News Round-Up

• “Leaked NHS report shows waiting list hitting 9.2 million” – Before the pandemic hit, NHS England waiting lists were at a record high of 4.4 million. Three lockdowns later, they’ve risen to six million, and modelling for the NHS shows them rising to over nine million, writes Kate Andrews in the Spectator.
• “When Britons need GoFundMe to pay for surgery, it’s clear the NHS backlog is a political time bomb” – Waiting lists may be the pandemic’s hidden cost, but the problem has been brewing for years – and the Government has until 2024 to fix it, writes Natasha Loder in the Telegraph.
• “Are we doomed to be the sick man of Europe, Mr Javid?” – The Health Secretary needs to be much tougher with the NHS – this is literally a matter of life or death, writes Allison Pearson in the Telegraph.
• “Masks worn for Olympic ice hockey game” – Players wear face masks for an ice hockey match at the Winter Olympics after confusion over COVID-19 tests, reports BBC News.
• “The White House Now Says It Never Really Wanted Lockdowns” – We have now reached the point in the media and political narrative where the party of lockdowns realises lockdowns are increasingly unpopular and so now claims it never supported lockdowns at all, writes Ryan McMaken at the Mises Institute.
• “A Health Public Policy Nightmare” – Vaccine spike protein and mRNA persist for two months in the body and production of spike protein is higher than in severely ill COVID-19 patients, according to a new study summarised by Dr. Robert Malone on his Substack page.
• “Why Sturgeon can’t apologise for Covid mistakes” – The Scottish nationalist project is built on the precarious assumption that its leaders are never wrong about anything, writes Tom Harris in the Telegraph.
• “Half-term travel: UK families avoid Spain over jab rules” – A rule barring unvaccinated over-12s means U.K. travellers are opting for Mexico and Turkey instead, reports BBC News.
• “Long Lockdown is destroying Britain” – Widespread reluctance to leave the Covid cocoon is toxic when combined with our ‘me, me, me’ culture, writes Matthew Lynn in the Telegraph.
• “Early ‘lab-grown’ Covid virus found in sample lends weight to Wuhan theory” – Hungarian scientists claim that samples of Antarctic soil sent to a Shanghai firm in 2019 became contaminated with an unknown variant that bridges the gap between bat viruses and SARS-CoV-2 – a find that appears to show the Chinese were aware of SARS-CoV-2 earlier than the end of December, reports the Telegraph.
• “Statistics show huge disparity in ‘official’ fatalities due to Covid” – Professor Robert Dingwall, a former U.K. Government Covid adviser, said ministers should scrap daily Covid statistics from the end of the month, reports the Mail.
• “Jabbing young kids for Covid won’t ‘make much difference’ expert says” – Jabbing healthy children between five and 11 years of age “won’t make much difference” in the U.K., an expert has said, as the Government’s vaccine advisory body gets set to reveal its position soon, reports the Mail.
• “The Doctor Will See You Now – Wait, Not You” – Doctors are increasingly refusing to treat the unvaccinated and forgetting their duty of care, writes L.S. Dugdale in the Wall Street Journal.
• “How to Live With Covid” – The emergency is over; it’s time to pivot to preparedness, writes Jonathan Rauch on Persuasion.
• “Hawke-eye rules freedom ‘out’” – The expulsion of Novak Djokovic – who has won nine of the last 14 Australian Opens – was unscientific and an abuse of state power, writes Ramesh Thakur in Spectator Australia.
• “The Biden Administration says I’m a terrorist threat.” – The White House has begun an extraordinary assault on free speech in America by casting “misleading narratives” as terrorism, writes Alex Berenson on his Substack page.
• “At long, long last, Covid is yesterday’s news” – A new variant may turn up, but policymakers’ first instinct will be to tough it out and depend on immunity to deal with it, writes Andrew Lilico, optimistically, in the Telegraph.
• “Quebec Liberal MP Robillard also breaks ranks, questions Trudeau Government’s handling of pandemic, sides with Lightbound” – Another MP sticks his neck out, but has already suffered repercussions, reports the Hill Times.
• “Can Macron really lecture Putin about democracy?” – It doesn’t appear to have yet dawned on Macron and many other western leaders that the days of dispensing lessons in democracy to despots are over – in the French Republic, the land of liberty, equality and fraternity, millions of people are still unable to eat in a restaurant, go to the cinema or play for their sports team, all because they believe in bodily autonomy, writes Gavin Mortimer in the Spectator.
• “NHS England deletes misleading Covid stats video” – Earlier this month, NHS England tweeted out a video to its half million followers to promote the Covid vaccine among children that it has now deleted because it was full of inaccurate statistics, such as that 1% of infected children are hospitalised(!), writes Robert Hughes in UnHerd.
• “Why it’s time to end mandatory self-isolation” – Mass testing and forced isolation have come at enormous cost, write Professor Carl Heneghan and Professor Tom Jefferson in Spiked.
• “Sceptical environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg on 50 years of misguided climate panic” – It is irresponsible to scare young people when even the UN Climate Panel finds that if we do nothing to mitigate climate change, by the end of the century it will mean average incomes increase by 438% instead of 450%, writes Bjorn Lomborg in CityAM.
• “Energy ‘surge pricing’ to be offered to millions of households” – Three of Britain’s biggest suppliers back plans to charge more at peak times, reports the Telegraph.
• “Smart meters are a symbol of the elite drive to nudge Britain into submission” – Combined with the lunacy of Net Zero, surge pricing will merely punish people for consuming energy, writes Allister Heath in the Telegraph.
• “Adele is right to take a pop at gender neutral awards” – Ditching separate gongs for men and women isn’t a sign of progress, writes Debbie Hayton in the Spectator.
• “We’re going to arrest anyone who brings gas” – Watch how Canadians responded when faced with the threat of arrest during the ongoing Freedom Convoy truckers protest in Ottawa.

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