News Round-Up

• “Ministers plan to end social distancing in England on 19th July” – Ministers are planning to remove all mandatory mask and social distancing restrictions in England on 19th July, the Guardian says, but masks may still be encouraged in some settings
• “How 1.7m people could be ordered to isolate each week” – If current trends continue, according to the Daily Mail, there will be 1,734,000 people self-isolating by July 28th
• “Now let’s dance – clubs to reopen (with no Covid tests)” – According to the Evening Standard, night clubs and music venues will be able to reopen in full and will not need to ask for a Covid status certificate which Michael Gove thinks would be “too much hassle”
• “Only ‘unprecedented’ incident would block July 19th reopening, Gove insists” – A second delay to the end of lockdown would only occur in the event of something that was both “unprecedented and remarkable”, Michael Gove has said according to the Independent
• “Scrapping U.K.’s daily Covid figure ‘would look dodgy’” – Cabinet ministers are minded to continue with the publication of daily figures on coronavirus cases, according to the Times, as to stop suddenly would make it look like they had “something to hide”. So does this mean they’ll go on doing it forever?
• “Pets catch COVID-19 but don’t infect owners, Dutch study suggests” – Researchers at Utrecht University have found that cats and dogs often test positive for COVID-19 when their owners become infected, the Times reports, but, to date, no pet to human transmission has been reported
• “Wearing disposable masks is ‘unforgivable’, says Lord Goldsmith” – Environment minister Zac Goldsmith has hit out at his fellow peers for wearing “absurd throwaway masks” while they lament “the stupidity of plastic waste”, the Telegraph reports
• “European holidays could be off limits to 5m Britons given Indian-made AstraZeneca jab” – Up to five million Brit face being locked out of European holidays, according to the Telegraph, as the jab they took is not recognised by the EU’s passport scheme
• “Covid cost one of the country’s richest families nearly £800 million” – Thanks to the lockdown, the Cadogan property portfolio has plunged in value to just £4.8 billion, MailOnline reports
• “AstraZeneca vaccine: ‘Don’t be fobbed off’ urges fiancee” – Rock singer Zion died after taking the AstraZeneca jab, the BBC reports. His fiancée Vikki Spit says a paramedic “dismissed” any possibility of link between his “excruciating” headache and the vaccine
• “Children’s physical activity levels have plummeted in pandemic” – Lockdowns and social distancing mean rising numbers of young people have barely left their homes for long periods, the Telegraph reports
• “How Boris Johnson plans to reopen the country” – “The current plan is for a comprehensive reopening,” according to the Spectator’s James Forsyth. “The one-metre rule will be ditched, masks will no longer be compulsory and venues will be allowed to operate at full capacity again”
• “Winding down furlough will reveal the post-pandemic economy” – Writing in the Spectator, Kate Andrews marks the beginning of the end for the furlough scheme
• “The Javid-Sunak alliance holds the key to unlocking Britain at last” – “Until last week, Hancock, Michael Gove and Chris Whitty had formed a powerful alliance arguing for restrictions,” says Fraser Nelson in the Telegraph, but he reckons Sajid Javid’s return to cabinet could change all that
• “Meet the New Health Minister, Same as the Old Health Minister” – To Breitbart‘s James Delingpole, the current health secretary is much like the last one. Sajid Javid also wants to “Build Back Better” as the saying goes
• “Lockdown killed my mother – and thousands like her” – “The death certificate records that Elizabeth Carol Chamberlain died of dementia and kidney disease aged 88. But it was lockdown that really killed her,” writes Gethin Chamberlain in the Spectator
• “Scared into submission by the Government’s campaign of fear” – The British Government has capitalised on our fear of death for the past 14 months, writes Jamie Walden in Bournbroook. “Cynically or benevolently depending on your viewpoint”
• “How the Sun got its Matt Hancock scoop” – The Sun‘s editor-in-chief Victoria Newton has written the diary in the New Statesman, describing the call she made to the former Health Secretary about the story it was running the following day
• How I missed the Matt Hancock story” – Isabel Oakeshott was offered the story too, she reveals in the Spectator. But she thought the pictures were fakes
• “Why the left wants Covid to last forever… And the right thinks the pandemic is over already” – John Scott Lewinski analyses the results of a new Gallup study for RT. It found that 57% of Republican voters consider the pandemic to be over but only 4% of Democrat voters feel the same way
• “Hey, Government – leave those kids alone” – “Given what children have been forced to put up with for the last 16 months, it is just frankly inappropriate for a society to continue treating its young in this way,” says Dr. Alex Starling in Reaction
• “When can my daughter dream again?” – “School has become a liability to my daughter,” writes Dominey Jenner for the Conservative Woman. “This is because of the testing regime being imposed upon our children and the related constant threat of isolation”
