News Round-Up

• “The most shocking thing about Dominic Cummings’ testimony? It exposed Ofcom’s Orwellian muzzling of our media” – Toby makes a valiant effort to resurrect his case against Ofcom for censoring the broadcast media during the pandemic
• “New Thai Covid variant found in UK – Public Health England investigating” – To date, there are 109 U.K. cases of variant C.36.3 which was first detected in Thailand, according to the Express
• “UK travellers may not need PCR test on return from green list countries” – Grant Shapps is in favour of a “vaccination dividend” for jabbed travellers, the Telegraph says, but he is awaiting results of tests at Porton Down before making a decision
• “Michael Gove hints Covid certificate plans might be dropped saying the benefits are ‘finely balanced’ against the hassle” – Michael Gove has said there are “benefits” in Covid status certification but that there is also a lot of “hassle” and “friction”, and pointed out that Israel has suspended its Green Pass scheme, MailOnline reports. Fingers crossed!
• “After NHS app data controversy, plans to share patient records with third-parties revealed” – The NHS is facing a backlash over plans to create a database of up to 55 million patient records which will reportedly be made available to third parties for purposes such as research and planning, the Express reports
• “The Covid lab leak theory is looking increasingly plausible” – “In March last year, it was widely agreed by everybody sensible, me included, that talk of the pandemic originating in a laboratory was pseudoscientific nonsense,” says Matt Ridley in the Spectator. But today “the mood has changed”. Matt Ridley also discusses the lab leak theory on this week’s SpectatorTV
• “BBC Radio Newcastle presenter Lisa Shaw died aged 44 after suffering blood clots following Covid AstraZeneca jab, her family reveal” – Lisa Shaw developed a severe headache a week after having the AstraZeneca jab and died in intensive care from blood clots and bleeding, according to MailOnline
• “Mother, 25, is put into intensive care coma after ‘very rare’ reaction to second Covid Pfizer jab caused terrifying anaphylactic shocks” – Kirsty Hext suffered 14 anaphylactic shocks and a seizure following her jab and was placed in an induced coma, MailOnline reports. She has nonetheless spoken out to encourage others to get vaccinated
• “Henry Slade exclusive: I am not going to have a Covid vaccine – I don’t agree with it all” – In an interview with the Telegraph, Rugby star Henry Slade has become the first high-profile sports personality to publicly reject the vaccine
• “The crucial facts Cummings left out tell a very different story of lockdown” – There is another side to the story Cummings told, argues Fraser Nelson in the Telegraph. “It shows decisions being made not in a chaotic way – but following the best advice. And a prime minister always nervous about the absence of a good case presented for lockdown”
• “The lives lost by lockdown that Dominic Cummings did not compute” – Had he had his way, Cummings said, he would have have appointed a “dictator” with “kingly authority’ to do whatever they thought necessary to tackle COVID-19. He behaves, says Ross Clark in the Daily Mail, as “if nothing else mattered at all”
• “Ignore Cummings: Boris’s open border approach was right all along” – “It’s time the Prime Minister’s libertarian spirit is allowed to rule again,” says the Telegraph‘s Annabel Fenwick Elliott
• “Death in Isolation” – Rosemary tells John’s Campaign about her friend, an 83 year-old, who went dramatically downhill after she was put into isolation in a care home
• “Your brilliant response to our vaccine rebuttal competition” – Kathy Gyngell was greatly cheered, she says, by readers’ responses to the vaccine rebuttal competition being run at the Conservative Woman and looks forward to sharing them over the next few days
• “Music to these locked-down ears” – Nicholas Orlando writes in the Conservative Woman of how much he enjoyed the novelty of attending a live concert in person at the Barbican last week
• “The Gloves Are Off” – Dr Ros Jones joins Allison Pearson and Liam Halligan on this week’s Planet Normal to discuss vaccinating children
• “Travel industry experts on the post-COVID travel trends emerging from bookings” – Holiday makers are craving “one-off, ferocious travel experiences”, according to Euronews, and there will also be less travelling by plane and more by train, car and bike
• “Keep BioNTech COVID jab for school children, German health minister says” – Deutsche Welle reports that German Health Minister Jens Spahn thinks the Pfizer jabs should be reserved for children so that they can return to school after the summer holidays
• “The Backward-Looking Storyteller” – “Looking back at the pandemic,” writes Joakim Book at AIER, “it’s fairly easy to say what and how we should have prepared.” But there is a problem: “This information is not available in real time, and fighting the last war is a sure-fire way of losing the next one”
• “Dismisinfoganda” – “Many Americans once believed government officials unless and until they had good reason to doubt them,” says Robert E. Wright at AIER. “But increasingly they disbelieve officials unless and until they have reason to believe them”
• “Lockdowns Turned Many Blue-State Democrats Into Red-State Republicans” – The media slammed Florida’s response to the coronavirus, Governor Ron DeSantis says, but now residents of blue states are flocking to the sunshine state
• “The Drug that Cracked Covid” – Michael Capuzzo tells the story of five doctors who discovered the benefit of ivermectin in treating COVID-19 in Mountain Home Magazine
• “Chinese researchers created new corona viruses under unsafe conditions” – A PhD dissertation by a researcher connected to the Wuhan Institute of Virology has just been published online, Minervanett reports, and it suggests that experiments were carried out on live viruses at safety standards that were far from ideal
• “The many failures of China’s vaccine programme” – China’s vaccination rollout is moving slowly, Ross Clark reports in the Spectator, and the Sinovac jabs are not very effective
• “Taiwan accuses China of interfering with Covid vaccine deals” – Tsai Ing-wen, the President of Taiwan, has accused Beijing of interfering with its acquisition of Pfizer jabs, the Guardian reports
• “Victoria wakes to first morning of new lockdown” – 9 News provides details of the seven-day circuit breaker lockdown which has just begun in Victoria
• “Mark Dolan says lockdown has become a religious cult” – Lockdowns have “become almost an ideology now,” says Dominque Samuels in agreement. “It’s about dogma”