News Round Up

• “Exclusive: World leaders call for pandemic treaty” – Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel have proposed a global accord like that forged after the Second World War to deal with future pandemics, says the Telegraph in an exclusive. The world leaders call the pandemic “a stark and painful reminder that nobody is safe until everyone is safe”. But if the reaction of different states to future pandemics has to be coordinated and complementary, won’t that make it difficult for any of the signatories of this accord to resist if the majority of countries decide to lock down?
• “Boris Johnson tells public: We’re on track to reopen shops and pubs” – Boris has urged people to go out and “have fun” as restrictions ease, the Times reports
• “Britain’s ‘wall of vaccination’ against Covid is ‘leaky’ because jabs aren’t 100% effective” – The MailOnline covers Christ Whitty’s warning at yesterday’s Downing Street press briefing that vaccinated people may be vulnerable to new variants
• “Why the travel ban must be lifted” – “Variants will reach us, whether or not your holiday is prohibited,” writes Professor David Livermore in Spiked. Forty Conservative MPs agree with him
• “Fears proposed vaccine passport could be final nail in the coffin for hospitality firms” – Scottish tourism leader Jo De Sylva has warned that vaccine passports could have a dire impact on hospitality businesses North of the border, the Press and Journal reports
• “UK towns and cities to make room for return of alfresco dining” – Birmingham, Manchester and London are all preparing temporary road closures to make space for outdoor dining, the Guardian reports
•  “A rare clotting disorder may cloud the world’s hopes for AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine” – Science report the findings of German researchers that the AstraZeneca blood clot side effect resembles a side effect of the blood thinner heparin called heparin-induced thrombocytopenia
• “Fetal Tissue Vaccines: 12 Faulty Assumptions” – A summary of issues and misconceptions about the use of aborted fetal tissue in vaccines from a Christian perspective by Thomas Seidler
• “Reconciling estimates of global spread and infection fatality rates of COVID‐19” – A new paper by Professor John Ioannidis says, “Acknowledging residual uncertainties, the available evidence suggests average global IFR of ~0.15% and ~1.5‐2.0 billion infections by February 2021 with substantial differences in IFR and in infection spread across continents, countries, and locations.”
• “Covid virtue-signalling has infected our TV dramas” – “For the sake of our collective sanity,” writes Robert Jackman in the Spectator, let’s delete Covid from all fictional universes
• “The chattering classes did nothing whatsoever to defend liberty” – Peter Hitchens’s latest conversation with Mike Graham on talkRADIO sees him criticise his “fellow members of the chattering classes” for not having challenged lockdown more strongly
• “The Real Normal Ep. 24 Wylde Sky Brewery Interview – How will hospitality survive?” – In the latest episode of the Real Normal Podcast, the presenters head to Wylde Sky Brewery in Cambridgeshire to find out how it has got on through the multiple laws, closures and restrictions
• “Gardaí establish strong presence in town where parish priest refuses to turn faithful away from Mass” – The Irish Independent reports increased Gardaí in Mullahorn, in County Cavan where a priest has been going about the dangerous business of celebrating mass
• “Merkel rails at German states for taking foot off ‘emergency brake’” – The German chancellor is criticising local politicians for not tightening Covid restrictions, and in some cases loosening them, according to the Financial Times
• “The vaccine connection to death on the rock” – Writing for the Conservative Woman, Neville Hodgkinson examines Gibraltar’s high Covid death rate and considers if it has something to tell us about the vaccines
• “Voters don’t necessarily reward their leaders for vaccine success – just look at Israel” – Voting in the 21st century is dictated by social and tribal affiliation, writes Anshel Pfeffer for CAPX, and it’ll take “more than a global pandemic to change that”
• “Twitter Censors Famed Epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff” – Jeffrey A. Tucker responds in the AIER to Twitter’s decision to censor Harvard Professor Martin Kulldorff for saying not everybody needs the vaccine. The Professor has also responded
• “Brisbane lockdown: Australian city to shut down over seven cases” – The Queensland state capital has gone into a three-day snap lockdown, the BBC reports, in a timely reminder that Zero Covid is a less than ideal strategy
• “Pulling the rug out’: 27,000 Brisbane businesses face snap lockdown without jobkeeper” – The Guardian points out that the latest lockdown comes just one day after the wage subsidy scheme ended
• “Government policies must catch up with latest data on COVID-19” – Original Covid fatality predictions overshot the mark, write Simon Thornley and Ananish Chaudhuri at New Zealand’s Covid Plan B. We need to return to the “foundations of science which means a sober assessment of reality over failed forecasts”
• “WHO COVID-19 origins report says lab leak ‘extremely unlikely’” – The World Health Organisation whitewash report is supporting the Chinese Communist Party’s version of history, according to the Telegraph – the virus passed from bats to humans via an “intermediate animal host”
• “WHO Report Into COVID-19 Origins Leaves Key Questions Unanswered” – The publication of the WHO report will not be the end of the matter, says the Wall Street Journal, given that the data is “insufficient to answer the critical questions of when, where and how the virus began spreading”
• “Boris Johnson needs to “break the doom loop” of lockdown” – Steve Baker MP, Deputy Chair of the Covid Recovery Group, urged Boris to accelerate the reopening on talkRADIO yesterday. For chapter and verse on what the data is telling us, see this thread by Ed Conway on Twitter