News Round-Up

• “Matt Hancock faces sack if affair becomes ‘Barnard Castle moment’” – Cabinet Ministers are warning that the fury of the public’s reaction to those photos will determine Matt Hancock’s fate, according to the Telegraph
• “Gina Coladangelo: the millionaire lobbyist quietly appointed to top government roles” – The woman caught in the affair with Matt Hancock first crossed paths with him when they were working on student radio at Oxford University, according to the Telegraph
• “Gina Coladangelo’s brother works at health firm that won NHS contracts” – Roberto Coladangelo’s firm was awarded a £28million contract last year to carry out work for the South Central Ambulance Service NHS Trust, MailOnline says, reporting on another side of the story
• “Sorry string of Matt Hancock scandals as he admits breaking his own Covid rules” – The Health Secretary believes he didn’t break the law, the Mirror understands, as he and Mrs Coladangelo were in the Health Department for legitimate work purposes
• “U.K. health chiefs say rates of myocarditis are higher than expected” – British cardiologists have told MailOnline that a change in language on the MHRA’s website signalled that it could be about to issue a warning about the link between the jabs and “very rare” and “typically mild” cases of myocarditis
• “Conflicts of interest alleged in ‘multi-layered web of influence’ as Big Pharma pays millions to informal Parliament groups” – Health-related semi-formal working groups of the British Parliament are taking millions in donations from the pharmaceutical industry, according to RT
• “Six cases of Lambda Covid variant first found in Peru confirmed in England” – The variants have reached the next letter, but, RT reports, Public Health England say there is no evidence to suggest that the variant has the capability of causing more serious illness or diminishing the efficacy of jabs
• “A plea from a pollster: stop listening to the public” – “We are increasingly finding ourselves in an unhealthy position,” says pollster James Johnson in the Spectator. “Politicians are not just looking at polls as a reflection of opinion, but taking them as a call to action”
• “The hypocrisy of Matt Hancock” – “I haven’t enjoyed a story so much since Neil Ferguson was outed for having broken lockdown rules which he played a part imposing on the rest of us so as to meet a comely married blonde woman,” writes Melanie McDonagh in the Spectator
• “Matt Hancock is now a national joke and must go today” – “As Hancock was enforcing the most inhumane and draconian limits on our interactions by law, he was flagrantly ignoring the social distancing rules to engage in a tawdry affair,” writes Dan Wootton in MailOnline
• “We’ve sacrificed our children on the altar of Covid” – “The damage goes beyond lost schooling to all the life experiences they missed that cannot be repeated,” says Camilla Tominey in the Telegraph
• “Hypocrisy is too small a word for Matt Hancock’s betrayal of the public’s trust” – “Those who govern us are drunk on absolute power, and it’s made men like Hancock reckless,” writes Allison Pearson in the Telegraph
• “Matt Hancock voted to invade our privacy, yet now he asks that his be respected” – There is an irony in Matt Hancock’s request for “privacy for my family”, says Fraser Nelson in the Telegraph.  “A great many other families would have been grateful for more privacy over the last 15 months”
• “Time for more TV tears, Mr Hancock?” – “It would take a heart of stone not to laugh,” says Frederick Edward in the Conservative Woman, responding of course to Matt Hancock’s indiscretions with a married member of his staff
• “BA refuse to deny pilots died after covid jab” – Sally Beck investigates the rumours surrounding the deaths of four British Airways pilots for the Conservative Woman
• “We are being guided by the National Conscience” – It is the idealistic National Conscience, “zealously guarded by the mainstream media who express their righteous outrage at every opportunity” that led us into lockdown, says Ian Ashworth-Kirkham in the Conservative Woman
• “Watch: Three times Matt Hancock was a hypocrite” – The Telegraph montage of Matt Hancock condemning his own behaviour
• “Will European workers take mandatory Covid jabs lying down?” – A feature in Euronews about the prospect of ‘no jab, no job’ policies in companies throughout Europe
