News Round Up

• “Just ten people die of coronavirus in the UK in a day, and new cases fall by 27% in a week to 3,423” – The UK recorded 10 deaths within 28 days of a positive Covid test yesterday, the lowest in six months, according to MailOnline
• “Foreign holidays on track to start May 17!” – The blanket ban on travel is to be replaced by a traffic light system, the Mail On Sunday reports. Don’t forget your passport
• “It is time for a discussion about Covid certification” – Michael Gove’s piece in the Sunday Telegraph, setting out why the Government proposes to pilot the use of ‘Covid certification’ in a range of venues, and inviting readers’ “thoughts on the role that certification might play in our anti-Covid strategy” – although you haven’t got long to share them because Boris is due to make an announcement about vaccine passports on Monday
• “The return of crowds: 21,000 for the FA Cup final, 3,000 inside a nightclub and 1,000 at an open-air cinema” – The Mail On Sunday provides details of the passport trials
• “Grandparents could use Covid passport app to screen birthday party guests” – According to the Telegraph, the passports can also be used at private parties! But why would grandparents want to screen guests if they’ve been vaccinated?
• “Millennials to be offered single-shot Johnson & Johnson Covid vaccine to ‘jab and go” – The Johnson & Johnson Jab could be available by July and ministers are hoping it can be given to 18 to 29 year-olds who are keen to enjoy the Summer, the Telegraph reports
• “Lockdown and cancer: are we getting the full story?” – “The true scale of the cancer backlog has yet to be acknowledged by the UK Government, far less prioritised with specific additional funding,” writes Professor Gordan Wishart in the Spectator. “Denial could cost lives”
• “Boris Johnson urged to sack Tory peer who denied Covid pandemic and said Chinese ‘fake videos started this’” – Boris is being urged by lockdown zealots to condemn Conservative peer Dame Helena Morrissey, the Independent reports, after she said on Twitter that we’re no longer in a pandemic and the CCP helped whip up a global panic about the virus. Jog on
• “The ‘covert tactics’ used to scare Britons into staying at home” – MailOnline reports Gary Sidley’s complaint to the British Psychological Society about covert psychological strategies employed by Downing Street to create fear about the coronavirus
• “Now the police are breaking up Good Friday services” – “There have been many shocking and even despicable acts of authoritarianism over this past year of lockdown”, says Brendan O’Neill in Spiked, “and right up there are the events that took place at a Polish Catholic church in south London”
• “How did a free people become so relaxed about losing their liberty?” – When lockdown is over, we will need to get to the bottom of the popular support for lockdown, writes Janet Daley in the Sunday Telegraph, or “we will lose what might be the best insight we could ever have had into the nature of liberty”
• “The new opposition: an interview with Ed Davey” – A Spectator interview the leader of the Liberal Democrats who whipped his party to oppose the extension of the Covid emergency powers
• “A sketch of the week” – Michael Curzon’s round-up of the week gone by for Bournbrook Magazine, with cartoons by Crid
• “Scenes from 2030” – Writer T.E. Creus’s vision of life in the year 2030, in Off-Guardian. Hopefully it won’t come true
• “Pubs, Probes and Prophets” – The 13th episode of the Week in Review podcast by Bournbrook Magazine discusses the latest blows to the hospitality industry
• “Finding God when the Church has failed; Vaccine Passports for all (including churches)” – The three clergymen of the Irreverend podcast consider the impact of vaccine passports on churches
• “How governments manipulate human behaviour” – In the latest episode of the Pandemic Podcast, Dan Astin Gregory compares Albert D. Bilderman’s historic work on how human behaviour can be manipulated with the present day handling of COVID-19
• “Beach crowds defy COVID-19 restrictions across Catalonia” – Covid rules did not stop stop sunseekers heading to the beaches in Catalonia, Reuters reports
• “German president warns of pandemic ‘crisis of trust’” – Politico reports that President  Steinmeier has used an Easter address to tell politicians that they must “get their act together”
• “Kenya warns of coronavirus ‘vaccine apartheid’ after UK travel ban” – The Kenyan Government has “hit out at the UK Government for adding the country to the ‘red list’, according to Sky News
• “Disease is the newest excuse for segregation” – “The notion that separation is safer than integration is dangerous and contrary to the good life as we’ve come to understand it over half a millennium,” writes Jeffrey A. Tucker for AIER
• “The Texas Neanderthals were right” – Texas governor Greg Abbott ended the state’s mask mandate in early March and since then cases, hospitalisations and deaths have all plummetted, Sean Collins reports in Spiked
• “Dr. Fauci, Tear off these masks” – Once Covid deaths drop to the level of flu deaths, which may happen in the U.S. within the next month or two, the masks can go, says Nicole Saphier in the Wall Street Journal
• “How COVID-19 became a disinformation operation wrapped in a virus” – Jordan Schachtel looks at how the CCP pulled off “the greatest deception in modern history”
• “Covid Policies, Progressing Past Disagreement with Martin Kulldorff” – Watch the eminent lockdown sceptic discuss the mismanagement of the pandemic on the Plenary Session podcast with Vinay Prasad
• “Vaccine Passports” – Tom Woods talks to Dave Smith, host of the Part of the Problem podcast, about vaccine passports, and just how bad an idea it really is
• “You don’t have to get a vaccine passport to exercise the freedom to live your life normally” – “You were born with those freedoms in a free western liberal democracy,” says Julia Hartley Brewer
• Polish pastor in Calgary shoos the Covid police out of his church with epic rant – Absolutely unmissable