hubs throughout the world rather than having employees work remotely. The co-founders are in talks with Alex Wallace, the former head of media and content at Yahoo from 2020 to 2022, to be Vice’s new CEO if GoDigital buys the company, according to people familiar with the matter. Wallace declined to comment.
As CEO, Peterson said he tries to match his portfolio companies’ employees with their own interests. “The Zone of Genius,” a concept borrowed from Gay Hendricks’ “The Big Leap,” is about the intersection between what a person loves and what they are good at doing, Peterson explained. He will preach that message to Vice’s employees on Day One if GoDigital acquires the company, he said.
“I’m going to go in there and I’m going to treat everybody as an individual human, and we’re going to try and figure out what are their individual purposes, what are their values?” Peterson said. “Because when we work at the confluence of what we like and what we’re great at or good at, we’re going to do well. It doesn’t matter how good we are at something if we don’t like it. We’re not going to do it for a long time. When you have high degrees of alignment of purpose between the individual and the organization, that’s when the magic happens.”
When business conversations turn to concepts like happiness and value alignment, it’s easy to think about WeWork founder Adam Neumann’s mission to elevate the world’s consciousness and cringe. It’s particularly jarring to match up the airy language against Vice’s original mission. Smith, Vice’s executive chairman and former CEO, couldn’t be reached for comment.

Shane Smith, co-founder of Vice.

GoDigital’s executives show no embarrassment about their New Age-style business school lingo. They believe linking passion and purpose creates “an incredible positive feedback loop for the company,” said Peterson.
“Recognizing that people make decisions based on their emotional state, our goal is to inspire happiness through an ecosystem of content, community and commerce across consumer passion points,” said Greiwe. “I’m now the person who dreams that at night. There’s a fundamental belief in making the impossible possible and doing it before anyone else.”

Similarities to the portfolio

Any company, including GoDigital, would have its share of problems in taking on Vice.
Vice had revenue of about $600 million last year and wasn’t profitable, Axios reported last month. Vice has been cash flow negative for “several years” according to a bankruptcy filing.
“There’s no reason that Vice shouldn’t be profitable today, but for its past mismanagement,” Peterson said.
But simply figuring out what Vice employees want to do and making sure they do it doesn’t solve problems like a weak advertising market or competition for content. Still, Peterson and Mulvey see similarities between Vice’s business and several companies they already own. Mulvey pointed to YogaWorks as a business GoDigital has transitioned to meet new ways of consumption.
With YogaWorks, GoDigital has attempted to disrupt an in-studio yoga consumer base with an online subscription service offering digitally distributed at-home classes. YogaWorks shut down all of its brick-and-mortar locations as part of its bankruptcy reorganization and has “only lost a very small number of customers” as GoDigital has transitioned the business online, Mulvey said.
Mulvey, who took over as YogaWorks’ CEO in January, said the shift from studio-based to in-home yoga is analogous to changing media-consumption habits.
“People consumed Vice on HBO or cable TV,” Mulvey said, alluding to Vice’s now-cancelled show on HBO and Vice’s cable network. “We’ve got to make sure we understand the followers and the customers that the way we’re evolving the business makes sense for how people consume news, media, fun or exercise on the go.”
Peterson noted Vice’s business model is similar to NGL-Mitu. Both make money off branded content and social amplification.
“This is not a new type of business for us,” Peterson said. “It’s a multi-platform network. We know how to run one.”
Greiwe added “the fundamentals of Vice are strong” and said GoDigital had no plans to sell of any of Vice’s assets, including the women-focused Refinery29, which Vice acquired for $400 million in 2019, and its homegrown advertising agency, Virtue.
“The brand value for Vice and Refinery29 is unparalleled in the marketplace,” said Greiwe. “It doesn’t make sense for Vice News to exist separate from Vice Publishing. And why would you not have Vice Studios on top of all of that with the decades of IP that exists within that company?”
Peterson acknowledged that much of his interest in buying Vice is he thinks it’s a good candidate for implementing his preferred culture and management style, which he calls “the GoDigital way.”
If he’s right, all Vice ever needed to succeed was a bankruptcy process to service its $834 million of outstanding debt and a little more zoned genius.
— CNBC’s Lillian Rizzo contributed to this report.
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