Swifties, this one’s for you. It seems like Taylor Swift's Eras Tour has lasted eons. Yet somehow, there’s always something to talk about. Just thinking about how much she’s accomplished while on tour makes me want to buckle down, lock in, and channel my inner girlboss. But while I can’t even be bothered to cook dinner at home after a long day of work, Taylor is accomplishing milestones most musicians can only dream of. Let’s recap.
The Era’s Tour began in March 2023 with its North American leg. It’s set to go until December 2024, with dates in Europe, Australia, Asia, and South America— spanning 152 shows across five continents.
As the queen of multitasking, Swift hasn’t stopped at just selling out stadiums. Since the Eras tour began, she’s released multiple albums — both new and old — and shaken up the tour setlist with each new release. Her list of new releases started on the first day of tour with “All Of The Girls You Loved Before,” which was quickly followed up by “The Alcott,” a feature on The National’s album — reciprocity for their work on her pandemic era albums, Folklore and Evermore.
She also released Midnights: Late Night Edition (including the iconic collab with Ice Spice), as well as not one but two album re-releases — Speak Now Taylor's Version and 1989 Taylor's Version. As if that wasn’t enough, she announced her latest album, The Tortured Poet’s Department, in a GRAMMY’s acceptance speech. Talk about legendary. Since its release, she’s also been churning out deluxe versions and remixes to keep us on our toes. The Eras Tour was even made into a Blockbuster film that brought Beyonce to its premiere. Star power: confirmed.
But that’s just her work life. Her personal life is just as eventful. She ended her 7-year relationship with Joe Alwyn in April 2023. Then entered into a brief but controversial fling with 1975 frontman Matty Healy. Though it didn’t last long, the relationship was enough to inspire a whole album and catapult her into her current romance with Travis Kelce, aka Amerca’s first nepo boyfriend. Now they’re the American Royal couple — and she somehow had time to fly from tour to his Super Bowl performance.
We all have the same hours in the day as Taylor Swift, but how she uses them will always be a mystery to me. I work eight hours a day and can barely manage a social life. Meanwhile, Taylor literally has it all — though conservatives are turning on her for daring to be a woman in her 30s who’s not married with kids. If that’s not proof that women can’t do anything right, I don’t know what is.
Clearly, she’s working late because she’s a singer. No wonder Taylor Swift became a billionaire months into her tour in October 2023. Her net worth is currently around 1.3 billion dollars, making her the only female musician to become a billionaire from her music.
Other entertainment billionaires like Rihanna, Kylie Jenner, Kim Kardashian, Jay-Z, and Kanye West have joined the three-comma club thanks to ventures like clothing brands, beauty products, and other entrepreneurial pursuits. Rihanna has her FENTY Empire. Kim has her award-winning SKIMS. Ye had Yeezy. But Taylor has an unbeatable catalog of publishing.
But Taylor isn’t just different from other Billionaires because of how she earned her money. She’s the Taylor we know and love because of how she spends it. Her rollercoaster Eras Tour is how she’s made much of her fortune. And she’s using it to give back in monumental degrees. From individual donations to investing in local infrastructure, Taylor is literally changing lives on a macro and micro scale. And teaching us what to expect from all billionaires in the process.
The Era’s Tour Bonuses — Talk About Workplace Benefits
First to make headlines were the Eras Tour crew bonuses. While some of us get rewarded with a pizza party or a $10 gift card to Starbucks, Taylor casually dropped $55 million in bonuses for her tour crew. The massive sum was paid out to everyone who makes the Eras Tour go around, from truck drivers to dancers and sound technicians.
In fairness, these bonuses are definitely well-deserved. Taylor’s shows are over three hours long. Imagine dancing for that long — because Swift certainly isn’t the one with the impressive moves — for hundreds of tour dates. Or remembering countless combinations of light cues to go with a setlist that changes daily. Yeah, they’re clocking in. And if my boss had millions to blow, I’d be expecting a comfortable bonus too. But $55 Million? That’s a testament to Swift’s generosity. It's like she's Oprah, but instead of cars, she's giving out life-changing amounts of cash. "You get a bonus! You get a bonus! Everybody gets a bonus!"
It’s similar to how Zendaya gave film equity to every member of the crew that worked on her controversial black-and-white drama, Malcolm & Marie. Filmed in a few days with a bare-bones crew during the peak of the pandemic, the film was Zendaya’s passion project with Sam Levinson, in which she starred alongside John David Washington. Though the film got mixed reviews, it captured the audience’s attention all the same. After all, it was Zendaya — and we’ll watch her in anything. So since the film sold to Netflix for a hefty sum, all the crew members got payouts from the deal on top of their salaries to reward their hard work.
