News Round Up

• “Pfizer asks U.K. regulator to approve Covid vaccine for use in 12 to 15 year-olds” – Pfizer has formally asked the U.K. regulator to authorise its jab for children over 12, the Telegraph reports
• “Were fears of a third wave overblown?” – Writing in the Spectator, Ross Clark puzzles over the unduly pessimistic assumptions that continue to be used in the models submitted to the SAGE committee
• “Deaths in Britain 7.3% below five-year average as Covid fatalities continue to fall” – The latest ONS figures indicate that there were 766 fewer deaths in the week ending April 30th than would be expected for this time of year, according to the Telegraph
• “At long, long last, the Government is putting children first” – Molly Kingsley celebrates the end of masks in classrooms in a piece for the Telegraph. “The battle is far from won,” she writes, but the “decision should give parents some hope that going forward better, braver and bolder decisions might be made”
• “Three borders, seven documents and an expiring Covid test: my 14-hour dash across Europe to get wed” – The Telegraph‘s Annabel Fenwick Elliott describes her drive across Europe to meet up with her German fiancé
• “What About Weddings?” – An open letter calling on the Prime Minister to remove the restrictions on weddings after June 21st
• “‘Expand green list or cost UK £19bn’: MPs call for more countries to be added to register of ‘safe’ travel destinations to boost economy” – A cross party group of MPs are predicting that revenues from international tourism will plummet to just £1.1 billion this summer against £20.2 billion pre-pandemic for June, July and August unless the ‘green list’ is expanded, the Daily Mail reports
• “It’s time to reopen transatlantic travel” – The Daily Mail says a coalition of airlines, including Delta, Virgin, British Airways and Jet Blue are lobbying Joe Biden and Boris Johnson to establish a travel corridor
• “#BeKind and #StaySafe, or else!” – “The application of behavioural science is getting so concerning that even I have a problem with it,” writes Patrick Fagan, formerly the Lead Psychologist at Cambridge Analytica
• “What if it all happens again?” – In the Conservative Woman, David Seedhouse describes the COVID-24 scenario which the Deliberative Practice community is debating next week and explains how readers can take part
• “The unleashing of Johnson’s inner tyrant” – During the flu epidemics of 1957 and 1968 “there was a concerted effort by both government and the media to avoid spreading panic and fear”. Jeff Williams explains the dramatic change between then and now in the Conservative Woman
• “Wales and a very convenient pandemic” – “Something strange and secretive is happening in the heart of Wales,” says Nicola Lund in the Conservative Woman. “Perhaps First Minister Mark Drakeford had more in mind than controlling a virus when imposing lengthy lockdowns”
• “It’s time to open up international travel” – Writing for Spiked, Rob Lyons sets out the case for relaxing the rules on international travel
• “Don’t let the state tell you who you can hug” – “There is no better snapshot of Britain’s slide into Covid dystopia than the argument over whether Britons should be allowed to hug each other again,” says Fraser Myers in Spiked
• “The UK could only reach Covid ‘alert level one’ by using up limited third world medical resources” – Collingwood writes in Bournbrook that a “global vaccination programme similar to the ones that eradicated smallpox” is the only way for the U.K. to reach Covid “alert level one”
• “‘It was this big’: a corrective on COVID-19 mortality” – “The actual number of people who have died of COVID-19 is impossible to know,” write Roger Watson and Niall McCrae on the Unity News Network, but they “speculate that many of the people who supposedly died of COVID-19 succumbed to the same conditions that take thousands of lives every winter”
• “Why the obsession with masks?” – Rev Phill Sacre offers a Christian perspective on the obsession with masks and why they should be resisted
• “Italian woman mistakenly given six shots of COVID-19 vaccine” – The 23 year-old woman from Tuscany was kept under observation for 24 hours, according to the Independent, but has not suffered any adverse reaction from the overdose of the Pfizer vaccine
• “Here in Washington D.C., Dr Fauci is a messianic figure” – “Everywhere you look in the tonier precincts of our fair capital one sees the posters and placards and pictures: ‘Thank you Dr. Fauci!'” writes James Carden in UnHerd
• “Fauci must answer for his role in Wuhan’s Covid lab” – Stephen L. Miller argues in Spectator USA that Dr. Fauci has some explaining to do to Congress
• “Dr. Fauci, Do you still support… NIH funding of the lab in Wuhan?” – Watch Senator Rand Paul give the good doctor a grilling about gain of function research
• “Covid restrictions are killing the national pastime” – Amber Athey recently went to a Major League Baseball game for the first time in two years but, according to her account in Spectator USA, nonsensical COVID-19 restrictions sapped “almost all the joy out of the experience”
• “Focused Protection Would Have Been the Right Pandemic Response” – “It is increasingly apparent,” says Ethan Yang at AIER, ” that a strategy of focused protection which respects the voluntary functions of society while taking reasonable steps to accommodate vulnerable populations would have been the most optimal pandemic response”
• “Would Australians support mandates for the COVID-19 vaccine? Our research suggests most would” – 73% of Australians would favour the Government making vaccination mandatory, say David Smith, Katie Attwell and Uswana Evans in the Conversation
• “The Flawed Assumptions Beneath COVID-19 Modelling (Epidemiological and Economic)” – An interview on the Letters from a Contrarian podcast with Dr. Doug Allen, a Professor of Economics at Simon Fraser University and author of a noted paper on the costs of lockdown
• “Texas Governor Greg Abbott vs. The Experts” – An entertaining video from Pishpish Cat