News Round-Up
- “Carrie Johnson pictured breaking Covid rules hugging friend at West End club” – Prime Minister’s wife “regrets the momentary lapse in judgment” after breaching social distancing guidelines in September 2020, the Telegraph reports.
- “Tory MPs back legal challenge against masks in the classroom” – The Prime Minister has been sent a Letter before Action by lawyers for UsForThem, backed by several Conservative MPs including Sir Graham Brady, Robert Halfon and Marcus Fysh, warning there is insufficient evidence to support pupils wearing masks, according to the Telegraph.
- “Looking back at lockdown: how we got it wrong” – We used scientific modelling to map the pandemic, but it seems that it painted a grimmer picture than what actually materialised, writes Sarah Knapton in the Telegraph.
- “Dismissing nursing staff during crisis is ‘self-sabotage’, says RCN” – The Royal College of Nursing, a trade union and professional association, opposes vaccine mandates.
- “Petition: Prohibit employers from requiring staff to be vaccinated against COVID-19” – Sign the petition on the Parliament website – already at 157,880 signatures and due to be debated in Parliament on January 24th – to make it illegal for any employer to mandate vaccination for its employees.
- “Boris Johnson’s Omicron victory should not be forgotten” – Amid unsurprising public rage over No. 10 parties, the decision not to impose further restrictions in December has been stunningly vindicated, writes Andrew Lilico in the Telegraph.
- “Our acceptance of a mass lock-in is more dangerous than any party” – How did this extraordinary transformation of our values occur so swiftly and with so little examination, asks Janet Daley in the Telegraph.
- “Boris’s biggest mistake was taking his allies for granted” – “One of Ronald Reagan’s favourite sayings was ‘You gotta dance with the one that brung ya,’ by which he meant a leader must deliver on his obligations to those who put him into power,” writes Patrick O’Flynn in the Spectator. “Boris Johnson has had his head turned by more fashionable habitués of the political ballroom.”
- “Tory MP: Downing Street staff partied but I couldn’t see my wife in hospital before our baby twins died” – Guy Opperman, a pensions minister, was unable to go and support his wife Flora when she fell ill while expecting their two sons, in the latest outpouring of anger at the hypocrisy of our masters in No. 10, reported in the Telegraph.
- “Michael Gove said to be on leadership ‘manoeuvres’ by courting Tory MPs at dinner” – Levelling Up Secretary reportedly spoke at event hosted by the person who managed his last campaign for No. 10, reports the Telegraph. Please God, no.
- “Austria is becoming a nightmare for the unvaccinated” – “The state is imposing itself on both the vaccinated and the unvaccinated whilst the freedoms of both are trampled underfoot. Compliance is now the only game in town,” writes Alex Story in the Spectator.
- “26 NY firehouses forced to close after firefighters refuse vaccine” – A total of 26 New York firehouses have been forced to close after firefighters refused to get vaccinated, including six in Manhattan, nine in Brooklyn, three in Queens, four in the Bronx and four in Staten Island, reports the Daily Mail.
- “‘I felt like a criminal’: Renata Voracova on being kicked out of Australia” – The Czech doubles player, whose visa was cancelled for being unvaccinated despite having an exemption, said she was made to undress during questioning and was backed by the WTA who said she ‘had done nothing wrong’, reports the Guardian.
- “Concerns regarding the efficacy and safety for BNT162b2 mRNA coronavirus disease (COVID-19) vaccine through six months” – Dr. Byram W. Bridle and colleagues on concerns regarding the Pfizer six-month trial report in NEJM, published in TrialSite News.
- “How the CDC fooled the world” – A rundown of the most egregious misinformation coming out of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) as collated by the Swiss Doctor.
- “The Netherlands is growing tired of lockdown restrictions” – The Netherlands closed all non-essential businesses on December 19th and now as civil disobedience escalates it’s clear the Dutch will no longer tolerate the harsh lockdown, writes Senay Boztas in the Spectator.
- “Covid: Vaccine vs infection myocarditis risk” – Dr. Sebastian Rushworth discusses the Oxford study in Nature Medicine that tells us the risk of myocarditis after vaccination versus Covid infection.
- “Nearly 140 Scientific Papers Detail The Minuscule Effect CO2 Has On Earth’s Temperature” – As of 2016 this list had only 50 papers on it. In less than six years the list has grown to 137 (as of today), writes Kenneth Richard in Watts Up With That.
- “Yet again, Cambridge’s ‘anti-racist’ professor is guilty of double standards” – Student Samuel Rubinstein in the Telegraph on the latest sins of Professor Priyamvada Gopal.
- “‘Nudge’ has no place in our democracy” – The Government’s use of behavioural science violates our freedom to judge and act for ourselves, writes Frank Furedi in Spiked.
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“We used scientific modelling to map the pandemic, but it seems that it painted a grimmer picture than what actually materialised“
Good grief, talk about English understatement!
Here’s some more: Anyone who backed lockdowns after all cause mortality questions from places like Belarus, Sweden and South Dakota started to emerge has questions to answer.
Should read “all cause mortality from places like Belarus”, not “all cause mortality questions”!
