News Round-Up

• “The cancer backlog scandal is so much worse than you think” – At the start of the pandemic I said that lockdown could end up killing more people than Covid – I wish I had been wrong, writes Allison Pearson in the Telegraph.
• “More than 100,000 pupils off school in England last week amid Covid surge” – The number of pupils with confirmed or suspected ‘cases’ on September 16th was the highest since start of pandemic.
• “Headteachers receiving death threats over Covid vaccines roll-out in schools” – The Vaccines Minister condemns the “intimidation” of staff by ‘anti-vaxxers’ since 12 to 15 year-olds began receiving jabs, reports the Telegraph.
• “Millions could work from home forever under new flexible working laws” – Working from home could become the norm for millions of Brits after the pandemic, with new rules set to give employees the right to request home working from their first day in the job, reports the Sun.
• “Doctors suffering ‘wave of abuse’ over lack of face-to-face appointments” – The Head of the Royal College of GPs says the current situation – with just over half of appointments taking place in person – is “about right”.
• “Biological and molecular evidence why children are effectively Covid immune and can be considered already vaccinated” – “Covid vaccines offer children no opportunity for benefit and only potential opportunities for harms,” writes Paul Alexander in TrialSite.
• “Students craving mask mandates are typical of the new breed of safety obsessives created by lockdown” – The enduring legacy of the pandemic may well be the growth of a section of society whose desire to be insulated from all risk is best illustrated by their performative mask-wearing – and this spells danger for everyone’s freedoms, writes Frank Furedi in Russia Today.
• “Vaccine Mandates: Who Will Comply, and Why?” – The presumption of venality, as it is inscribed in new measures against the pandemic, is extremely interesting, at least from an anthropological point of view, writes Jovana Diković in Mises Institute.
• “Emergency Powers and the Rule of Law” – “On the pretence of fighting a virus, draconian measures have been adopted that profoundly violate the Australian Constitution and the inalienable rights of the individual,” writes Augusto Zimmermann in Quadrant.
• “Bari Weiss: there are signs of sanity returning” – “At some point down the line, I feel like we’ve lost sight of the science here, and it’s become a lot more about signalling what political tribe you’re a part of,” says Bari Weiss in an interview on Covid restrictions and more in UnHerd.
• “Coming soon: Devi Sridhar’s spring best-seller” – “Her book promises to ‘challenge, outrage and inspire’ – rather like Sridhar’s own tweeted musings on the efficacy of the AstraZeneca jab in March which saw her being accused of disinformation, a charge which led her to block the critics,” writes ‘Steerpike’ in the Spectator.
• “Whose Britishness?” – “On education, drugs, immigration, environmental alarmism, transgender issues, foreign aid, personal rights, privacy, free speech and – most of all – British culture, the Conservative Party has been firmly unconservative,” writes Alexander Adams in Bournbrook Magazine.
• “Power mad: This devastating audit lays bare the costly errors ” – Matt Ridley writes in the Mail that the root of our energy crisis is the Governments’ pursuit of decarbonisation.
• “About fracking time! The Government must revisit its shale moratorium” – “It’s clear that lifting the ban on shale energy here would not cause any plausible risk of earthquake deaths – but it would certainly prevent deaths from hypothermia,” writes Harry Phibbs in CapX.
• “Police’s appeasement of M25 mob is an embarrassment” – Whatever your opinion on the Insulate Britain protesters, their reckless methods of running headfirst into motorway traffic are irrefutably both illegal and irresponsible, writes ex-Met superintendent Philip Flower in the Mail.
• “Germany Wants To Force Gab To Censor, It’s Not Happening” – Because of Gab’s unwillingness to participate in state-mandated censorship of free speech, the German Government is now going after it with heavy fines and other legal action.
• “Violinist Nigel Kennedy cancels concert after Classic FM stops Hendrix tribute” – The performer has pulled his Royal Albert Hall gig over a decision he compared to musical segregation.
• “Oxford college run by former equalities head apologises for hosting Christian conference” – Here’s yet another case of cancel culture as Worcester College acknowledges the “distress” caused to students by a Christian conference.
• “Calling women ‘birds’ is ‘plainly sexist’, judge rules” – The ruling comes in the case of a Barclays investment banker who won a sex discrimination claim after her boss repeatedly called women “birds”, reports MailOnline.
• “‘It’s impossible to justify vaccination against Covid on the grounds of risk – especially for children’” – Former NHS consultant Dr. John Lee says on talkRADIO that children should not be jabbed: “The risk for Covid has been overstated for everyone.”