Bonuses and equity payouts are common in many industries, but not entertainment. Even though it’s one of the most lucrative and recognizable American industries, most entertainers don’t make enough to survive. The SAG and WGA strikes last year were proof that there needs to be systemic change in the industry. LA County has even identified show businesses as risk factors for being unhoused — after all, how many stories do we hear of actors who were living in their cars before their big break? And for many, their big break never comes. For even more, they get hired on amazing gigs with giant performers … then go right back to the grind afterward. While individual actions from our favorite stars won’t fix everything, Zendaya and Taylor are providing models for how Hollywood should treat the people who make this town go round.
And in this economy, even a little bit could go a long way. Inflation and the cost of living are not a joke. Especially when, like with many creative careers, you often have to invest in lessons or equipment for your craft. With all this considered, the impact of Swirt’s donations can’t be overstated. Imagine getting a lump sum of cash for dancing to your favorite Taylor Swift tracks? Talk about a dream job.
The Economic Impact of Swift - Swiftonomics, if you will
Like Barbie and Beyonce last year, Swift is still on a tear to boost the economy of the cities she’s in just by traveling there — ad inspiring others to make the trek, too.
The Barbie movie proved that by marketing to women (instead of just making Marvel flops like Madame Web that aren’t really targeted to women at all), the entertainment industry can make giant profits. Barbie fever went beyond the theater. Thanks to a plethora of product collabs, the phenomenon rippled through retail.
Similarly, Beyonce’s Renaissance Tour tour generated an estimated $4.5 billion for the American economy. According to NPR, that’s almost as much as the entire 2008 Olympics earned for Beijing. People were taking money out of their 401ks to pay for Beyonce tickets and the glittery, silver-hues outfits to rock at her shows. Cities even started calling her effect the “Beyonce Bump.”
Swift has the same effect. She’s not just proving her generosity on a micro-scale for the people close to her, she’s having actual, tangible effects on the economy. It's like she's leaving a trail of dollar bills in her wake, and cities are scrambling to catch them like it's a country-pop, capitalist version of musical chairs.
The US Travel Association called it the Taylor Swift Impact after she generated over $5 Billion in just the first 5 months of the Eras Tour. But how does this work? It’s not like Taylor is printing more money at those shows, but it almost is. Her tour dates are pretty much economic steroid shots for local businesses. Hotels are booked solid, restaurants are packed, and let's not even get started on the surge in friendship bracelet supplies.
“Swifties averaged $1,300 of spending in local economies on travel, hotel stays, food, as well as merchandise and costumes,” say the US Travel Association. “That amount of spending is on par with the Super Bowl, but this time it happened on 53 different nights in 20 different locations over the course of five months.” That’s not to say anothing of her effect on the actual Super Bowl and the entire NFL season thanks to her ball-throwing boyfriend.
It's like she's created her own micro-economy, and everyone's invited to the party. And unlike some economic theories that rely on wealth trickling down (spoiler alert: it doesn't), Taylor's wealth is more like a t-shirt cannon or the confetti at her shows — showering everyone around.
Donations that actually do good
Taylor isn’t just stepping into cities and calling it a night. She’s also not just throwing pennies at problems - she's making significant contributions that are changing lives. And more importantly, she's using her platform to encourage her fans to do the same.
She kicked off her tour with quiet donations to food banks in Glendale, Ariz., and Las Vegas ahead of the Eras Tour. Once the tour was in full swing, she continued this practice. In Seattle, she donated to Food Lifeline, a local hunger relief organization. In Santa Clara, she showed some love to Second Harvest of Silicon Valley. And let's not forget about her $100,000 donation to the Hawkins County School Nutrition Program in Tennessee.
She’s been making similar donations overseas. Taylor Swift donated enough money to cover the food bills for an entire year across 11 food banks and & community pantries in Liverpool. Swift also covered 10,800 meals for Cardiff Foodbank and many more banks across the UK and EU. Her impact is so profound that her numbers are doing more to combat issues like hunger than the government.
Can billionaires actually be good?
One thing about me, I’m always ready and willing — knife and fork in hand — to eat the rich. Because fundamentally, can any billionaire really be good? In our late-stage capitalist horror story, the answer is usually no. Look how many of them are supporting the Trump campaign just to get some tax breaks.
