News Round-Up

• “Boris Johnson upbeat but cautious over June 21st reopening in England” – Boris Johnson said yesterday that he remained upbeat about ending lockdown measures on June 21st, but ministers are drawing up a fallback plan to push the date back by two weeks, according to the FT
• “Why delaying reopening could be so devastating to our economy, health” – The Daily Mail analyses the impact of continuing restrictions beyond June 21st on five sectors of the economy
• “Boris Johnson warns green list could be culled as Portugal faces axe” – Boris Johnson has warned that the Government “will not hesitate” to axe countries from the green list for travel, the Telegraph reports, as concerns grow that Portugal could be removed. Let the Summer travel chaos begin
• “I went to Wuhan to investigate the origins of Covid. Here’s what we can learn from Huanan market” – “We need not only to tackle diseases before they spread but also to address the underlying conditions that produce them,” says Hung Nguyen-Viet, who was among the WHO team that went to Wuhan, in the Telegraph
• “Prescriptions for Covid patients fuelling antibiotic resistance” – Numerous Covid patients were prescribed antibiotics unnecessarily, the Daily Mail reports, leading experts to warn about increased antibiotic resistance
• “How the Covid shock has radicalised generation Z” – Many young people have drawn one clear political conclusion from the fallout from Covid, the Guardian claims: Society is run by the old, for the old.
• “Concern at ‘very serious’ Conwy county cluster” – Eluned Morgan, Health Minister for Wales, is concerned by a cluster of cases of the Delta variant, the BBC reports. She fears it could affect the easing of restrictions
• “UK set to buy new Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine designed to protect against South African variant” – According to inews, Britain is set to purchase doses of a new version of the AstraZeneca jab that is specifically tailored against the Beta variant
• “Amazon starts testing UK staff for coronavirus variants” – Amazon is testing its front-line staff in Britain for coronavirus variants and feeding the data to public health officials, Reuters reports
• “Why I’m disinviting my unvaccinated friends to dinner parties” – Writing in the Telegraph, Kate Mulvey says she only wants vaccinated friends coming to her house
• “The WHO is acting like it wants to be defunded – so what are we waiting for?” – “Nobody’s perfect,” says Christopher Snowden in CAPX, “but the WHO is almost a parody of corruption and incompetence” and it “is almost as if it wants to be defunded”
• “Manchester Untied, the anti-Covid dream team” – In the Conservative Woman, Mark Ellse imagines a letter from Boris to Andy Burnham urging him to make Manchester the city that leads Britain out of lockdown
• “MPs are brought to book for allowing lockdown Project Fear” – The Conservative Woman‘s Kathy Gyngell celebrates the news that the Recovery group has handed each and every MP a copy of Laura Dodsworth’s book, A State of Fear
• “Is this the end of freedom?” – From the beginning, COVID-19 has been framed as “an enemy to fight and defend against, in order to keep us safe and to preserve our way of life”, says Sean Jones in the Conservative Woman, “but our way of life has not been preserved!”
• “Why this damning delay in probing a Covid lab leak?” – Writing for the Conservative Woman, Neville Hodgkinson points out that “Chinese scientists are not the only ones to have suffered censorship and suppression during the global ‘frenzy’ surrounding the Covid crisis”
• “Counting Covid’s Deceptive Deaths” – “Of all the innovations that governments and media around the world have come up with, seemingly independently of each other, during the ongoing Covid period,” writes Bernard Marx in Off-Guardian, perhaps the most insidious is the daily running total of deaths
• “A Year of Lost Education” – “Children have least to gain and most to lose from school closures,” says Dan Astin Gregory as he evaluates the cost of a year of lost education in the latest episode of the Pandemic podcast
• “France extends COVID-19 vaccination to 12-18 year olds” – President Macron has announced that France will begin vaccinating to 12 to 18 year-olds from June 15th, Euronews reports
• “Not a shred of doubt: Sweden was right” –  “Has the Swedish model failed? Were the lockdowns justified? Were the economic and social upheavals in most of the world an unavoidable necessity?” According to Eyal Shahar the answer is “a resounding no”
• “Moscow among top three cities worldwide for tackling COVID-19 crisis while keeping life going & economy open” – RT reports that according to analysis by Ernst & Young, Moscow dealt with COVID-19 better than almost every major city in the world, both preventing economic catastrophe and keeping the virus under control. Should be taken with a large dose of salt, given that RT is funded by the Russian state
• “Emails show Fauci was warned Covid may have been engineered” – The Daily Mail reports all the revelations from the release of Dr Fauci’s emails, as calls grow for him to be sacked. Read all the emails here
• “Amazon, Barnes and Noble scrub Fauci’s book amid backlash” – Dr. Fauci’s is also facing cancellation, according to the Post Millennial, with his upcoming book Expect the Unexpected being scrubbed from Amazon and other online booksellers
• “Governor Cuomo’s Unconstitutional Vaccine Passport Program” – In launching the only vaccine passport programme in the U.S., New York Governor Andrew Cuomo “circumvented the constitutional separation of powers and imposed invasive directives on the people of New York with zero legislative oversight”, writes Jenin Younes in an article for AIER
• “Delhi’s COVID-19 positivity rate below 1% after 74 days” – The Covid positivity rate in Delhi stood at 0.99% on Monday, according to the Hindustan Times, even as the number of tests fell during the weekend
• “Empty streets, shuttered malls as Malaysia begins third nationwide COVID-19 lockdown” – A Channel News Asia report from Malaysia which has just embarked on its third nationwide lockdown
• “Scientists find no evidence strain is fast-moving ‘beast’” – Australia’s peak pandemic advisory group has found that the Indian Kappa variant at the centre of the Melbourne outbreak is not moving any faster or spreading any differently than any other variant, the Sydney Morning Herald reports
• “Dan Andrews urges Victorians to ‘keep fighting’ as lockdown extended” – As the Melbourne lockdown is set to continue for another seven days, Chairman Dan has urged citizens to keep fighting. “Just because we’ve had to do this before doesn’t mean it’s easy to do again,” he said, according to ABC
• “The fantasy prediction of 510,000 deaths” – A team at Imperial College London predicted that COVID-19 could cause 510,000 deaths in the U.K. This “was a fantasy number churned out by absurd modelling of a zero-probability event”, say Professor David Campbell and Professor Kevin Dowd in Spectator Australia
• “COVID-19 pushed over 100 million more workers into poverty, says UN” – The International Labour Organisation has reported that “relative to 2019, an estimated additional 108 million workers are now extremely or moderately poor”, Euronews says. But, of course, it wasn’t COVID-19 that did that…
• “If they were following the ‘actual science’, they would have opened up by now” – Mail+ journalist Emily HIll reckons that if it actually was about “data not dates” and following “the science” we would have opened up by now