News Round-Up

• “Rip it up: the vaccine passport experiment needs to end” – Kate Andrews in the Spectator sounds the alarm about the arrival of the dystopian pass scheme: “The idea that anyone should be free to move within a country, and free to leave it, is hardly extreme. It’s something protected in Article 13 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights. But liberty, once ceded only in an emergency, is hard to win back.”
• “The time has come to get on with our lives” – “It will soon become clear,” writes Douglas Murray in the Spectator, “that there are societies, states and whole countries that are successfully getting on with life, and others that are not. And as people in the countries that want to lock down for the rest of the decade look to those places like Florida which are successfully getting on with things, they will want their own lives to look like that too.”
• “The Church cannot indefinitely sidestep its self-inflicted Covid damage” – ‘Archbishop Cranmer’ on the “sheer thoughtlessness of church incumbents and parochial church councils deciding to close their services in order to ‘protect the public’ and ‘Save the NHS’”.
• “All the world’s a nudge” – And all the men and women merely cattle, writes ‘MyBodyThisPaperThisFire’ on their Substack page.
• “My dog and the NHS have a lot in common” – Rod Liddle in the Spectator on the remarkable similarities between the health service and his pet: “She has become a hideously bloated, entitled creature who almost by herself determines how we live our lives. In winter she is particularly tyrannical.”
• “Mild omicron wave will bring down the Covid police state” – Highly transmissible but less deadly variant destroys case for restrictions on freedom, writes Ryan Bourne in the Telegraph.
• “P*** off the unvaccinated? Plus ca change!” – Mr Macron does not regard unjabbed Frenchies as full citizens, saying that an “irresponsible person” (aka those who have not yet submitted to government coercion) “is not a citizen”, writes Frederick Edward in Bournbrook.
• “Defiant Djokovic faces deportation from Australia” – Unlike so many others, Novak Djokovic has prioritised liberty over fortune and status-quo social media symbolism and he needs all the support he can get, writes Luke Perry in Bournbrook.
• “The Pernicious Pandemic Blinders” – The latest from Omar Khan.
• “Data justifying five-day self-isolation has been evident since summer” – NHS leaders and think-tanks are calling for self-isolation to be cut to five days, reports the Mail.
• “Covid: Deadly Omicron should not be called mild, warns WHO” – The WHO seems to be panicking that people have stopped panicking, reports BBC News.
• “It’s time to end Covid mass testing” – What matters more is targeted interventions on those who are most vulnerable, and rebuilding staffing capacity in the NHS, writes Dr. Allyson Pollock in the Telegraph.
• “Novak Djokovic is a useful distraction from Australia’s Zero Covid failure” – World leaders’ outlandish threats against the unvaccinated are no way to tackle this pressing issue, as Australia clocks up more reported infections in the past eight days than in the previous two years, writes Fraser Nelson in the Telegraph.
• “The end is always nigh” – Lionel Shriver in the Spectator is not being taken in by the latest prophets of doom: “The stridency, the hyperbole, the whipping up of accelerating hysteria, the indisputable gospel and the evangelical, Speakers’ Corner cries that the end is nigh… I’ve been around a pretty long time now, and I’m afraid it’s all a little too familiar.”
• “The second gender war” – At the end of 2021, the debate on sex and gender and the conflict with women’s rights feels very different, at least in the UK, from the way it felt at the end of 2019, writes Maya Forstater in the Critic.
• “Colston Four verdict ‘undermines rule of law’, warns MP who says vandalism isn’t acceptable as a political protest” – Senior Tory MPs express concern that judgment in favour of Black Lives Matter activists could affect future cases involving monuments, reports the Telegraph.
• “Beheading the hydra” – Will 2022 be the year when we begin to curtail the excesses, and reverse the growth, of the seemingly unstoppable “Equality, Diversity and Inclusion” industry, asks Caroline Ffiske in the Critic.
• “Child sexual exploitation is not just part of Rotherham’s past” – Local councillor Emily Barley on the worrying signs of history repeating itself.
• “‘Huge numbers’ of pupils at 6 NW secondary schools are refusing to do LFTs and wear masks according to NASUWT teaching union. It says one Lancashire school has only 67 children out of 1,300 willing to follow guidance. The union is calling for testing and masks to be compulsory” – Tweet from BBC North West.