News Round-Up

• “Covid cases plummet 27.5% to 46,025 compared to last week” – Government dashboard data show there were 46,025 new positive coronavirus tests over the last 24 hours in the U.K., down 27.5% on the 63,493 recorded last Saturday, reports the Mail.
• “Boris Johnson to ‘restore a smaller state’ as part of No 10 ‘reset’, says Steve Barclay” – Boris’s new Chief of Staff says the Government will take “a step back from people’s lives” as Prime Minister aims to appease MPs after ‘partygate’, reports the Telegraph. We’ll believe it when we see it.
• “Children as young as five could be offered ‘non-urgent’ Covid vaccines” – Covid vaccines are set to be offered to children aged five to 11 after the Government’s scientific advisers are said to have agreed jabs can be made available to youngsters on a “non-urgent basis”, reports the Mail. And the evidence base for this is…?
• “EU watchdog probes link between mRNA Covid jabs and irregular periods” – The European Medicines Agency’s drug safety committee is investigating both cases of heavy bleeding and missed periods following vaccination, reports the Mail.
• “My second brush with Covid is proof the law is an ass” – Two years into this pandemic, we don’t need the Government to carry on telling us how to behave – just leave us to it, writes Camilla Tominey in the Telegraph.
• “How Jacinda Ardern turned New Zealand into a ‘hermit kingdom’” – The island nation’s Prime Minister gambled everything on an isolationist stance – but the public’s mood is turning against her, writes David Cohen in the Telegraph.
• “Some protests are more equal than others” – Michael Curzon, S.D. Wickett and Luke Perry discuss the Canadian trucker protests, the renewed attention on Keir Starmer’s history, and Liz Truss’s Russia gaffe, in the weekly Bournbrook podcast.
• “Hong Kong has been left wrecked by Zero-Covid Beijing” – China has unabashedly shut down everything the territory once stood for, writes Ben Marlow in the Telegraph.
• “A Government-created culture of fear is now our greatest danger” – The hostile reaction to reopening has betrayed just how hard it will be to return to normality, writes Janet Daley in the Telegraph.
• “How mask slavery messes with your mind” – Many have become highly anxious as a result of Covid policies during the past 22 months and one of the most destructive aspects has been the introduction and continued use of face masks, especially for children and young people, writes psychologist Dr. Mark Stephen Nesti in TCW Defending Freedom.
• “Sanity Beyond the Sloth” – The world became an authoritarian police state and many are reluctant to have that wrested from their grip, writes Omar Khan in Uncommon Wisdom.
• “Citation impact and social media visibility of Great Barrington and John Snow signatories for COVID-19 strategy” – Study from Professor John P.A. Ioannidis in the BMJ which concludes both the Great Barrington Declaration and the John Snow Memorandum include many “stellar scientists”, but the John Snow Memorandum has far more powerful social media presence (not least because GBD authors were censored) and this may have shaped the impression that it is the dominant narrative.
• “The Propaganda Pandemic” – SPR (Swiss Doctor) offers its take on how mass psychosis, PR campaigns and psychological operations shaped the pandemic.
• “Families denied holidays amid a million NHS Covid vaccine app blunders” – Britons locked out of overseas travel as more than a million vaccinations on the health service app are not updated, the Telegraph reports, reminding us of one of many reasons that unreliable state bureaucracy should not be given this power.
• “Mask Mandates Didn’t Make Much of a Difference Anyway” – The policies clearly didn’t stop Omicron, writes Faye Flam in Bloomberg.
• “Tory grandees urge Boris Johnson to lift ‘unconservative’ ban on fracking” – Senior MPs and peers plea PM for U-turn, reports the Telegraph.
• “Fracking would have saved Britain from the energy crisis” – Our vast reserves of shale oil could have spared us from rocketing gas prices, writes Matthew Lynn in the Telegraph.
• “The EV delusion” – Huge economic and infrastructure challenges must be overcome if electric vehicles are to become anything more than toys for middle class drivers, writes Brian Clegg in the Critic.
• “Why the woke social purpose bandwagon is running out of steam” – In advocating for causes that they personally support, marketers have forgotten that it’s not about them, writes Chris Bullick on his LinkedIn page.
• “Why anti-racism should be resisted” – Parents are fighting the return of segregation, writes Asra Q. Nomani in UnHerd.
• “Civil servants ‘subvert and sabotage’ ministers by defying order to scrap unconscious bias training” – Government departments carry on regardless with controversial diversity courses, even though they were banned for being ineffective, reports the Telegraph.
• “We’re being forced to change our beliefs, says Christian GP fired over transgender views” – Dr. David Mackereth goes to the High Court to reverse a tribunal decision to dismiss him after he refused to call a trans woman a ‘she’, reports the Telegraph.
• “The academic taking on the trans activist bullies at Bristol university” – Raquel Rosario-Sanchez’s case may prove to be a landmark one in the current war on women, writes Julie Bindel in the Spectator.
• “Stonewall’s disgraceful attacks on the EHRC” – Today, the gay rights movement seems a shadow of itself, preoccupied by the intricacies of a language despotism that has emerged from the faculty lounges of minor North American universities, writes Trevor Phillips in the Spectator.
• “The deadly consequences of Defund the Police” – Brendan O’Neill in Spiked on how a woke slogan caused mayhem in America’s working-class communities.
• “The Ministry of Waste: £200m Covid vaccine factory put up for sale after failing to produce a single dose” – Professor Carl Heneghan on the news that the taxpayer-funded plant was due to produce 70 million jabs in six months, but never opened.

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