News Round-Up

• “Scientists urge delay to June 21st Covid lockdown lifting” – The Telegraph recounts the warnings of scientists urging for a delay to the end of lockdown
• “Longer queues than Glastonbury!: More than 15,000 under-30s swamp Twickenham stadium” – An account in the MailOnline of the rush of under 30 year-olds to get vaccinated at Twickenham stadium yesterday
• “Cancer patients who didn’t seek treatment during lockdown are overwhelming A&E” – A&E unites are struggling to cope with the number of people seeking treatment for cancer, hip and knee operations and other serious ailments, the Telegraph reports, with some trusts at 97% capacity
• “China is a hotbed for new Coronaviruses – report warns of ‘possible new hotspots’” – A team of researchers from Italy, the U.S. and New Zealand has found that China has the highest concentration of hotspots where humans are at risk of contracting pathogens from wildlife, according to the Express
• “Amateur choirs decline to fall silent over restrictive rule change” – The leaders of amateur choirs in Aldeburgh and Woodbridge are scratching their heads at the logic behind the tightened restrictions on group singing, the East Anglian Daily Times reports
• “Bank Holiday blow for Manchester bars and restaurants forced to temporarily close following Covid cases” – Several bars and restaurants in Manchester have been forced to close this weekend following cases of COVID-19, the Manchester Evening News reports, with their staff going into isolation
• “Wuhan lab leak may be the biggest economic shock for decades” – “If intelligence services find a Chinese lab really did create Covid then global trade would collapse,” says Matthew Lynn in the Telegraph
• “France’s travel ban is really just spiteful Macron’s latest Brexit punishment. He’ll regret it” – Writing in the Telegraph, Ross Clark is unimpressed by Macron’s near complete closure of France’s ‘border’ with the U.K.
• “Save us from a techno-fascist Covid dictator” – “It’s no surprise that the elites will take away from this crisis that we need a bigger, more powerful government staffed by yet more elites,” writes Tim Stanley in the Telegraph, but he suggests an alternative: “humility”
• “History shows us why vaccines must be voluntary” – “The history of vaccination is one of an heroic effort to rid humanity of deadly and blighting disease,” says James Heartfield, a vaccinator at Guy’s and St Thomas’s Hospital, in Spiked. And it “shows why the voluntary principle is still best”
• “Has Facebook unwittingly become a shill for China?” – Writing in Spiked, Brendan O’Neil points out that thanks to Facebook’s clampdown on any discussion of the lab leak theory people across the world were “essentially banned from saying things that might embarrass the Chinese Communist Party”
• “Covid Corruption: Assaulting Human Norms” – “We can be respectfully, lawfully, civilly disobedient, and make our voices heard, in concert, and purposefully,” says Omar S. Khan in his latest barnstormer
• “Our vaccine rebuttal competition – the winner!” – Read the three runners-up and the winning entry to the Conservative Woman‘s vaccine rebuttal competition
• “The Covid silence that drove a nurse to quit” – The Conservative Woman publishes the resignation letter of a nurse driven to leave the profession by the “complete lack of integrity that has been displayed since the beginning of the ‘COVID-19 Crisis'”
• “Back to work for (a re-educated) Ivan Dennison” – John Ellwood in the Conservative Woman with another instalment of the Life and Times of a Covid Marshal (Grade Two)
• “Climate change, wokeness and Covid – the un-Holy Trinity” – God was “long ago abandoned by western society”, says Roger Watson in the Conservative Woman, and “into the vacuum have flooded false gods and a new religion with its own un-Holy Trinity of beliefs”
• “The Real Pandemic Challenge” – Omar Khan talks to Dr. Peter McCullough about the importance of early treatment for COVID-19, the vaccines, and much else
• “21st June 2021 Lockdown – Will it end?” – Professor Robert Dingwall dissects the flaws in the use of scientific modelling by the Government to justify lockdown restrictions for Sketch Notes on a Pandemic
• “Weather and COVID-19 restrictions lead to France avalanche death toll doubling” – There were 39 people killed by avalanches this year, a much higher toll than usual. According to Euronews, the increase is blamed in part on the closure of ski-lifts in a misguided attempt to stop the spread of COVID-19
• “Florida threatens to fine cruises over Covid vaccine requirements” – Florida is threatening to slap cruise lines with tens of thousands of dollars in fines for requiring passengers to show proof of COVID-19 vaccination, the New York Post reports
• “Establishment journalists confess they dismissed Wuhan lab leak theory because Trump said it” – The Post Millennial reports on the growing numbers of journalists who now recognise “some things may be true even if Donald Trump said them”
• “Wuhan Lab Researcher’s Wife Died Of Covid-Like Illness In December 2019, Former Lead US Investigator Says” – In what might have been an early clue as to the origins of the virus, state department investigator David Asher tells the Daily Caller that the wife of Wuhan lab researcher died of Covid-like symptoms in December 2019
• “Mexico’s coronavirus deaths are plummeting. The ‘Biden wall’ could be a factor” – Confirmed deaths from COVID-19 in Mexico have fallen by more than 85% since January, according to the Washington Post, mainly because many Mexicans have been exposed to the virus, but the successful vaccine roll-out in the U.S. may also be a factor
• “Indian Bar Association Serves Legal Notice Upon Dr. Soumya Swaminathan, the Chief Scientist, WHO” – Dr. Soumya Swaminathan has been served with a legal notice by the Indian Bar Association for misleading people about the benefits of ivermectin in treating COVID-19, according to TrialSiteNews. You can read the Indian Bar Association’s press release here
• “Peru revises pandemic death toll, now worst in the world per capita” – Following a Government review, the official death toll in Peru has almost tripled to 180,764 and the country now has the highest death rate per capita in the world, according to Reuters. Peru also had one of the most stringent lockdowns in the world
• “Melbourne’s ‘ring of steel’ could be brought back as ‘critical’ Covid battle continues” – 7News with the latest from Victoria, where three of 11 new cases reported on Monday are linked to care homes and speculation mounts that the ‘ring of steel’ separating Melbourne from the rest of the state may return
• “Time has come’ for pandemic treaty as part of bold reforms” – The WHO Director-General is pushing for a new international treaty to boost pandemic preparedness, Reuters reports
• “Give poorer countries extra jabs to stop Covid variants, urge world bodies” – In an article in the Telegraph, the heads of the World Health Organisation, International Monetary Fund, World Bank Group and World Trade Organisation urge rich countries to give more Covid jabs to poor countries
• “They marched in their hundreds of thousands for your freedom” – Laurence Fox has produced his own report from Saturday’s anti-lockdown march to make up for the gap left by the mainstream media