News Round Up

• “Will lockdown still end on June 21st?” – According to Katy Balls in the Spectator, it depends on whether vaccine hesitancy remains an issue in Government calculations
• “Full easing is now unlikely” – From what Robert Peston’s heard, the prospect of stage 4 going ahead as planned is “close to nil”
• “Boris Johnson is not to blame for the spread of the Indian variant” – Writing in the Telegraph, Ross Clark defends the Prime Minister against the charge that he has been ignoring obvious scientific evidence about the threat posed by the Indian variant
• “Don’t be fooled by ‘freedom day’ – this totalitarian nightmare is far from over” – “We are,” writes Annabel Fenwick Elliott in the Telegraph, “as so many people continue to wilfully ignore, still living under a totalitarian regime that no-one voted for”
• “Every time we think life might be returning to normal, along comes another Covid variant” – “Each time the Government needs to scare the public into submission, a new mutation pops up,” says Sarah Knapton in the Telegraph. “But we will only be able to test our hard-won vaccine resilience by ending lockdown”
• “Northern Ireland police cleared of bias over Bobby Storey funeral” – The Guardian reports that the PSNI has been cleared of bias in handling the funeral of Bobby Storey which attracted over 2,000 mourners last June, the watchdog finding that they had prioritised security over the enforcement of the Covid regulations which were “confusing”
• “Online betting surge among young people” – Online gambling increased six-fold during the lockdowns, the Times reports, and young men were particularly susceptible
• “YouTube launches vaccination ad campaign” – In conjunction with the NHS, YouTube has launched a multi-million-pound advertising campaign to encourage young people to get vaccinated, the BBC reports
• “Successful Covid vaccine trials give GlaxoSmithKline a lift” – A COVID-19 vaccine jointly developed by GlaxoSmithKline and Sanofi has shown positive results in early-stage trials, according to the Times
• “Is the Pfizer vaccine as effective as claimed?” – Norman Fenton and Martin Neil note on the Probability and Law blog that the Israeli study showing Pfizer jabs to be 95% effective is a bit dubious
• “Demonising vaccine “refuseniks” is pointless and wrong” – “An individual’s decision to proceed with an injection should be a matter of informed consent, not something decreed by top-down diktat and laced with veiled threats,” writes Dr Alex Starling in Reaction
• “Fat is a lockdown issue” – “Lockdown was, in part, the sacrifice of liberty to gluttony,” says Dr Sarah Ingham at Conservative Home
• “Kept apart – the price of beating Covid” – Two members of the British Medical Association, the former president Sir Al Aynsley-Green, and representative Dr Latifa Patel, describe their hospital stays and ask whether the balance between safety and compassion is right
• “Friends and allies: The Gates Foundation and British scientists” – In a third instalment of a Conservative Woman series, Karen Harradine shine a light on the connections between the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the universities and colleges that employ members of SAGE
• “Delay reopening? We saw that coming” – The Prime Minister’s talk of a possible delay to the end of lockdown is entirely predictable, according to Daniel Miller at Conservative Woman, and “the rationale has no relation whatsoever to any Indian variant”
• “Covid scaremongering – the Government’s £1bn blitz” – Frederick Edward outlines the huge sums of money that have been spent on Covid media campaigns in the Conservative Woman
• “Ministers – not the unvaccinated – are ruining it for everybody else” – Writing for Bournbrook Magazine, Michael Curzon is under no illusion who the real culprits are when it comes to delaying the reopening
• “A Snapshot of the Worldwide Freedom Demo in London” – Emily Garcia reports on Saturday’s anti-lockdown protest in London, part of the second Worldwide Demonstration For Freedom, for LeftLockdownSceptics
• “No shortage of lockdown protests – only a shortage of reporting” – Roger Watson searched far and wide for reports on Saturday’s protest in London, but apart from Toby’s account, there wasn’t too much to find, he says at the Unity New Network
• “Care homes or prisons” – Collateral Global talks to Julia Jones, co-founder of the John’s Campaign, about the cessation of visiting rights in care homes, part of the third edition a mag on elder care
• “The Great Reopening (Indoors)” – Peter Hitchens joins Mike Graham and Kevin O’Sullivan as the Independent Republic of Mike Graham marks the day that the pubs reopened indoors. They are finally in the same room!
• “Sweden, Covid and lockdown – a look at the data” – To some, Sweden is a “Covid hell”, says Fraser Nelson in the Spectator, “but if Covid and lockdown is judged in the round, you can see why Swedes remain confident in Anders Tegnell”
• “Calgary pastor arrested after breaking pandemic gathering rules for months” – Pastor Tim Stephens of Fairview Baptist Church in Calgary has become the latest pastor to be arrested in relation to COVID-19 lockdown restrictions, CBC reports
• “Will 2020 Prove to Be the Beginning of the End of Modernity?” – “Abruptly starting 16 months ago, there quite possibly began the end of liberal civilisation,” writes Donald J. Boudreaux for the AIER
• “Texas Reports Zero Covid Deaths two Months After Biden Called its Reopening Plan as Neanderthal Thinking” – Texan “Neanderthal thinking” has worked out quite well Newsweek reports, as on Sunday, just after NCAA FCS college football national championship, Governor Greg Abbott reported that the State had recorded zero Covid deaths in the previous 24 hours
• “School closures on trial” – Writing in Spectator USA, Richard Koenig’s judgement is that “for more than a year now the young have borne the burden when their elders freaked out over Covid”
• “Dr. Fauci is Finally Unmasked” – “The serious unraveling of  Fauci’s undeserved reputation as ‘an American hero’ and ‘the most trusted voice on COVID-19’ has finally begun,” says Peter Barry Chowka in the American Thinker
• “Queensland researchers’ discover COVID-19 ‘heat-seeking missile’” – 9 News Australia reports on the development of a treatment for COVID-19, a form of therapy called ‘gene silencing’ in which nano particles are injected into the blood to seek out and destroy coronavirus cells. It’s hoped it will be available in two years
• “What Covid Reveals About our Leaders” – Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying discuss the ‘lab-leak’ hypothesis and the potential of ivermectin to treat Covid in the most recent episode of the DarkHorse Podcast
• “Wake Up From Covid” – A Groundhog Day parody. Very funny. Worth watching