News Round-Up

• “Inept Government decisions are the real root cause of our problems” – On Covid and the climate, our mitigation policies are more damaging than the issues they purport to solve, writes Janet Daley in the Telegraph.
• “Covid has made America more divided than ever” – My home country grows angrier and angrier, writes Kate Andrews in the Spectator.
• “Masks in schools: how convincing is the Government’s evidence?” – A searing take-down by Professor Carl Heneghan and Dr. Tom Jefferson in the Spectator.
• “Novak Djokovic had Covid a month ago and received clearance to enter Australia, lawyers say in court filing” – Djokovic is challenging his visa cancellation in Australia’s federal court in hopes of winning his 21st Grand Slam at the Australian Open, the Telegraph reports. There’s also some controversy over him apparently not isolating after his positive test.
• “The sports Covid chaos brewing from the athletes who refuse to get vaccinated” – Government drawing up plans for dramatic crackdown on unvaccinated athletes, excluding them from any ‘elite-sport quarantine exemptions’, reports the Telegraph.
• “Is this NHS crisis really worse than ones before?” – Winter is always the most difficult time of year. How alarming are the current problems, asks Nick Triggle on the BBC website.
• “Call to all democratic governments: don’t leave Italians alone” – Watch Francesca Donato report on the escalating authoritarian madness in Italy.
• “New dodgy data row as UKHSA warned over ‘implausible’ Covid statistics” – Public trust ‘at risk’ after officials took days to justify controversial figures quoted by Sajid Javid over the spread of Omicron variant, reports the Telegraph.
• “Life in Zero-Covid Antarctica” – If an enterprise mostly created and funded by the National Science Foundation cannot utilise scientific reasoning and accept normalcy where there is no Covid, how can we trust our scientific institutions to seek to in the rest of the world, where Covid is here to stay, asks Willy Forsyth on the Brownstone Institute site.
• “Britain faces surgeon shortage, as cancelled operations leave graduates under-qualified” – More than one million elective operations in which trainees would have gained vital experience have been ‘lost’ to the Covid pandemic, reports the Telegraph.
• “The Workers of England Union: defending NHS staff against mandatory vaccination” – Only one trade union fought for care home workers, writes Niall McCrae on the Bruges Group website, and the Workers of England Union is “determined to support any member against unethical, unscientific and frankly unBritish vaccine coercion”.
• “Monaco offers free blood tests to check residents’ Covid immunity” – The results can be used to decide whether a citizen or resident should receive a third vaccine dose straightaway, or whether they can afford to wait, reports the Connexion.
• “South Africa offers clues to life after Omicron” – Decoupling of community transmission and hospital cases gives lessons for the future as fourth wave peaks, reports the Financial Times.
• “South African Researchers Say Omicron Might Mark The End Of COVID Pandemic” – Tyler Durden on ZeroHedge reports on an encouraging study from Pretoria.
• “Swabbing throat and nose ‘boosts Covid detection in lateral flow tests’” – New data is being examined by ministers which could lead to advice on the use of LFTs being updated for tens of millions of users, reports the Telegraph, making the whole thing even more unpleasant.
• “We cannot afford to postpone a return to normality” – While the Omicron wave appears to be slowing, the devastating economic consequences of Covid restrictions are accumulating fast, says the Telegraph in this leader article.
• “Mom allegedly stuffed son in trunk because he had Covid, needed to be quarantined” – Sarah Beam faces child endangerment charges after she allegedly packed up her son and took him to a drive-thru coronavirus testing center in Houston on Jan. 3rd, the New York Post reports.
• “The Global Disinformation Campaign Against Ivermectin in COVID-19 (Part I)” – The tactics deployed by the pharmaceutical industry in their decades-long war on generic drugs reached a zenith during COVID-19, writes Dr. Pierre Kory on his Substack page.
• “‘There is no Control of the Omicron Wave’ as Heavily Pfizer-Boosted Nation Shatters Infection Record” – The Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 rages now through the eastern Mediterranean nation of Israel as the reported number of cases hit a COVID-19 pandemic record, reports TrialSite News.
• “Deprogramming Covidian mass psychosis (Part III)” – The task is therefore to detach others from mass psychosis, writes Alexander Adams in Bournbrook.
• “UAH’s Earth System Science Center Records Considered Unreliable and Harmful By Google” – Dr. Roy Spencer’s website DrRoySpencer.com has been demonetised by Google for “unreliable and harmful claims” – by which it mainly means the data he publishes on global temperature trends, one of the world’s foremost temperature data sets, according to Watts Up With That.
• “What vegan propaganda ignores” – Cutting out animal products will kill us, not save us, writes John Lewis-Stempel in UnHerd as he sets out the case against veganism.
• “Germany’s meltdown over nuclear power risks a costly winter” – Move to phase out nuclear risks leaving country reliant on Russian gas, the Telegraph reports.
• “How the West stopped having babies” – Lois Rogers in the Telegraph discovers how ‘climate anxiety’ is contributing to a generation who think it’s better not to reproduce.
• “Welcome to the end of democracy” – A rising tide of money and administrative power defines the rising autocracy, many driven by an extreme green messianic agenda dubbed the ‘Great Reset’ by the World Economic Forum, writes Joel Kotkin in the Spectator.
• “The ‘gay cake’ battle wasn’t worth fighting” – With the case now standing as a victory against compelled speech, “what a shame political discourse has come to this sad polarised place”, writes Janice Turner in the Times, “where everyone who disagrees with you is a foe, and instead of building something worthwhile you battle through a court for seven years to force Christians to bake a cake”.
• “George Osborne told: You’d better hope protesters don’t come for Elgin Marbles, after he backs ‘Colston four’” – The comments by the new British Museum Chairman are described as bizarre after he praises the jury that cleared activists who toppled the Bristol monument, reports the Telegraph.
• “Flippin ‘eck Tucker! Schools are much better thanks to you” – Toby in the Daily Mail suspects the forthcoming Grange Hill film will rubbish the education reforms that he knows from first hand experience with the West London Free School have done much to improve schooling in the U.K.
• “World leaders think the unvaccinated are ‘next door to idiots, racists and misogynists’” – Watch Neil Oliver on GB News on the demonisation of the unvaxxed.