{"id":1633,"date":"2021-01-21T20:56:52","date_gmt":"2021-01-21T20:56:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/?p=1633"},"modified":"2021-01-21T23:15:12","modified_gmt":"2021-01-21T23:15:12","slug":"thursday-21st-january-2021-day-311","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/2021\/01\/21\/thursday-21st-january-2021-day-311\/","title":{"rendered":"Thursday, 21st January, 2021 [Day 311]"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was technically this morning (well actually. few minutes after midnight) but Sky News were\u00a0indicating\u00a0that they were going to broadcast the first Press Briefing from the Joe Biden\u00a0White House. This turned out to be\u00a0fascinating, if\u00a0only for the massive contrast with the Trump counterpart. The initial Trump briefing started off with a massive row between the\u00a0accredited press correspondents and the new Trump spokesman who was\u00a0attempting to argue that the crowds at the Trump inauguration were the biggest in\u00a0history – a ‘fact’ easily disproved by recourse to the\u00a0available photographic evidence of how far the\u00a0inauguration\u00a0day crowds extended down the Mall. Relationships with the press started off on a bad footing and never recovered. The Biden press briefing was entirely different. The new spokesperson was very experienced having done a similar job at the \u00a0State Department for years. She promised a policy of complete openness and transparency and the whole atmosphere made you feel as the years had just rolled away and what had transpired under the Trump regime was just a bad dream. One correspondent asked her whether the Joe Biden regime would prove to be boring to which she replied ‘I\u00a0certainly hope so!<\/em>‘ – none of the fireworks and press rows as previously but just old-fashioned boring government news!<\/span><\/p>\n

Our Waitrose<\/em> order came today and got put away, fortunately with\u00a0nothing having been forgotten. Then we walked down under a\u00a0fairly blue sky but quite a ‘nip’ in the air to collect our newspapers and thence onto the park. There we met with ex-University of Birmingham friend again plus the old lady who we know lives near the park so we had our normal\u00a0pleasant chat before it was time to strike homewards.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This afternoon, I busied myself with going through a pile of old newspapers to see if there was anything worth preserving. What tends to happen is that any unread bits of newspaper from the day before get put onto a pile which gradually grows until it gets ‘attacked’ (as this afternoon). I find that I tend to keep any interesting cartoons from the Times<\/em>, plus any important\u00a0media\/diet\/exercise bits. The Times<\/em>\u00a0publishes its health section each Tuesday and this is generally worth a read. I happened to find an article on Joe Biden’s wife (who has a PhD in education) so this obviates me having to traverse the web for something similar. I have\u00a0managed to get most (but not all) of this task completed by the early evening.<\/span><\/p>\n

The COVID news this evening is interesting. The number of people now successfully\u00a0vaccinated is approaching 5 million but it looks as though there are still a\u00a0proportion of the 80 yr olds to be vaccinated before the next tranche of vaccines is administered to the 75+ age\u00a0cohort. As you\u00a0might expect, we are awaiting our call day by day but do not know whether it will be a letter, by a phone call or by text message. By my calculations, this call ought to come within the next week or so which will take us well into February. There is a certain amount of\u00a0discussion going on about the efficacy of a ‘one-shot’ virus with a second dose following within 12 weeks rather than the three weeks the manufacturers recommend. The UK government scientists are\u00a0arguing that it is better to \u00a0‘save’ the second dose that would normally be received three weeks after the first and to use to give a measure of protection to another person. This is following the utilitarian principle of the \u00a0‘greatest good of the\u00a0greatest number<\/em>‘. However, Israel has been enormously\u00a0successful in vaccinating way over 90% of their\u00a0population already but the scientific data is revealing that the amount of protection may be quite low. Amongst the over 60-year-old’s who need the vaccine protection most, the efficacy has been reported as only 33% – which still leaves them quite vulnerable.\u00a0This question may take time some time to resolve – the Israeli data is the Pfizer\/BioNTech vaccine whereas in pure numbers the UK Oxford University\/AstraZeneca accounts for a greater\u00a0proportion of\u00a0vaccination. Whether the\u00a0government will admit it is wrong and has over-estimated the\u00a0effigy of a one-dose shot of the vaccine is an\u00a0interesting question. After all, it would not be the first time that the government have proved to be ‘economical with the truth’.<\/span><\/p>\n

Returning to American politics to conclude, Nancy Pelosi the Speaker of the Democrat-controlled House of\u00a0Representatives seems keen to\u00a0press ahead and try to secure a conviction against the impeached Donald Trump. She has argued that ‘you don’t ignore a president’s actions because people think we should be nice-nice and\u00a0forget that people died here’<\/em> Although it may consume a lot of the Congress time and not help to create a bi-partisanship working relationship in the new Congress, then if you do not impeach a president who has urged, stimulated and abetted the invasion of the Capitol by a white-supremacist mob, then who\u00a0would you ever impeach?<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was technically this morning (well actually. few minutes after midnight) but Sky News were\u00a0indicating\u00a0that they were going to broadcast the first Press Briefing from the Joe Biden\u00a0White House. This turned out to be\u00a0fascinating, if\u00a0only for the massive contrast with the Trump counterpart. The initial Trump briefing started off with a massive row between the\u00a0accredited […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1633"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1633\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1637,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1633\/revisions\/1637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mch-net.info\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}