We used innumerate gibbering fantasies extrapolated from false assumptions by the Piltdown Man hoaxer…
“Carrie’s momentary lapse in hugging friend”.
The wider point is that it was always a complete nonsense to expect people to follow these inhuman rules. Indefinitely. And all too often without notice.
(By the way, hugging is one of the healthiest things you can do, good for body and soul).
It was never illegal, not was there an enforceable ban on hugging another person in private or public. It was how the “rules” were interepreted. I shocked people and still do, hugging others in public.
Guidance, perhaps. How much of this nonsense could actually be enforced in a court of law?
Wasn’t there one time that a “rule” change was announced late at night – so that if you’d gone to stay with someone, you’d be “illegal” when you got up in the morning?
Actually, I know some people who did go for a holiday in late 2020. The rules were changed after they’d set off for their new year’s holiday so they were allowed to stay on when they arrived. They were the only ones at the hotel. All that food wasted – just one of the many crimes of the past two years.
Christmas 2020 which bozo suddenly reduced to 24 hours visiting other households.
If you set off to stay with mum & dad by train on Xmas Eve (24/12) there would be no way of getting back until after Boxing Day (27/12) because trains shut down for two days.
Thousands were fined for lockdown breaches. No action against those in power who did so. Starting with Ferguson. We await the class action.
But nobody has been taken to Court using Covid ‘laws’ because the CPS don’t want to know.
Some victims have just paid up for a quiet life, more fool them.
Others have been persecuted indirectly by Councils using pre-existing Licensing regulations or health & safety. Those responsible need action taken against them.
“MPs back legal challenge to masks in classrooms”.
Good old Graham Brady. Wouldn’t I be surprised if he becomes PM!
“Dismissing nursing staff during crisis is self-sabotage”. (RCN).
It is a crime against humanity. No understatement this time!
Or at any time.
“‘I felt like a criminal’: Renata Voracova on being kicked out of Australia” – The Czech doubles player, whose visa was cancelled for being unvaccinated despite having an exemption, said she was made to undress during questioning”
This kind of procedural abuse, clearly done in order to make the process a punishment in itself, should be a dismissal and punishable offence on the part of any state functionary in any civilised country, though it’s to be expected in a primitive and thuggishly authoritarian state such as Australia They should be required to specifically justify every such search action before a hostile and genuinely independent tribunal.
Same applies to the increasingly commonplace abusive US-style police arrest processes. The norm for any alleged crime without a clear risk of flight or destruction of evidence should be a polite request to attend the police station. No handcuffs. No disrespectful treatment.
This is the essence of policing a supposed free citizenry by consent, with the presumption of innocence.
Too many of our police and state functionaries have watched too many American films and TV shows.
Now, let’s see. A highly successful, elite sportswoman doubling as a drug mule whilst she travels the world? Because searching for drugs is the only reason for undertaking strip-searches and x-rays of travellers forcibly-stripped at Customs. Didn’t Maradona do drugs, after all? It’s obvious, now, what Vorocova was up to. Can’t be anything to do with ritual, sexual humiliation by Australia’s border guards against something far worse than a drug-dealer – an unvaccinated person daring to set foot in Australia where 92.5% of good little citizens are fully jabbed. The unjabbed who haven’t got with the program must be shamed and coerced into seeing the light and that means not allowing high profile international sports stars who could set an alternative unjabbed example to be treated as normal people. Renata Voracova, despite doing nothing wrong according to ‘the rules’ (she obtained a legitimate medical exemption to the vaxx because of an actual Covid infection that precluded getting vaxxed, on medical grounds (twice signed off by panels of doctors from Tennis Australia and from the Victorian government) within the appropriate timeframe for the Australian Open, and despite her professions of loyalty to the regime (she says she will get her second jab as soon as she… Read more »
Police forcibly gang wrestling innocuous members of the public to the ground was commonplace in the UK during lockdown one.
As you say, using the arrest process itself as a form of punishment. For all those that featured on the news and YouTube there will be many many more that did not.
“Gove on leadership manoeuvres”.
Can’t the Tories get a sensible leader just for once?
Pretty much all Blairites at the top levels.
What would actually have to happen for Brady, McVey, Bone, Redwood etc. to have a chance?
There would have to be a real and terminal collapse of the panicker narrative, with a full discrediting both in the wider population and within the “Conservative” Party of all those associated with it, to sweep away the established old guard and force them to look for people with no cabinet responsibility for it and at least some credibility as opponents.
From our perspective that kind of collapse and utter discrediting is what has happened, but our perspective is not the one that matters in this.
“26 NY firehouses forced to close”.
Beijing Bidden fiddles while New York burns…
“Exempt Renata Voracova kicked out of Oz, made to undress”.
So they’re deviants as well as nut jobs. Never forget.
