News Round Up

• “You call this freedom? Boris offers a future full of endless Covid rules” – MailOnline‘s account of Boris’ announcement yesterday, in which he “laid out a grim vision of coronavirus restrictions stretching into the future”
• “Johnson is in trouble over vaccine passports – and it’s showing” – The Prime Minister was unable to answer questions about vaccine passports at the press conference yesterday, says Fraser Nelson in the Spectator. “Given the ferocity of the debate ahead – and the depth of concern in his party – this bodes ill”
• “Go with the flow: how helpful is mass testing” – To introduce mass testing at a moment when prevalence is very low seems “deeply confused”, writes Ross Clark in the Spectator. “A case of no one being quite brave enough to ditch an initiative that was conceived before vaccines had made it redundant”
• “Vaccine passports: Covid status checks to become ‘feature of our lives’” – If the Government gets its way, there will be nothing to prevent a businesses from checking a customer’s Covid status, provided they are not breaking equalities laws, the Telegraph reports
• “Covid domestic passports have unleashed a growing revolt” – “After a year of waving through Covid measures with minimal resistance, it looks like vaccine passports might be the thing that finally awakens some political protest,” writes Freddie Sayers in the Telegraph
• “Weekly summary of Yellow Card reporting” – As of March 21st, 40,883 yellow cards have been reported for the Pfizer vaccine (10.8 million first doses administered) and 99,817 for the AstraZeneca vaccine (15.8 million first doses)
• “The price of perpetual panic” – In his latest blog post, Omar S. Khan goes on a tour of misplaced Covid panic, before training his spotlight on Britain’s slide from “autonomy and liberalism” to “crotchety authoritarianism”
• “Why risk aversion is bad for us” – Refusing to accept some level of risk will make us poorer, unhappier and unhealthier, writes Fiona Buller in Spiked
• “We have Covid data, now we want dates – so why are we still waiting?” – The Covid data is all good, writes Trevor Kavanagh in the Sun, yet instead of freedom we are heading for vaccine passports
• “Are vaccines paving the way for the next pandemic” – Writing for the Conservative Woman, Andrew Mahon considers whether efforts to prolong life with mass vaccination programmes are “inadvertently enlarging the susceptible population and making a bigger target for the next virus”
• “Johnson’s stormtroopers enforce their own law on Good Friday” – Looking at the way police interrupted a Good Friday church service for the Conservative Woman, Neil McCarthy concludes that, in Boris’s Britain, “the law at any moment is merely what the police say it is”
• “Additional freedoms for the fully vaccinated on the way” – Leo Varadkar has confirmed that the Irish Government is developing a digital vaccine pass, according to the Belfast Telegraph. He confirmed that the Government would introduce “more freedoms for those who have been vaccinated”
• “COVID-19: Department of Health notified of 320 new cases, no deaths” – According to RTE yesterday, the Irish Department of Health reported zero deaths from COVID-19
• “Why are flu-vaccinated people more resistant to COVID-19?” – Deutsche Welle looks at a recent study which suggests that people who have had a flu jab are much less likely to get Covid
• “Young Pakistanis rush to purchase Russian vaccine as private sales open” – Sputnik V is now available for sale in Pakistan at a cost of 12,000 Pakistani rupees (£56), Reuters reports, and people are are queuing up to buy it
• “Mecca to accept only ‘immunised’ pilgrims from Ramadan” – Saudi authorities have said that anyone doing the umrah pilgrimage must be immunised against Covid, Agence France Presse reports. This includes those who have received two doses, those give a single dose 14 days prior, and people who have antibodies because they’ve recovered from the disease
• “Researchers are hatching a low-cost coronavirus vaccine” – A new vaccine is entering clinical trials in Brazil, Mexico, Thailand and Vietnam, and, according to the New York Times, it is far easier to make
• “Touch wood! Risk of COVID-19 transmission via surfaces is less than 1 in 10,000, CDC says in new cleaning guidelines” – The CDC’s updated guidance recognises that the risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection via fomite transmission is very small and that there is no need to disinfect after 24 hours, RT reports
• “Why the silence in the face of Covid tyranny” – Prompted by the job ad for a head of asymptomatic testing communication, AIER’s Donald J. Boudreaux considers why so many liberty minded individuals have been so quiet on Covid tyranny
• “A conversation on Covid and lockdowns: Drs. Prasad and Kulldorff” – The AIER has published a transcript of Dr Vinay Prasad and Dr Martin Kulldorff’s recent conversation about the mismanagement of the Covid pandemic on the Plenary Session podcast
• “Fauci says US will not require COVID-19 ‘vaccine passports’” – Dr. Fauci said yesterday that the Federal Government will not require Americans to use vaccine passports, according to the New York Post. He expects rather that businesses and institutions will create their own policies about vaccinations
• “When a doctor and his family got Covid, they experienced a remarkable recovery” – A video from the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance about a Covid patient who recovered well after taking Ivermectin
• “Living with this virus does not involve turning Britain into a totalitarian state” – “That’s not what living with the virus looks like,” says broadcaster Mark Dolan