2020 has been a devastating year. We could all do with some good news.

Here are some of @CrisisGroup’s 10 reasons for hope in 2021.

I've been seeing a lot of discussion around the dosage gaps recommended by government for the Astra/Oxford & Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines. My thoughts on the potential benefits & risks of such an approach, and the need for much greater transparency around these decisions. Thread.

The UK govt announced recently that both the Oxford & BioNTech vaccines would be now administered with a gap of between 4-12 weeks (so prioritise administration of first dose, given limited resources).

What is the basis of this?

The basis that's been discussed seems to be that
1) the first dose is likely to confer some degree of protection against disease, so better to roll this out as fast as possible, and
2) that for Oxford/Astra efficacy may be higher when the gap between doses is greater.

I discuss some of the technical details around the Oxford trial below for those interested in these. If you'd just like a summary of this, please skip to the summary tweet titled 'SUMMARY'.

What does published evidence show? The Astra/Oxford data are a bit messy because of protocol changes during the trial. This is because the trial was originally planned as a single dose trial, but a booster dose was added when developers realised that this would likely help.

[Cause]
Define 'Subversion'.
The act of subverting : the state of being subverted; especially : a systematic attempt to overthrow or undermine a government or political system by persons working secretly from within?

[Effect]
"The United States seeks to impose tangible and significant consequences on those who commit serious human rights abuse or engage in corruption, as well as to protect the financial system of the United States from abuse by these same persons."

"I therefore determine that serious human rights abuse and corruption around the world constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States, and I hereby declare a national emergency to deal with that threat."

NATIONAL EMERGENCY.
Nothing to See Here
Drop 1927

Links;

I am bemused by those who demand that we repay the UK government’s debt. It makes me wonder, do they know what it is? And how do they think it can be repaid? And do they appreciate the consequences? A thread is coming on......bear with me, because I think you need to know this.

First, what is the UK government’s debt? I’ve immersed myself in this issue and can confidently say the Office for National Statistics’s figures are wrong, most especially because they claim that the UK government is in debt by owing money to itself. That’s not possible.

Whatever the Office for National Statistics like to claim, money you owe yourself is not debt, and so quantitative easing cancels about £800 billion of UK national debt right now. There are other mistakes in their numbers, but I’ll just stick with this one for the moment.

So, if the ONS claim the national debt is around £2.1 trillion at present, it isn’t. Allowing for the UK government owning around £800 billion of its own debt the figure reduces to maybe £1.3 trillion, give or take a bit. But that, I hasten to add, is not the end of the story.

It’s important to understand that the ONS includes some things few would think of as debt in their figures. For example, around £200 billion (£0.2 trillion) of National Savings balances are included in the national debt. Whoever knew Premium Bond holders were such a burden?

Macron on tensions with Russia: “We continue sometimes to fight against an ideology or an organisation that no longer exists with a geopolitical logic that no longer exists and that has continued to fracture Europe.”

And on Nato: “Nobody can tell me that today’s Nato is a structure that, in its foundations, is still pertinent. It was founded to face down the Warsaw Pact. There is no more a Warsaw Pact.”

In other words, the partly confrontational policy of the West towards Russia is anachronistic.

Yet the "geopolitical logic" of today's more confrontational policy towards Russia has nothing to do with the Warsaw Pact or the Cold War. It's not true that the West is caught in anachronistic thinking.

Sanctions and the renewed focus of Nato on territorial defense was a response towards Russian aggression against Ukraine: Putin started a war of aggression against Ukraine and has annexed parts of the country, with over 13.000 people killed.

We've been hearing this a lot: the House managers have successfully shown how horrible the January 6 insurrection was and also highlighted Donald Trump's vulgar comments. But they haven't really proven the connection between Trump's comments and the attack. This is nonsense. 1/

There is a criminal case to be made against Trump for his role in inciting the inspiration, and @CREWcrew has made that case in its criminal sedition complaint against Trump. But this is not a criminal case, and does not require that kind of proof.

On a basic level, this case is painfully obvious. Donald Trump spent weeks and months and years saying, falsely, the election would be fraudulent and then that it had been stolen. This primed his supporters to believe their democratic rights were being take away. 3/

Trump spent weeks and months and years fueling a sense of grievance among his supporters and hostility to any political opponents, as well as condoning violence or mildly condemning it with a clear wink and a nod obviously meant to encourage it. 4/

In the weeks after the election, he compounded his big lie that he had won with efforts to take bogus claims to courts and to pressure officials at every level of government to overturn the results. He portrayed the across the board rejections as further persecution. 5/