“Our acceptance of a mass lock-in is more dangerous than any party” – How did this extraordinary transformation of our values occur so swiftly and with so little examination, asks Janet Daley in the Telegraph. I couldn’t remember what Janet Daley’s attitudes were to covid early on (I think I have a tendency to confuse her with Melanie Phillips), so I did a quick search. Looks like she’s been pretty solid. But one result that came up was this piece from Psychology Today, March 19th 2020 – right when our government and elites were being browbeaten into dropping the broadly sensible approach to covid that they originally adopted, by infantile and hysterical accusations of it being uncaring, rightwing, putting money ahead of lives, etc. It’s a useful reminder of what was going on at the time, from one of the (many) original panickers: A Health Crisis and Herd Immunity Lessons from Britain’s disastrous coronavirus response. “Until earlier this week, when Boris Johnson’s administration in the UK made an abrupt U-turn on its approach to managing COVID-19, Britain was an outlier among OECD countries in rejecting efforts to contain and suppress the virus. The Johnson administration ruled out mass testing, waived restrictions and… Read more »
Dismissing nursing staff during crisis is ‘self-sabotage’
I’ll make a bold prediction now: the most popular phrase on the internet for 2022 will be
Who would have guessed?
Which is more wicked a d evil: to hold a party, or to keep a husband away from his wife when their baby twins die?
Ferguson and co. state that they were asked to model the worst case scenario. Rather then a simulation of reality. Hence lockdown. How many deaths on his conscience (none, I suspect. Man’s a sociopath) as a result of the resultant lockdown?
ps. At least they are consistent with the climate modellers. Even Gavin Schmidt, who has just left Giss after some years, stated publicly that they knew the models run too hot.
Yet we still base “policy” on models we know are tuned to produce junk.
The Education secretary with conservative party members in Leicester on Saturday – not a mask in sight, but if it were in a secondary school all the children would be wearing them on his command.
Is it just me, or do others think that Zahawi look like Ming the Merciless from the 1980’s (?) Flash Gordon film? Sorry to be trivial, but that’s what I always think when I see him.
Anybody else who cannot access ‘today’s update’. sits there trying to load and nothing appears.
Same for me
Me too. I get “there has been a critical error” notice after a while.
Yep nothing, after a while a critical error message appears hope they’ve not done away with it as its by far the most up to date comments and best source of information.
Amino Acid fingerprints from Moderna Patents: The chance of SARS COV-2 being natural zoonosis = 4 Unvigintillion to One (that’s a 4 with 66 zeros to 1)
https://twitter.com/EthicalSkeptic/status/1482430893478322179/photo/1
Thanks for teaching me a new word. Unvigintillion. I was convinced you must have made up a nonsense word until I looked it up. Great word.
The really interesting one is Austria.
It feels as if the government is playing a game of chicken with the unjabbed population and is willing to drive the car over the cliff and plunge headlong into full on totalitarianism before giving in.
This, just as the world wakes up to the fact that jabs are completely ineffective and that the latest version of the coronavirus (if that is what is actually what is making so many people have colds) is so mild it’s less dangerous than a flu.
It really is a rerun of the 1930s but without the military action. Just the ideological battle between totalitarian, technocratic rule and a free, liberal way of life.
The similarities are astonishing. Germany, Austria and Italy leading the way. The French, who mostly collaborated back then, once again with the totalitarians. And the US and UK relative beacons of sanity.
A few changes. Spain seems to be more sensible this time around. As does Japan. On the other hand, we’ve lost the Anglo colonies (Australia, New Zealand and Canada). And of course, China is the new Japan.
Scary stuff.
Lost in the midst of all this is the fact that the government are leaking to the media that face masks for shops and public transport are to STAY – how on earth can this possibly be anything other than a victory for lockdowners who will come out of Omicron having made permanent one of their cherished policies?
The idea that our case is winning is academic. Boris is still not listening and only timidly allowing Javid to scrap classroom masks – and only then just before the court case will certainly force him to anyway.
What’s happened to the resistance?
Exactly. That phrase should and must read ‘there is insufficient evidence to support people wearing masks’ not just pupils.
It is irrelevant that Carrie Antoinette hugged her friend, it’s only relevant her husband outlawed it, the great fat communist fraud.
Me: I’d rather forget the week just gone.
Also me: This week ought never be forgotten.
https://gregoryno6.wordpress.com/2022/01/16/a-week-of-blunder-in-lockdownunder/
“Boris Johnson’s Omicron victory should not be forgotten”
No, it should not be misjudged. Partygate stopped him implementing the demands of the corrupt scientists.
The ‘victory’ was for the rest of us.
Just look at the corrupt Van Tam jumping ship. The BBC et al, are working their socks off trying to hold on to the narrative while reality barges it’s way back into the psych of its viewers.
Even the lockdown sceptics are cowardly it seems, wanting to keep a clown dictator in fear of what may replace him.
That’s not the way to live people, don’t accept the lesser of two evils, just say no to evil!
All these conservative pundits who bleat about the poor quality of MPs, need to step forward & fight for what they believe in, stand for election, let’s see the end of career politicians.
““regrets the momentary lapse in judgment”: does that mean that she’s confident that there are no photos of her continuing to breach the regulations?
“how we got it wrong”: who’s this “we” then? Broadly speaking I got it right, which is pretty good going for someone who knew bugger all about virology when this began.