But here's the thing - Taylor Swift might just be the exception that proves the rule. She's not perfect, sure. She still flies private jets and probably has a carbon footprint bigger than Bigfoot. But unlike most of the others in her tax bracket, she's not flaunting her wealth like it's a personality trait.
Take a look around. We've got billionaires trying to colonize Mars instead of, I don't know, helping people on Earth. In this context, Taylor's approach is more like Mackenzie Scott’s — Bezos’s ex-wife. She's not trying to escape to another planet - she's trying to make this one better.
And look, I'm not saying we should stop critiquing billionaires or the system that creates them. But she's just setting the bar for what we should expect from all billionaires. She's showing us that our collective power as fans can translate into real-world change. That our love for catchy choruses and bridge drops can somehow, improbably, lead to food banks getting funded and crew members getting life-changing bonuses.
So sorry to my neighbors who hear me belting “Cruel Summer” and “right where you left me” at the top of my lungs (and range). Just know it’s for the greater good.
Is the COVID-19 Vaccine Safe?
This is an extraordinary scientific achievement, but is it safe?
These will be the fastest vaccines ever developed, by a margin of years. The next fastest vaccine ever approved for public use was the mumps vaccine, and that took 4 years.
Unfortunately, that speed has made a lot of people nervous. Will the vaccine be safe? Are they skipping steps? How is this process moving so fast?
According to Pew Research, 77% of Americans think it's very or somewhat likely a COVID-19 vaccine will be approved in the United States before its safety and effectiveness are fully understood.
But regardless of the fear and doubt, we need a vaccine. We are now losing over 2,000 American lives per day to COVID-19. Numerous health experts have warned that this pandemic will not truly be over until we have a vaccinated population.
Part of the fear is related to the mystery surrounding the process of vaccine creation. Almost no one who isn't integrally involved in vaccine development understands how long it takes to create a vaccine or why it takes so long. So to most Americans speed doesn't seem like a feat of modern science, it seems like cutting corners. Here are all the (genuinely not scary) reasons why this vaccine is being developed so much faster than any in history.
Operation Warp Speed
Operation Warp Speed (OWS) is a coordinated government effort to defeat this virus as quickly as possible. It is a partnership between the Department of Defense and the Department of Health and Human services to make resources available to the private companies involved in creating vaccines, testing, and therapeutics for COVID-19. In practice, OWS has focused primarily on the creation of vaccines and has already spent billions ensuring that the vaccine development, manufacturing, and distribution process can move as efficiently as possible.
The US program is bankrolling the development and production of six promising coronavirus vaccine candidates. This has already sped up the process significantly and will likely play an even larger role in the manufacturing process. Medical research of any kind often moves slowly because it's expensive and risky.
Funding is hard to secure, because in order to prove a vaccine is successful (and therefore profitable) you have to have tests, and to do tests, you need money. It's sort of a catch-22 that is only ended when someone decides to make a risky bet.
Betting on vaccines is risky, because if it ends up being unsuccessful (the majority of vaccines never make it to market), that money is just gone. The US government chose to take the gamble.
The US has spent $10 billion through OWS on the most promising vaccine candidates, ensuring they don't have to wait for private funding to move through each phase of the process.
Combining Steps
Many people are concerned that these drug companies are skipping steps in the race to create a vaccine, but what's happening is that multiple steps in the process are being done simultaneously.
Steps that are usually done sequentially are being done at the same time. For example, some labs are running combined Phase 1 and Phase 2 human trials or having vaccine development manufacturing facilities ready even before a vaccine is finalized. This increases the financial risk, but not the product risk.
Typically, clinical trials set up their own independent panels of scientists, known as a data safety monitoring board or DSMB, to watch out for safety concerns or early signs of success. But all of the vaccine trials in Operation Warp Speed are sharing a common DSMB. This allows the DSMB to review the data from all the trials from the various vaccines concurrently. That shared data expedites the process and quickly identifies which vaccines are effective and which aren't without wasting time and resources.
Saad Omer, director of the Yale Institute of Global Health, explains that this is not a huge difference. "There's really just a subtle difference in how the trials are run. If the trials were separate, you would publish the full data, and then recruit a new set of participants. For a combined trial, the data and safety monitoring board would look at the interim data and determine whether it's still worth continuing the trial." This continuous monitoring cuts the inefficiencies out of the process without changing the safety standards.
