News Round-Up

• “Pandemic death toll three times higher than official figures suggest” – Two years after the WHO first called COVID-19 a ‘pandemic’, a new study suggests 18 million people have died – but it’s based on dubious modelling and funded by Bill Gates.
• “Unrepentant Met Police considers appeal after High Court judges say they breached Sarah Everard vigil organisers’ human rights” – The Metropolitan Police breached the rights of organisers of a vigil for Sarah Everard with its handling of the planned event during Covid restrictions, High Court judges have ruled, the Mail reports.
• “NHS cancer performance drops to worst ever level for eight targets” – Thousands of suspected and confirmed cancer patients in England are being left behind with the NHS recording its worst ever performance in eight of its nine diagnosis and treatment targets, the Mail reports.
• “NHS urged to get on with the rollout of fourth jabs for the elderly” – No.10’s vaccine advisory panel recommended over-75s, care home residents and patients with weakened immune system should be given top-up shots around six months after their original booster, the Mail reports.
• “How to measure vaccine harms” – The flawed reporting system doesn’t measure the scale of the problem, says HART.
• “WHO says it advised Ukraine to destroy pathogens in health labs to prevent disease spread” – The World Health Organisation advised Ukraine to destroy high-threat pathogens housed in the country’s public health laboratories to prevent “any potential spills” that would spread disease among the population, the agency told Reuters on Thursday. What exactly are these labs doing and who is funding it?
• “Covid is rising again. Should we be worried?” – As immunity drops in local areas (those hit by new variants first) cases will rise until immunity is regained, but there’s no need to panic, says Michael Simmons in the Spectator.
• “How Fact-Finding Fauci Led To My Cancellation At Forbes” – The inside story of how Adam Andrzejewski was dropped by Forbes after he published investigations of Fauci’s income, net worth, investments, royalties, and more.
• “Pfizer to Ask U.S. Regulators to Authorise Second Booster Due to Waning Effectiveness: CEO” – Pfizer plans to ask U.S. regulators to grant emergency use authorisation for a second booster of its COVID-19 vaccine, according to the Epoch Times.
• “Quarter of rise in ‘Covid’ beds last week were primarily for virus” – Just 136 of the nearly 600 extra coronavirus patients in English hospitals over the last week were primarily there for the virus, according to analysis by MailOnline.
• “Hong Kong pays a heavy price for Zero Covid approach” – Hong Kong is currently experiencing the highest Covid death rate, per capita, of anywhere in the world, at any time during the pandemic. Until Christmas, it had seen just over 200 deaths caused by Covid; the figure now stands at just shy of 3,500 and it’s going up fast, writes Philip Cowley in UnHerd.
• “It’s time to drop the Net Zero agenda” – For years British energy policy has been an exercise in wishful thinking. We’ve been living in a fantasy world in which Britain can somehow achieve ‘Net Zero’ by 2050 without paying any serious economic price, and with no one significantly poorer as a result, says the Spectator in this leading article.
• “Ukraine and the Changing Normative Architecture of World Order” – Ramesh Thakur in Global Policy argues that we’re experiencing an international order in transition, with terrible consequences for Ukraine, few options for NATO and big wins for China.
• “This Is How Wars End” – Remember the Tamil Tigers, says D.V. Williamson on his Substack page.
• “Potato and pasta prices set to rise by up to 50% say farmers” – Prices of basic food items in the U.K. could soar by as much as 50% as a result of the conflict in Ukraine, the Mail reports.
• “EU says it needs five years to wean itself off Russian energy” – The EU has said it needs five years to wean the bloc off Russian gas, oil and coal as the country’s invasion of Ukraine sparks chaos in energy markets, the Telegraph reports.
• “Three ways the Ukraine war could crash the financial system” – It is quite conceivable that things will get worse than they already are, warns Matthew Lynn in the Telegraph.
• “The problem with the U.K.’s transgender clinic” – Life-changing and sometimes irreversible medical treatment is being administered to a growing number of females, without evidence for how that treatment will affect females but mainly on the basis of limited evidence about how such treatments affect males – and the people administering that treatment don’t even know why so many of their patients are female, writes James Kirkup in the Spectator.
• “Why is the EU attacking Poland and Hungary in a crisis?” – If war doesn’t give Brussels some perspective, then what can, asks Andrew Tettenborn in the Spectator.

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