Good morning,
Covid
In Britain the vaccines are being given at lightning speed with predictions by Gov that by the end of May most restrictions will be lifted and the economy will “roar back to life”. It may be too optimistic but cases are down 25% and hospital admissions down 23%, as 1 in 5 adults have now been vaccinated and one study says The UK will have herd immunity as early as July.
The country hopes to vaccinate its most vulnerable by Feb. 15, including people over 70, care home residents and staff, and health and social care workers. Together, these groups have made up 88 per cent of all Covid-19 deaths in the country.
But, how can you claim success if you cannot contain new variant’s emerging? And there are up to 4000 variants, some of them close to out pacing the vaccines like the South Africa variant, so the UK has to quarantine incoming visitors to ensure all of this effort to vaccinate isn’t ruined. So the newspapers are critical of the fact The Gov doesn’t have quarantine hotels in place months after promising to do so but it will make 10 day quarantines mandatory by mid Feb. 15th.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/breaking-hotel-quarantines-to-take-23445837
In The U.S. meantime the UK variant responsible for this spike in cases and contributing to more than 100 thousand deaths in Britain is just taking hold. There are 500 cases so far and it spreads 70% faster. On CNN yesterday a stark warning from Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota who said it’s like telling people who are playing on a sunny warm blue sky beach, that a storm is coming and they won’t leave the beach. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says the COVID-19 variant, known as B.1.1.7, has been detected in 33 states across the US. And Osterholm likened the new variant spread to a “Cat 5 hurricane churning off the coast”.
And disease expert Anthony Fauci noted while the vaccines are effective against The UK variant, the South African variant, which has also been found in American, is a much bigger threat because it may require a vaccine “upgrade”.
https://nypost.com/2021/02/04/uk-covid-variant-like-a-category-5-hurricane-official/
No one is safe, until everyone is safe as they say, so COVAXX which is the program to9 vaccinate poorer countries has to be given more than lip service by richer countries.
Trump and Impeachment
You have probably heard the discussion about whether Trump will or won’t testify at his own impeachment trial, and the latest being he won’t. But he has been warned the legal inference in the invitation by (D) Jamie Raskin who is the impeachment manager, that “[i]f you decline this invitation, we reserve any and all rights, including the right to establish at trial that your refusal to testify supports a strong adverse inference regarding your actions (and inaction) on January 6, 2021.”
A new video makes a strong case that Trump knowingly incited his followers to storm the Capitol and put lawmakers lives in danger including V.P. Pence. The 10-minute video, posted by Just Security, an online forum hosted by the Reiss Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law, is a compilation of scenes, many taken from the right-wing social media platform Parler.
Paul Butler (@LawProfButler), former federal prosecutor with the Public Integrity Section of the U.S. Department of Justice:
The video contains strong evidence that Trump did incite the insurrection, regardless of whether that was his intent. The rioter’s words “we were invited here” were exactly right, and the refrain “fight for Trump” was directly responsive to Trump’s demand. In criminal law, we would say this video proves the act but perhaps not the mental state – that Trump intended to cause the insurrection or knew it would happen as a result of his words.
https://www.justsecurity.org/74335/fight-for-trump-video-evidence-of-incitement-at-the-capitol/
And Prof. Butler says the evidence would not be sufficient for a criminal court, but the impeachment process is different. My worry is what the impeachment trial will do ti stir a divided America, at a time we were all just starting to have a break from Trump and his incitement to hate. It’s been a welcome few weeks of twitter silence, despite my concerns about freedom of speech and the dangers of silencing an American President. (Trump was suspended from twitter before inauguration)
Russia
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell is on a three day visit to Russia and the top of his agenda is the jailing of opposition leader Alexei Navalny and harsh treatment of protesters by President Putin’s security forces.
The EU wants to discuss Iran resigning the nuclear deal and climate change, but in the wake of the Navalny episode and the jailing of thousands of people, Borrell cannot be seen to deliver a soft message on human rights. And in fact the EU is under tremendous internal pressure to bring on more sanctions against Russia and under criticism it’s been slow to act.
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/02/04/outcry-over-navalny-crackdown-as-top-eu-envoy-heads-to-moscow-a72828
And now the Navalny team has announced it will not call for more street demonstrations until Spring because it’s concentrating on Parliamentary elections for later in the year in Russia. So to free Navalny EU and U.S. pressure on Putin becomes paramount and I believe The Kremlin will do everything it can to keep Navalny silenced and in prison for years to come.
And finally …
Sorry but it’s Friday and I need a laugh in our world of zoom meetings and the struggle for civilized electronic contact, and this is hilarious. A parish meeting in The UK has gone viral after no one could agree on anything. The video is all over twitter and youtube. Enjoy and have a good weekend everyone.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/bizarre-handford-parish-council-zoom-meeting-goes-viral-after-descending-into-chaos/ar-BB1doNEE