Years of Prior Research
The research stage of vaccine development is often one of the longest. The College of Physicians of Philadelphia states that this exploratory phase "often lasts 2-4 years." Thankfully, much of the research needed for the COVID-19 vaccine had already been done before the novel coronavirus even appeared.
The term "coronavirus" includes a family of several known viruses that cause respiratory tract illnesses that range from the common cold to such potentially deadly illnesses as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which killed almost 800 people during an epidemic that occurred in 2002 and 2003. After the SARS outbreak, research on coronaviruses increased significantly. So when SARS-Cov-2 or COVID-19 appeared, vaccine work on some of its relatives had already been underway. This gave scientists a significant head start.
Another way in which scientists weren't exactly starting from scratch on this vaccine is thanks to the messenger RNA or mRNA technology. mRNA technology is a completely new vaccine technology that is being used in both the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and the Moderna vaccine. Both the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccine use mRNA to trigger the immune system to produce protective antibodies without using actual samples of the virus.
While this mRNA science hasn't created a successful vaccine before now, the ideas behind an mRNA vaccine have been studied and tested extensively for over 30 years.
In the natural world, the body relies on millions of tiny proteins to keep itself alive and healthy, and it uses mRNA to tell cells which proteins to make. The concept behind an mRNA vaccine is simple: If you can design your own synthetic mRNA, you could tell the body to create whatever proteins you want, including antibodies to vaccinate against infection.
Messenger RNA vaccines are a game-changer in terms of speed. The mRNA vaccines produced by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna are faster to develop as they don't require companies to produce protein or weakened pathogens for the vaccine.
Traditional vaccines typically use a weakened version of the disease or a protein piece of it, but because these are grown in eggs or cells, developing and manufacturing vaccines takes a long time. In contrast, the genetic material mRNA is efficient to make, and highly customizable.
Short but Large Phase 3
When a new vaccine is tested on humans, it is tested in three phases. Each phase increases in size and scope. The length of study for phase 3 clinical trials is usually 1 to 4 years and normally involves 300 to 3,000 patients.
COVID-19 is killing over 2,000 Americans a day, so we don't have time to wait for a lengthy trial. To resolve this issue, they have increased the trial size significantly. Pfizer's phase 3 trial had 43,000 volunteers, and Moderna's had 30,000.
These are what are called "event-driven trials." Basically an event in this case is when one of the volunteers gets sick with COVID-19. Once a trial reaches a previously decided on number of events, they check how many of the people that got sick were given the real vaccine and how many were given the placebo. This shows how effective the vaccine was.
The incredibly large trial size and the prevalence of the disease has allowed the "events" to occur quickly, making it easy to test the efficacy of the vaccine. Normally clinical trials can be held back by low volunteer numbers and low disease prevalence. However, COVID-19 spreads rapidly and pretty much all adults seem to be susceptible, which makes these problems irrelevant.
The only downside of a shorter but larger trial is that you don't get to see what long-term effects the vaccine will have. But scientists agree that the chances of long-term complications are extremely unlikely because of how vaccines work. Deborah Fuller, Ph.D, who is a vaccine scientist with UW Medicine, explains, "Most of their job is done in the first few days, then the vaccine is gone from your body. So what's left is that immune response to the vaccine."
Emergency Use Authorization
At the end of the vaccine making process, when the trials are finished and the research is done, companies submit a Biologics License Application (BLA) to the FDA. The BLA usually takes about a year to gain approval. To speed up the process, COVID-19 vaccines are seeking an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) before they are even done collecting data.
Under an EUA, a company can produce and distribute a vaccine that hasn't officially been approved. This is a process meant for one purpose: to save lives. The FDA will only grant an EUA if they believe that the expected benefits outweigh the possible risks of the vaccine.
Early in the pandemic, the FDA issued a list of requirements they would need from a company before they would consider issuing an EUA for a vaccine. Those guidelines included information about how many people had to be involved in trials, how long the follow up with them had to be, and what information had to be included in their reports.
To ensure that this EUA isn't about cutting corners, the FDA has appointed an independent advisory board to aid them in their decision about the vaccine. On Thursday this week the FDA is scheduled to convene a meeting of that advisory board, known as VRBPAC, to review Pfizer's Covid-19 vaccine for emergency use authorization.
This vaccine is coming, and it's coming quickly. At first that might seem scary, but in reality it's just a perfect confluence of events that have allowed scientific minds to do the impossible. Operation Warp Speed, years of usable research, combining steps, a differently designed phase 3, and emergency use authorizations have all come together to create the perfect situation to make a safe and effective vaccine—in record time.