News Round-Up

• “How mass testing provides a skewed picture of the pandemic’s scale” – Sarah Knapton, the Telegraph’s Science Editor, reports that community prevalence is currently five times lower than when the country had similar case numbers last year but the picture is distorted by mass testing
• “Terrorist threat increases due to lockdowns” – Home Secretary Priti Patel has warned that Britain faces a heightened terrorist threat due to lockdown creating a range of “triggers” that could push individuals to act, the Times reports
• “Lockdowns leave half of teenagers battling anxiety and trauma” – Research from the Royal Society of Psychologists suggests that 53% of girls and 44% of boys aged 13 to 18 were found to be suffering from trauma or PTSD in the months after the first lockdown, according to the Telegraph
• “School self-isolation hitting poor pupils hardest” – Youngsters in the most disadvantaged parts of the country are almost twice as likely as peers in wealthier areas to be forced to self-isolate, the Telegraph reveals
• “Sajid Javid opens way for EU travel to resume with NHS app” – The app has been updated to serve as a Covid passport, the Telegraph says, and is ready to be integrated into the EU’s green pass system
• “Covid loan fraud and error will cost U.K. taxpayers tens of billions, say MPs” – A cross-party group has claimed that taxpayers stand to lose out on tens of billions of pounds due to fraudulent use of the COVID-19 support schemes, the Guardian reports
• “Covid hospitalisations half of SAGE forecasts for July 19th Freedom Day” – SAGE models in the middle of June predicted that hospitalisations would be around 531 on June 22nd if ‘Freedom Day’ was delayed to July 19th, but, according to MailOnline, the daily hospital admissions on that date was 223
• “Britons riled as foreign business leaders exempt from Covid quarantine if trip brings ‘significant economic benefit’ to U.K.” – The Department for Business has announced new rules allowing business visitors to avoid quarantine if their trip is of significant economic benefit, but, RT reports, the policy has gone down like a lead balloon with many Brits
• “Should we be mixing AstraZeneca and Pfizer shots? – Writing for the Spectator, Ross Clark considers the evidence that mixing the jabs improves their efficacy
• “How much longer will people obey pointless and unjust lockdown laws?” – “It’s unconscionable that I’m considered a law-breaker for not wearing a mask on station platforms,” says Philip Johnston in the Telegraph
• “Dear Sajid, good luck with the new job – you’re going to need it” – Allison Pearson offers the new Health Secretary a few tips in the Telegraph
• “The world must learn from Australia that zero Covid is a disastrous dead end” – “Australia’s smug party is over,” says Annabel Fenwick Elliott in the Telegraph. And their “hard-won Covid battle has only just begun”
• “Have we given up on liberty?” – “If there was ever a case for limiting our rights because of the presence of this virus then it has long since disappeared,” writes Professor David McGrogan, a contributor to Lockdown Sceptics, in Spiked
• “COVID-19 – the final nail in coffin of medical research” – “I was already pretty depressed with the direction that medical science was taking,” writes Dr. Malcolm Kendrick. “Then COVID-19 came along, the distortion and hype became so outrageous that I almost gave up trying to establish what was true, and what was just made up nonsense”
• “Scandal of the suppressed case for ivermectin” – Writing for the Conservative Woman, Edmund Fordham gives an account of a paper he co-authored with Dr. Tess Lawrie about using ivermectin to treat COVID-19. It was published in the American Journal of Therapeutics after the Lancet turned it down
• “Trust me – I’m from Big Pharma” – “For reasons yet to be confirmed,” says Kate Dunlop in the Conservative Woman, political and public health leaders have turned themselves into “procurers for Big Pharma”
• “Readers, can you help?” – The Conservative Woman tells of a rumour that Public Health England is warning dentists to expect and plan for a lockdown from October until March next year. Can it be refuted?
