News Round-Up

• “The public health emergency is over” – The only justification for the state to impose constraints on the lives of the populace is if the country faces an emergency, yet this has not existed for some time, says the Telegraph in its leading article.
• “Lateral flow tests being rationed already ahead of Boris Johnson’s ‘living with Covid’ announcement” – The public could previously order one pack of seven tests every 24 hours through the Government website but this is now being limited, reports the Telegraph.
• “Bosses are about to become the next Covid rule makers” – The shift in responsibility from the Government to individuals will not be easy in workplaces given how the virus has divided Britain, writes Lucy Burton in the Telegraph.
• “Never again must we repeat the errors of the Covid lockdowns” – We have developed unrealistic expectations of control over nature, and seem to have lost our sense of risk, writes former SAGE member Professor Robert Dingwall in the Telegraph.
• “Catching Covid was fine – isolation was the really scary part” – It is a bitter irony that, in a bid to preserve physical health, we have destroyed so many people’s mental health, writes Bryony Gordon in the Telegraph.
• “Ignore the doomerists – we need to learn to live with Covid” – Until we can accept that we are not in a similar kind of situation to two years ago, then we will not be able to move on, writes Amy Jones in UnHerd.
• “Britain’s Covid cases fall to lowest level since November in 8% drop” – Boris Johnson has been given the confidence to ease Covid measures by the continuing drop in cases, hospitalisations and deaths, reports the Mail.
• “Canadian police appear to end protesters’ siege of Ottawa” – Hundreds of police in riot gear swept through Canada’s capital Saturday, retaking control of the streets around the Parliament buildings and appearing to end the siege of Ottawa after three weeks of protests, reports the Associated Press.
• “Iron fist for the truckers, velvet glove for eco-terrorists” – A real terrorist outrage in Canada has gone largely unnoticed, overshadowed by the persecution of the truckers’ Freedom Convoy, writes Janice Davis in TCW Defending Freedom.
• “Why is the Left silent on Trudeau’s crackdown?” – Civil liberties have been sacrificed to the culture war, says Heydon Prowse in Spiked.
• “The tyranny of high-status opinion” – How the woke Left wrote the script for the Canadian state’s tyrannical assault on the protesting truckers, according to Brendan O’Neill in Spiked.
• “Where is the liberal outrage at Trudeau’s monstrously illiberal behaviour?” – Imagine the uproar if, back in 2020, President Trump had frozen bank accounts belonging to key figures in the Black Lives Matter movement, writes Joanna Williams in the Telegraph.
• “End of the green pass, smart working and reopening” – Italy is set to announce in the next few days its ‘road map’ back to normality – though the vaccine mandate is not expected to be lifted until mid-June at the earliest, reports Corriere Della Serra.
• “The Disinformation Campaign Against Ivermectin – JAMA’s ‘Diversion’” – Big Pharma influences high-impact journals to selectively publish (purportedly) negative studies about ivermectin while outright rejecting positive studies from publication, writes Pierre Kory.
• “How rare are vaccine side effects? Not very rare at all.” – The CDC and Wall Street Journal both say serious side effects from the Covid vaccines are extremely rare, but now we have proof from the Israeli Government that this is untrue, writes Steve Kirsch.
• “Is there a cure for the NHS?” – At one end of the NHS employment spectrum the number of people earning six figure salaries increases while, at the other end, they bleat about not having enough nurses to run the service – if ever a ship was holed below the water line but still building cabins, it is the NHS, writes Roger Watson in the New Conservative.
• “Hundreds of unvaccinated BHP workers to be sacked” – Mining giant BHP is set to lose between 2% and 3% of its workforce after instituting a Covid vaccine mandate for all staff in its Australian operations, reports the Mail.
• “New Zealand’s lockdown fairytale is over” – After its Zero Covid failure, a storm is brewing in a country with fewer ICU beds per head than India and a health system that remains perpetually stretched to its limits amidst warnings that Omicron will tip it over the edge, writes Tom Chodor in UnHerd.
• “Joe Rogan Experience #1780 – Maajid Nawaz” – The comedian and popular podcaster interviews Maajid Nawaz, a former Islamist turned counter-extremism activist, author of multiple books, public speaker, and noted lockdown sceptic.
• “MSH3 Homology and Potential Recombination Link to SARS-CoV-2 Furin Cleavage Site” – Paper in Frontiers in Virology on the intriguing discovery that a 19 nucleotide portion of the SARS-CoV-2 genome encompassing the critical furin cleavage site is a 100% match to an mRNA sequence called MSH3 that was patented by Moderna in 2016. One ‘innocent’ explanation is offered here.
• “Fully-vaccinated Britons to be allowed into Europe without pre-departure tests” – Relief for most holidaymakers planning Easter holidays as the European Council is set to unveil simpler Covid travel guidelines, according to the Telegraph – but what about the unvaccinated?
• “Matt Le Tissier – football’s voice of reason over the jab” – Kathy Gyngell in TCW Defending Freedom highlights Matt Le Tissier’s questioning of the vaccine: “The last year, it’s just been unbelievable how many people not just footballers, sports people in general – we have had tennis players, we’ve had cricketers, basketball players – just how many are keeling over and at some point surely you have to say, this isn’t right – this needs to be investigated.”
• “Logan Mwangi ‘beaten to death by his mother, stepfather and boy’” – Logan’s mother, Angharad Williamson, 30, her partner, John Cole, 39, and a 14-year-old boy are charged with killing five year-old Logan Mwangi in July 2021 while he was ‘hidden away’ after testing positive for coronavirus, reports the Mail.
• “NOAA and NASA’s Recent Sea Level Rise Claims Are All Wet – The Data Doesn’t Support It” – When you examine historical sea level data and analyse the trends, the claim that sea level along U.S. coastlines will rise between 10 to 12 inches on average above today’s levels by 2050 is not supported by evidence, writes Anthony Watts in Watts Up With That?
• “‘Legal but harmful’: making social media the arbiter of gospel truth” – The Online Safety Bill threatens websites with huge fines if they fail to remove user-generated content that indirectly has a “significant adverse physical or psychological impact on an adult of ordinary sensibilities” – but there will be no fine for over-zealous censorship, writes Archbishop Cranmer.
• “Why I stopped being a good girl” – Women can no longer afford to sit out the gender wars, argues Hadley Freeman in UnHerd.
• “Will Nadhim Zahawi win his fight against ‘the Blob’?” – The Education Secretary must persuade voters of the need to preserve U.K. education as an empirical exercise that teaches pupils to think for themselves rather than absorbing oven-ready ideology, writes Andrew Tettenborn in the Spectator.
• “London mayor Sadiq Khan has said masks will no longer be compulsory to wear on London transport following today’s announcement that all Covid restrictions will be scrapped” – talkRADIO tweets the good news for Londoners.

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