News Round-Up

• “Campaign to boycott Tesco after supermarket promotes vaccine passports in Christmas advert” – Campaigners are urging Britons to boycott Tesco because the supermarket appears to promote vaccine passports in its Christmas advert, reports the Express.
• “Government-approved Covid testing firm faces watchdog probe” – The Information Commissioner’s Office said it would analyse information gathered about Cignpost Diagnostics over its plans to sell customers’ swabs for medical research, reports MailOnline.
• “Vaccine exemptions that care workers need to be aware of” – “It will at least buy them time and keep them in work and pay until April. There is nothing illegal about this,” says Kathy Gyngell, who explains how unvaccinated care workers can dodge the vaccine mandate for the time being in TCW.
• “Prem Group suffers €13.5m Covid losses” – “Prem Group, which operates hotels across Ireland, U.K., Netherlands and Belgium, suffered heavy losses after being forced to close during the Covid pandemic,” reports the Sunday Times.
• “Elderly being blocked from Covid vaccine booster jabs because of NHS blunders” – People wanting top-up jab are being turned away because medical staff wrongly recorded date of their second dose, reports the Telegraph.
• “CDC: no record of naturally immune transmitting Covid” – “The Centers for Disease Control says it has no record of people who are naturally immune transmitting the virus that causes Covid,” reports the Epoch Times.
• “Vaccines make free” – “Remember when I got in trouble for saying that? Remember when all the bright boys on Twitter told me I was trivializing the Holocaust? Can you hear me now?” writes Alex Berenson, who points to Austria’s unvaccinated lockdown in his latest Substack update.
• “Low-cost antiviral fails phase three – bleak prospects for economical repurposed Covid treatments in North America” – “The antiviral drug originally from Japan called favipiravir (Avigan) failed to demonstrate statistical significance on the primary endpoint objective of time to sustained clinical recovery,” reports Trialsite.
• “It’s the people’s war on Covid, but President Xi is the biggest winner” – The Chinese leader is tightening his grip on power with a hard-line zero-Covid policy and a never-ending cycle of lockdowns, writes Philip Sherwell in the Sunday Times.
• “Protest erupts in Dutch city on first night of new lockdown” – Riot police were deployed as hundreds set off fireworks and bars and restaurants were forced to close early, reports the Telegraph.
• “Children as young as five to begin getting Covid jabs by January” – Australia’s vaccine rollout boss Lieutenant-General John Frewen has revealed children aged five to 11 years-old could begin getting Covid jabs by early next year, reports the Mail Australia.
• “China and India are right to keep coal” – “There has been no comparable look at the millions of families in India and China who depend on coal to provide them with life-saving electricity,” says Samir Shah, who writes on the West’s ignorance about the situation facing these two nations in the Spectator.
• “Bank of England tried to appease Extinction Rebellion protesters, emails reveal” – Officials defended stance on allowing banks to lend to heavy polluters in emails to climate activists who caused chaos in London, reports the Telegraph.
• “The end of truth is nigh” – “Freedom of speech, thought and action has morphed into a freedom to agree and do as you are told or you will be excommunicated in your own land,” writes Brother Antony, who argues that the concept of objective and verifiable truth is facing a targeted attack from society’s dominant institutions in TCW.
• “How anti-racism became a religion” – John McWhorter’s Woke Racism is an elegant, essential demolition of today’s ugly racial politics, argues Tom Slater, who reviews McWhorter’s new book Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America in Spiked.
• “Trans activists fuming as BBC executive tells staff that journalism can hurt their feelings” – “A BBC meeting on LGBT rights reportedly left many activists in emotional distress, after leadership told them that in the profession of journalism, they will hear opinions they ‘don’t personally like’,” reports RT.
• “North Dakota bans Critical Race Theory in public schools, requires ‘factual, objective’ curriculum” – “North Dakota has become the latest state to ban critical race theory (CRT) from being taught in public school classrooms,” reports the Epoch Times.
• “Woke cannot survive being exposed as a bad joke” – Risible over-reach has turned a once-dominant ideology into a target of widespread mockery, writes Janet Daley in the Telegraph.
• “You know who else didn’t like people making fun of Hitler? Hitler, of course” – “Mockery of wickedness is without question a good thing. It is, I would suggest, vital,” argues Rod Liddle, who explains the necessity of humour and opening ideas to ridicule in the Sunday Times.
• “Where did Covid begin?” – Author Matt Ridley talks to GB News about the potential origins of Covid: “We haven’t concluded that it definitely came from a laboratory… but we both ended up thinking that is a very strong possibility.”