News Round-Up

• “Testing asymptomatic children should end, experts say” – Testing healthy children could do “more harm than good”, say the Royal College of Paediatricians.
• “Face-to-face GP appointments down by almost one million in a month” – Campaigners for elderly warn that remote appointments are “the new normal” and accuse the Government of failing to “get a grip”, reports the Telegraph.
• “Covid and the cynical betrayal of the elderly” – “The pandemic has exposed deep and disturbing prejudices against the elderly, the gravely ill and people who are disabled,” writes Simon Caldwell in TCW Defending Freedom.
• “Masks on planes should be scrapped – but it’s possible they never will be” – There is no reason we should be muzzled on planes and not at nightclubs; but then, aviation ‘safety’ rules have never made much sense, writes Annabel Fenwick Elliott in the Telegraph.
• “No face masks, little social distancing. Labour’s Covid hypocrisy was on full display in Brighton” – Perhaps socialists are so virtuous that they cannot pass germs on to each other, suggests Patrick O’Flynn in the Telegraph.
• “Covid rules reintroduced at Ipswich school after cases surge” – An Ipswich high school has reintroduced several Covid measures after a recording a “higher than average” number of cases.
• “Why are we vaccinating children against Covid?” – “The clinical trials did not address long-term effects that, if serious, would be borne by children/adolescents for potentially decades,” write the authors of a new article in Toxicology Reports.
• “Were we always so prone to all this panic, doom and gloom?” – 70s parents calmed us with a sense of progress. It’s when the world seems to be pedaling backwards that despair sets in, writes Jemima Lewis in the Telegraph.
• “Medical student, 21, died a day after getting J&J vaccine” – John Foley, 21, a student at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio received the Johnson & Johnson Covid vaccine on Saturday and was discovered by his roommates on Sunday, reports MailOnline.
• “Australian notes” – “If there is one thing this Covid pandemic has shown us it is the hollow and massively politicised nature of the lawyer-driven human rights complex in this country,” writes James Allan in the Spectator Australia.
• “Dan Andrews could be [‘]forced[‘] to push back roadmap to freedom” – Locked-down Victoria has experienced its worst day yet of the current outbreak, raising fears that the ‘roadmap to freedom’ will be delayed.
• “Slovenian police use tear gas and water cannon as rally against Covid pass mandate gets chaotic (VIDEO)” – Tear gas and water cannon were deployed by police in Slovenia’s capital after thousands of demonstrators upset over mandatory Covid passes tried to block a major highway and were accused of assaulting the media, reports Russia Today.
• “Most African nations miss target to vaccinate 10% of population by end of September” – Richer nations have been urged to deliver on donation promises as a lack of supply is blamed on low vaccination rate, reports the Telegraph.
• “Homeowners set to be hit with new eco gas tax in green nudge” – Climate change levies currently added to domestic electricity will be axed and new payments will be added to gas to entice people to replace their central heating boilers and cookers, reports MailOnline.
• “Britain’s Coming Winter Energy Crisis” – This winter, the U.K.’s wrongheaded energy policy may test public devotion to environmentalism, writes Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal.
• “The Culture War is Coming for Your Genes” – “Imposing any single conception of merit on the world amounts to tyranny as it means trampling on everyone else’s conception,” writes Damien Morris in his review of Dr. Kathryn Paige Harden’s The Genetic Lottery for Quillette.
• “The lost art of the political put down” – “What one grieves for when hearing Raynor’s [Rayner’s] speech is what has been lost: the art of the political put down. Her diatribe was absent of any wit and the true imagination of a good insult,” writes Jamie Walden in Bournbrook Magazine.
• “How Labour became the nasty party” – Social justice has become a form of persecution, writes Giles Fraser in UnHerd.
• “Bond is about the last real man standing in Hollywood” – It would be utterly preposterous to have Wonder Man replace Wonder Woman, just as it would be to utterly preposterous to see James Bond turned into Jane Bond, writes Piers Morgan in MailOnline.
• “‘A preprint from a great scientist, Joe DeRisi’” – A new study – which is yet to be peer reviewed – has found “no significant difference in viral load between vaccinated and unvaccinated, asymptomatic and symptomatic groups infected with [the] SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant”.