News Round-Up

• “Thousands could have isolated for no reason due to Covid app error, says source” – A Whitehall whistleblower says Matt Hancock was told of a mistake where people were classed as close contacts for five days, not two, before he resigned, reports the Guardian.
• “The new case for jabs makes the idea of vaccine passports absurd” – A combination of new variants and fading immunity has left early hopes of 95% protection in tatters, writes Freddie Sayers in the Telegraph.
• “Harvard Epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff on Vaccine Passports, the Delta Variant, and the Covid ‘Public Health Fiasco’” – “Those who are pushing for vaccine mandates and vaccine passports… [are doing] so much more damage to vaccine confidence than anybody else,” says Dr Martin Kulldorff in an interview with the Epoch Times.
• “Why is the Government hellbent on pushing unnecessary vaccinations on our children?” – Teenagers no more need protection against Covid than they need protection against dementia or heart disease or asteroids, writes Allison Pearson in the Telegraph.
• “U.K. unemployment falls amid record rise in job vacancies” – June and July figures show a rocketing demand for workers as the country emerged from lockdown, reports the Guardian.
• “Covid anger in football growing with players in every team refusing jab” – Football clubs are angry that some players don’t want to get vaccinated against Covid, reports the Sun.
• “Travel test chaos as private labs fail to hand over up to 150,000 results a week” – Crucial data provided by travellers with PCR swabs is disappearing into ‘test-provider black hole’ without being passed on to Test and Trace, reports the Telegraph.
• “Classrooms in England ‘urgently’ need air filters, school unions say” – Seven unions call on the Education Secretary to improve ventilation to protect children ahead of new term, reports the Guardian.
• “The unions want the ‘pingdemic’ to last forever” – The crowds at football matches and pubs show there’s a much greater degree of resistance to going back to work than play, writes Patrick O’Flynn in the Telegraph.
• “How Covid’s origins were obscured, by the East and the West” – The origins of the Covid pandemic remain obscure due to a vigorous campaign of concealment by the Chinese authorities and missteps by senior medical research officials in the U.K. and U.S., writes Nicholas Wade in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
• “Austria imposes nine-month vaccine deadline on British travellers” – Austria has put an expiry date on arriving travellers’ vaccine certificates amid fears of waning immunity from the jabs, reports the Telegraph.
• “Israeli Health Payor Study Reveals Pfizer mRNA Vaccine Effectiveness Wanes Greatly for 60+ at 4.8 Months” – Although most vaccinated cases don’t lead to severe cases, a growing trend in Israel reveals vaccinated people are at ever greater risks, reports Trial Site.
• “France’s vaccine civil war” – It’s beginning to feel more like a civil war between the angry vaccinated and the equally angry unvaccinated in France, writes Richard Ings in TCW Defending Freedom.
• “McMaster TOGETHER Trial: Ivermectin a No Show While Fluvoxamine Shows Some Promise” – A new study highlights interim analysis results evidencing no impact of ivermectin and some other repurposed study drugs while pointing to some promise for Fluvoxamine, reports Trial Site.
• “Taliban spokesman complains of Facebook censorship” – In the Taliban’s first press conference in Kabul, the spokesman for the militant group appeared to take issue with Facebook’s ban on Taliban-related content, claiming such measures violate the syndicate’s freedom of speech, reports The Week.
• “Now the travel industry is bowing to wokeness” – Rachel Alexander reports on a group of writers who are urging for holiday destinations to be rated on bias, diversity and more in WND.
• “Will Knowland, Eton and the problem with the teaching misconduct panel” – Eton teaching Will Knowland has won a victory for free speech – but other teachers should be troubled by his experience, writes Andrew Tettenborn in the Spectator.
• “The other Mayor” – The hyper-sensitive Mayor of Bristol is devoting time to monitoring social media and blocking critics of him on Twitter, writes Alexander Adams in his latest column in Bournbrook Magazine.
• “The Kate Clanchy pile-on shows no one is safe from the speech police” – “Writers attempting to control how their work is reviewed is the flipside of Wokies attempting to control how minorities are portrayed in that work. Neither is possible,” writes Helen Dale in CapX.
• “Challenging U.N., Study Finds Sun – not CO2 – May Be Behind Global Warming” – “Accepting climate warnings at face value without considering strenuous objections from well qualified scientists as to the quality of the procedures which led to those conclusions could lead to a catastrophic global misallocation of resources,” writes Eric Worrall in Watts Up With That.
• “Vaccine passports will become mandatory for nightclubs and other venues by the end of September” – Big Brother Watch’s Madeleine Stone says pushback is needed to stop mandatory policies. She tells talkRADIO: “This policy is not about public health, it’s about coercion.”