• “Covid’s dark winter: Did hidden banking crisis spark global lockdown?” – Neville Hodgkinson in the Conservative Woman with more on the pandemic simulation exercises which have been going on for over 20 years. His first article on the subject was published yesterday
• “Two Covid deaths this summer and Australia turns into North Korea” – “What a mess, over nothing,” says Paul Collits, reporting from Australia for the Conservative Woman
• “Covid vaccine for children: all risk, no benefit” – Abir Ballan offers ten reasons why children and young people should not take a Covid vaccine
• “Gospel Lockdown? – A Biblical Perspective on the Church’s Response to the Pandemic” – Rob Hawksworth considers a Christian response to the pandemic and to lockdown. “Jesus always moved towards the sick,” he says and “he expects his followers to do likewise”
• “Permit congregational singing in all places of worship” – A U.K. parliamentary petition to allow congregational singing
• “Finally a Clinical Trial on Facemasks in Children – Parents Take Note!” – Ivor Cummins looks at the results of the trial, just published in JAMA and which Will Jones has just written about for Lockdown Sceptics, which found that wearing masks causes children to breathe in dangerous levels of Carbon dioxide
• “Is vaccine encouragement becoming vaccine coercion?” – “I feel very uncomfortable about the idea of children being lured into getting a vaccine with a sweet treat without their parent’s consent,” Laura Dodsworth says in the Americano podcast from the Spectator
• “Eastern Europe Is Racing to Use Covid Shots Before They Expire” – According to Bloomberg, Bulgaria and Romania have many spare vaccines thanks to plunging demand among their populations and are offering them to other countries in order to avoid their reaching their expiry dates unused
• “Fauci says vaccine hesitancy will lead to ‘two Americas’” – The Post Millennial highlights Dr. Fauci’s appearance on CNN, expressing concerns about vaccine hesitancy. “It’s almost like it’s going to be two Americas,” he said
• “Toronto Hospital apologises after giving 15-year-old the wrong COVID-19 vaccine” – Michael Garron Hospital in Toronto has apologised to a family of a 15 year-old who was given the Moderna vaccine which is not approved for teens in Canada, the Post Millennial reports. He was supposed to get the Pfizer jab
• “Mandatory safe and effective COVID-19 vaccinations and testing for all students and staff” – A motion up for debate at the annual meeting of the National Education Association, a teachers’ union in the U.S., calling for mandatory jabs for all students and staff before the return of face-to-face teaching in the Autumn
• “Healthy Societies Prioritise the Young” – “It has been known since February 2020 that this is a disease from which children are at almost infinitesimal risk,” writes David McGrogan, a Lockdown Sceptics contributor, for AIER. But the kids “were kept out of school because adults were panicking”
• “Ignoring the Fear, Americans Reclaim Their Right to Travel” – The CDC is still warning people against incautious travel but, says Jeffrey Tucker in Real Clear Markets, “Americans have stopped caring about all this messaging”
• “TheSeeker268, world’s foremost virus origins hunter, on how he began combing internet” – India’s The Week interviews “the seeker”, a member of the DRASTIC group about how he got involved in the search for the origins of COVID-19
• “Natural immunity vs COVID-19 vaccine-induced immunity” – Mainstream media, health authorities and many “experts” have downplayed natural immunity and portrayed vaccines as a silver bullet. “The data shows a different picture,” says PANDA’s Marc Girardot at BizNews
• “Indonesia announces lockdown in Java and Bali as cases surge” – Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo has announced that the Island of Java is to go into a two-week lockdown aimed at reducing the daily number of identified cases from more than 20,000 to below 10,000, the BBC reports
• “The Drug Whose Name Must Not Be Uttered” – Writing for Quadrant, Peter O’Brien considers why authorities in Australia and elsewhere don’t seem to be interested in ivermectin as a potential treatment for COVID-19
• “Will Australians ever be free?” – “Australia was the envy of the world in 2020, managing to keep Covid cases and deaths very low,” says Melbourne’s James Bolt in Spiked. “We are now the world’s laughing stock”
• “A Guide to Understanding this Pandemic” – A tour-de-force from Professor James Allan in Spectator Australia. “In the end,” he says, “the problem is the voters, all those liberty-discarding, quaking sheep”
• “This is not a threat to you” – YouTube removed Dr. Jay Bhattacharya’s discussion with David Brody of the Water Cooler, included here yesterday, about the Delta variant, how it is not a threat, and the contradictory guidance of the CDC and the WHO. Here it is again, this time on BitChute
• “Singapore is being ‘run by smarter people’ amid response to pandemic” – Sky News Australia looks at the moves Singapore is making to “live with Covid”
• “Will the U.S. Help the World Reopen?” – In the latest episode of the Tom Woods Show, Tom looks at how the example of the U.S. might spur other countries towards freedom
• “It’s unnecessary and unethical. Forty five per cent of schoolchildren already have Covid antibodies” – Dr Anthony Hinton tells Mark Dolan why children must not be given the Covid vaccine