• “‘The great majority of people will recover from this, even if they are in their 80’s’ Chris Whitty” – The Sceptic Nurse has compiled a montage of such names as Boris Johnson, Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance making clear that the vast majority of people, even the elderly, recover from COVID-19
• “I am convinced that the virus came out by accident from a laboratory in Wuhan” – Canadian biologist Derrick Rossi, a co-founder of Moderna, tells the Spanish news paper El Comercio that he finds the lab leak hypothesis to be the most logical explanation for the origins of SARS-CoV-2
• “Spanish school students stuck in hotel quarantine in Majorca” – According to the BBC, around 200 Spanish students are being held under police guard at the Palma Bellver Hotel in Majorca after an outbreak of cases was linked to their end-of-year trip
• “Germany now wants to spoil the Euro 2020 Wembley final with fewer fans” – Germany is demanding that the crowd size for the Euro 2020 Wembley final be drastically reduced by around 40,000 fans due to concerns about the Delta variant, MailOnline reports
• “Child contacts rights group to get corona jab despite antivax parents” – An Israeli child has contacted the Assistance and Support Centre of the National Council for the Child to help him get the jab against the wishes of his parents, the Jerusalem Post reports
• “Alberta pastor found in contempt of court, another has jail sentence extended for holding worship services” – The Post Millennial reports that pastors Artur Pawlowski and Tim Stephens are both continuing to defy Alberta Public Health after they chose to hold worship services during lockdown
• “Senator Johnson, families speak: Covid vaccine adverse reactions” – A Fox6 report on the meeting hosted by U.S. Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin on Monday with families affected by adverse reactions from the Covid vaccinations
• “Inside the risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan” – China emulated “reverse genetics” techniques developed in the U.S. to construct novel coronaviruses, the MIT Technology Review says, and they carried the work out at biosafety level 2
• “Fauci must come clean on Wuhan lab” – “Taxpayers have a right to know if the National Institutes of Health knew about and covered up a lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology that placed global health and our economy in peril,” says Congresswoman Diana Harshbarger and Anthony Bellotti in the Washington Examiner
• “Calls rise for FDA to fully approve COVID-19 vaccines” – Calls are rising for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to move faster to fully approve the COVID-19 vaccines, the Hill reports, as some may be put off by their current emergency status
• “Cuba’s COVID vaccine rivals BioNTech-Pfizer, Moderna” – Deutsche Welle takes a look at Cuba’s vaccine Abdala which is said to be 92% effective
• “North Korea Covid outbreak fears after Kim Jong-un warns of ‘huge crisis’ in ‘antivirus fight’” – North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un has spoken of a failure in anti-epidemic work that has led to a “grave incident” and chastised his officials for neglecting the duties, the Guardian reports
• “Red Cross warns of imminent ‘catastrophe’ in Indonesia” – President Joko Widodo of Indonesia is likely to impose new social-distancing restrictions, according to the Times, as the Delta variant spreads and doubts are raised about the Chinese vaccine which the country used to protect the population
• “False gods of public health” – “Even before Covid, it was impossible to hold public health research and the small band of professionals who make a living out of the discipline in high esteem,” says Judith Sloan in Spectator Australia  
• “Vaccine segregation is an affront to liberty” – “In Australia, we do not discriminate (and neither should we) on the basis of race, sex, colour, religion, age or so on,” wites Dr. Rocco Loiacono in Spectator Australia. “Why then should we begin discrimination on the basis of medical status?”
• “Stop this human sacrifice: the case against lockdowns” – “What is going on here is not the fight of our lives against a fearsome pestilence,” writes economist Gigi Foster in the Sydney Morning Herald. “It is politicians willingly sacrificing their people’s welfare, hoping the people see their actions as a sufficient offering”
• “COVID-19 epidemiology: risks, measures, and ending the pandemic” – A talk by Professor John Ioannidis at the University of Salzburg about the epidemiology of COVID-19, its extreme risk stratification, the Infection Fatality Rate and the poor evidence base for many of the measures taken
• “I hate SAGE and I hate what they have done to this country…” – On talkRADIO yesterday, Mark Dolan appealed for “peaceful people power” to help bring this madness to an end