News Round-Up

• “Dentists say NHS has no idea how many dental staff need to get jabbed to avoid sack” – Even modest numbers of dental teams that can’t work would have a dramatic effect, reports the i.
• “Masking children is illogical and irrational” – By restricting the activities of healthy young people we could be prolonging the Covid nightmare, writes Professor Sunetra Gupta in the Telegraph.
• “Has the Great Barrington Declaration been vindicated?” – Lockdowns failed to serve the collective good, argue Thomas Fazi and Toby Green in UnHerd.
• “Omicron Makes Biden’s Vaccine Mandates Obsolete” – There is no evidence so far that vaccines are reducing infections from the fast-spreading variant, write Nobel-prize winning virologist Luc Montagnier and Law Professor Jed Rubenfeld in the Wall Street Journal.
• “Repeat after me: Covid doesn’t spread on surfaces” – It’s more than two years since the virus started spreading and a year since Nature pointed out “COVID-19 rarely spreads through surfaces” and we still think we have to keep surfaces sterile, writes Tom Chivers in UnHerd.
• “Macron’s anti-vaxxer bashing will backfire in France’s ‘lost territories’” – Macron seems to have forgotten he is ruling a divided country and his policies are only making things worse, writes Gavin Mortimer in the Spectator.
• “The epidemic of the vaccinated” – Neville Hodgkinson in TCW on the shocking international data showing infection rates higher in the vaccinated than the unvaccinated.
• “Sweden to implement more Covid measures as Omicron squeezes healthcare” – Sweden, once a famed holdout against extreme public health intervention, fails to learn from the U.K. and South Africa’s experience with Omicron and re-introduces a Rule of 8, curfews and large gathering limits, Reuters reports.
• “Separation of science and state” – Peter Yim on his Substack page sees a parallel with religion that should be applied to the relationship between government and scientists.
• “Novak Djokovic affair exposes Australia’s Covid policy as hysterical and paranoid” – Djokovic did everything by the rules, while the Australian Government’s attempt to cancel his visa smacks of playing to the crowd, writes Mark Higgie, Australia’s former ambassador to the EU, in the Telegraph.
• “Italy tightens Super Green Pass rules on 10th January” – Italy’s tightened vaccine passport came into force yesterday, banning the unvaccinated from hotels, ski lifts, restaurants, public transport, domestic flights, museums, archaeological sites, gyms, swimming pools, wedding receptions, bingo halls, festivals and theme parks, among other things, with no negative test accepted, reports Wanted in Rome.
• “COVID-19: ‘End in sight’ but there will be more ‘bumps’ for next three months – WHO envoy” – It sounds hopeful, but lockdown fanaticism persists, as Dr David Nabarro says even if coronavirus does become endemic the U.K. should still be prepared for variant surges like Omicron to occur and must be able to react quickly to contain them if possible, reports Sky News. But why?
• “Omicron has humiliated Britain’s dismal lockdown establishment” – But they retain a firm grip on the national debate, making it impossible for the U.K. to live with Covid, writes Sherelle Jacobs in the Telegraph.
• “Cabinet anger over misleading Covid isolation guidance” – Reduction to five-day policy expected after health bosses admit their advice was not accurate as the UKHSA wrongly claimed that America’s five-day self-isolation period began with the positive test rather then symptom onset, the Telegraph reports.
• “From porn to pepper spray: How Novak Djokovic’s case in Australia descended into chaos” – Tennis became a gripping soap opera being watched all over the world, as star was released from detention centre in a day of drama, writes Oliver Brown in the Telegraph.
• “We must have as many babies as possible” – The West is moving towards under-population and the climate doom-mongers are wrong: we need to breed to have a future, argues Tim Stanley in the Telegraph.
• “Pope Francis warns against ‘cancel culture’ taking root in society” – Pope against the woke? The pontiff uses the English anti-woke phrase during a speech to diplomats in Italian warning against historical revisionism, the Telegraph reports.
• “The unreported truth about teenage murders” – The victims of London’s grim 2021 record have underlying commonalities that are going unremarked, writes Vlod Barchuk on TCW.
• “Labour’s figures sound alarming, but race and prosperity in Britain is far from black and white” – Ethnic disparities in the U.K. are complex and derive from a multiplicity of causes that Labour’s simplistic ‘structural racism’ framework fails to capture or address, argues Rakib Ehsan in CapX.
• “Comet of Deliverance” – A “socio-spiritual review” of climate propaganda flic Don’t Look Up by Charles Eisenstein on his Substack page.
• “Here’s UN Climate Change ambassador Leonardo DiCaprio aboard a 315ft, £110 million superyacht, complete with a helipad and six decks that spew out as much as your average car does in a year by sailing as little as 7 miles. Remember that as you watch his climate catastrophe movie” – Mischievous tweet from Darren Grimes.