News Round-Up

• “Free speech: a lockdown on disagreeing” – Toby’s essay in the People’s Lockdown Inquiry, a new collaboration between Claire Fox, Buckingham University and Laurence Fox on the impact of lockdown
• “Boris Johnson urged to go the extra mile to cut cancer backlog” – Leading oncologists, the heads of medical colleges and MPs have written to the Prime Minister urging him to do more to tackle a cancer backlog caused by the pandemic, the Times says. Read their letter in the Lancet here
• “Covid jabs can be tweaked within weeks to combat future variants thanks to UK ‘vaccine library’” – According to scientists at the Centre for Process Innovation in Darlington, the U.K. will be able to tweak the current jabs within weeks to combat any further variants, the i reports
• “How many times will it be ‘one last heave’ until we’re free?” – “If we don’t open up now,” writes Ross Clark in the Telegraph, “will we ever?”
• “Boris is right: we need to learn to live with Covid. So why not now? ” – “For the life of me I cannot understand the logic of this,” says the Telegraph‘s Janet Daley. “If we must learn to live with the ineradicable risk of the virus, why not start now?”
• “This isn’t a delay, but a disastrous trap for the PM and the country” – “Boris Johnson’s lockdown concession leaves the door open to semi-permanent restrictions on liberties,” writes Sherelle Jacobs in the Telegraph
• “Boris Johnson has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory” – “The Government hasn’t so much moved the goalposts as demolished the entire stadium and decamped to another postcode,” writes the Daily Mail‘s Richard Littlejohn
• “‘One final push?’ Yeah, right – this madness is here for good!” – “We are told that this is the final push,” says Luke Perry in Bournbrook. “What folly. The precedent has been set. This is here for good”
• “Boris faces a choice – and it’s not between clubbing and no clubbing” – Henry Hill had long feared that “as the range of activities restricted continued to narrow, so would support for lifting the restrictions”, he says in CAPX. Now he reckons his pessimism was justified
• “The G7 and the arrogance of Covid theatre” – “We know that so many of the Covid rituals are pointless,” writes Fraser Myers in Spiked. “And now, thanks to the pictures from the G7, we know that our leaders know these gestures are largely pointless, too”
• “Delaying Liberation Day sets a dangerous precedent” – “As we contemplate sliding in to yet another extension of serious legal curtailments to our lives, our livelihoods and our freedom,” says Tory MP Miriam Cates, “It’s time to ask if we have travelled too far down this road”
• “As a GP in the NHS I witnessed first-hand the catastrophic way Matt Hancock failed the old and vulnerable in care homes” – “If there was one population that needed to be protected it was elderly, vulnerable care home residents,” Dr. Malcolm Kendrick writes in RT. “Matt Hancock presided over policy decisions that threw care home residents under a bus”
• “COVID-19 vaccines: In the rush for regulatory approval, do we need more data?” – Manufacturers of COVID-19 vaccines are now seeking full regulatory approval for their products. But what’s the rush, asks Peter Doshi in the BMJ, and is just six months of data from now unblinded trials acceptable?
• “The Innova scandal Part 3: The U.S. says ‘Throw the tests in the trash‘” – In a third instalment of her Conservative Woman series investigating the Innova lateral flow test, Sonia Elijah covers the announcement from the FDA last week warning that the performance of the test has not been adequately established and directing the public to throw them them in the bin
• “Using weapons of mass deception: Why Covid is Johnson’s Iraq” – “Politicians are a vain lot who yearn for a simple, binary, Manichean issue where they can play a starring Churchillian role,” says Andrew Cadman in the Conservative Woman. “For Johnson and Hancock, it is Covid”
• “Coming to a TV near you, the Covid Comedy of Errors (it’s a gaffe-a-minute)” – In a satirical piece for the Conservative Woman, Suzie Halewood pictures the year gone by as a pitch for a new series to a U.S. television network
• “Susan Michie: Don’t rule out more delays” – UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers interviews Susan Michie, the infamous Government scientist who believes lockdown might not end in July and that face masks could be here forever
• “Delta variant having ‘huge impact on vaccine effectiveness’” – Speaking to Euronews, Dr Michael Head, a Senior Research Fellow in Global Health at the University of Southampton, explains that the Indian Delta variant is having a huge impact on vaccine effectiveness in the U.K.
• “Italy’s AIFA approves using different vaccine for second dose after AstraZeneca jab” – Italian authorities have said that people under the age of 60 who received a first dose of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine can be given a different vaccine for their second dose, Reuters reports
• “No more AstraZeneca shots for under-60s” – Greece’s National Vaccination Committee has recommended that the AstraZeneca vaccine should not be administered to people under the age of 60, according to ekathimerini
• “Get Covid vaccine and chance to win a car as Moscow’s death toll grows” – The Mayor of Moscow is offering anyone who accepts the jab the opportunity to win a car, the Times reports, as the city recorded 69 COVID-19 deaths on Sunday and suspicion of vaccines remains widespread
• “Beijing Protests a Lab Leak Too Much” – “The linguistic evidence is overwhelming that Chinese leaders believe the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the source,” says Perry Link, a Professor of Chinese at the University of California, in the Wall Street Journal
• “Cashier slaughtered in supermarket for telling man to wear a mask” – A cashier was shot and killed after telling a man to put on a mask at a store in the state of Georgia, the New York Post reports
• “Workers push back against hospitals requiring Covid vaccines” – Despite having lost their case, Jennifer Bridges and other workers at Houston Methodist Hospital in Texas remain steadfast in their belief that their employer’s ‘No Jab, No Job’ policy is wrong, AP news reports
• “Wuhan Lab Controversy Illustrates How Government Funding Throttles Scientific Integrity” – “This fear of the loss of grants – and, therefore, livelihoods – undercuts the willingness of scientists ‘to stick their necks out’ with unpopular – but potentially true – viewpoints on the origins of the Covid virus,” writes Raymond C. Niles at the AIER
• “India gingerly eases coronavirus rules as new cases dip to two-month low” – Many Indian states eased restrictions on Monday, Reuters says, including the capital Delhi, where all shops and malls have now been allowed to open
• “Chile faces setback to reopening as coronavirus cases soar” – As cases in the country continue to soar Chilean health authorities have said they would extend a COVID-19 emergency until September to allow the Government to continue to impose restrictions, Reuters reports
• “The looming medical apartheid” – Bill Muehlenberg sounds a warning in Spectator Australia about the “two-tiered society” that will inevitably result from “the growing demands being made by state and business elites to have mandatory corona vaccinations”
• “Press conference of the U.S. Senators” – A recent press conference of U.S. Senators covering mainstream media bias and big tech censorship in reporting on COVID-19 stories and the need for accountability
• “Dr. Roger Hodkinson talks to Anna Brees” – Dr. Roger Hodkinson joins Anna on Brees Media to discuss vaccine side effects
• “Novel coronavirus has a signature never seen in this virus class before” – Sky News Australia’s Sharri Markson speaks to Atossa Therapeutics CEO Dr. Steven Quay who says that SARS-CoV-2 bears a “signature” that’s never been seen in this virus class before and came “completely pre-adapted to humans”
• “We should always have remained open and it’s just a tragedy that we are in this position” – “I’m starting to despair,” says Great Barrington Declaration founding signatory Professor Sunetra Gupta, regretting the continued denial of the principle of focused protection