• “Vexation not vacation for Europeans hoping for US voyages” – The European Union is letting Americans back in, but the United States is still blocking European travellers from its shores. Deutsche Welle takes a look at what’s holding things up
• “Germany fans urged not to travel to England for Euro 2020 clash” – According to Deutsche Welle, the World Medical Association believes that, given the prevalence of the Delta variant, it would be “irresponsible” for German football fans to travel to London for the Euro2020 match on Tuesday
• “Malta imposes quarantine for unvaccinated Britons, hours after addition to green list” – The Maltese government has reintroduced self-isolation for unjabbed British holidaymakers, the Telegraph reports, amid growing concern over UK rates of the delta variant
• “Tunisian Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi contracts COVID-19” – The Prime Ministers of Tunisia is cancelling his meetings and working remotely, according to Reuters, after he became infected with the coronavirus
• “Russia mandates vaccinations for some as virus cases surge” – Having fallen short of the target to vaccinate 30 million, regional governments across Russia are now, according to the Associated Press, obliging many workers to take the jab and requiring vaccination for entry into restaurants and other businesses
• “Iceland to lift all COVID-19 restrictions from Saturday” – Svandís Svavarsdóttirlonger, the Minister of Health in Iceland, has announced all Covid restrictions are to be dropped as of Saturday, Reuters reports, including masks and social distancing
• “National Institutes of Health defends deleting COVID-19 genetic data pointing to lab leak origin” – A National Institutes of Health spokesperson has defended its decision to delete its record of genetic sequencing of COVID-19 cases, the Washington Examiner explains, on the grounds that the request for the deletions fell within internationally agreed guidelines
• “Inside Wikipedia’s endless war over the coronavirus lab leak theory” – A cnet feature on Wikipedia’s ongoing internal editor battles over the coronavirus and its origins
• “From limousine to lockdown: How Sydney’s outbreak got out of control” – The Sydney Morning Herald reports on how the city ended up with another lockdown
• “Nearly one in 10 Victorians ‘seriously considered suicide’ during COVID lockdown, report finds” – According to ABC, researchers surveyed 1,157 residents of Victoria, Australia during September 2020 and found that 33.4% reported symptoms of anxiety or depression, 26.3% reported burnout, 12.3% has started using or increased their use of substances and 9.5% seriously considered suicide
• “An abundance of dread as Daniel Andrews’ comeback looms” – In just days, John Simpson warns in Spectator Australia, “the architect of one of the worst chapters in the life of Victoria (outside of war and the Great Depression) returns from three months away due to injury”
• “WHO’s behind Facebook?” – “The World Health Organisation surprised everyone,” says Rebecca Weisser in Spectator Australia, “by advising parents to hold off on vaccinating their children for COVID-19” but no one was more startled than Facebook
• “They called it a conspiracy theory. But Alina Chan tweeted life into the idea that the virus came from a lab.” – Antonio Regalado interviews Alina Chan, the post-doc researcher who used her twitter account to help change the debate about the origins of SARS-CoV-2, for the MIT Technology Review
• “COVID-19 origins still a mystery: Study finds virus was ‘highly human adapted’” – Medical Xpress reports the findings of researchers at Flinders University and La Trobe University in Australia, who, seeking to help identify an immediate animal vector, found that the virus was “ideally adapted to infect human cells”
• “Covid pandemic fuelling major increase in drug use worldwide: UN report” – A press release about the new United Nations report which found that around 275 million people took drugs last year, up 22% over 2010
• “Child labour: The hidden costs of Covid” – A BBC report on 9 year-old Teddy in Uganda. After her school closed in response to COVID-19, she went to work mining for gold
• “Shocking revelations’ on gain-of-function research ‘raise questions’ about CSIRO” – Sky News Australia’s Peta Credlin covers the revelations that the Australian Government agency CSIRO has undertaken research on live bats with the Wuhan Institute of Virology
• “Matt Hancock needs to go and he needs to go today” – TalkRADIO’s Mike Graham lays out the case against the Secretary of State for Health