News Round-Up

• “England’s cancer backlog ‘could take more than five years to clear’” – MacMillan estimates 32,000 fewer patients than expected have started their first treatment since the start of the pandemic in England, the Mail reports.
• “Going to school ‘non-negotiable’, warns Nadhim Zahawi in crackdown on truants” – Teachers will be ordered to produce plans for tackling absenteeism now classes are operating normally after lockdowns, the Telegraph reports.
• “‘Work is no longer a place’: Civil servants revolt against back-to-office directive” – Hundreds of senior and middle-ranking mandarins across Government departments back motions to continue flexible working, according to the Telegraph.
• “The hidden dissent inside Zero Covid China” – Shanghai has mounted an unlikely resistance to Beijing’s diktats, says Leng Ping in UnHerd.
• “Britain is stuck in a priggish world of Covid Puritanism” – Starmer had a chance to reflect on the lunacy of the lockdown rules; instead he continued to moralise, writes Madeline Grant in the Telegraph.
• “Lockdown backlog has left thousands of children without dental care” – At every step of the lockdown journey, the nation’s children have seen their lives stagnate, their futures decimated and their health both physically and mentally plummet, writes Luke Perry in Bournbrook.
• “NHS Covid test scam costing victims thousands of pounds” – One couple lost £20,000 when a fraudster phished details from a fake website, the Telegraph reports.
• “Covid ‘not more likely to cause depression than other infections’” – Oxford University researchers found the risks between developing psychiatric disorders in the long-term were ‘similar’ between people with Covid and other severe acute respiratory illnesses, the Mail reports.
• “Broadway star Patti LuPone lays into crowd member for not wearing mask” – The two-time Tony award winner berated the individual in the audience who supposedly did not have her mask pulled all the way over her nose during an after show talkback, the Mail reports – in the latest evidence that Covid rules are a petty bully’s delight.
• “Democrats Silent as Republicans Rip Into Secret Royalty Checks to Fauci, Hundreds of NIH Scientists” – A non-profit Government watchdog has estimated that Anthony Fauci, former NIH director Francis Collins and hundreds of NIH scientists got as much as $350 million in undisclosed royalty payments from pharmaceutical and other private firms between 2010 and 2020, according to the Epoch Times.
• “The Lockdown Sceptics at the WHO” – Does Sweden have the lowest excess mortality in Europe? Does Germany have a higher excess mortality than Britain? Not really, but apparently even the WHO seems to think so, says the Swiss Doctor.
• “Hypervaccinating gigamasker Bill Gates tests positive for SARS-2” – Strange how this keeps happening, says Eugyppius.
• “Shift in COVID-19 Vaccine Market from Volume to Targeted Boosts” – With a confluence of forces, from COVID-19 vaccine gluts to increasing numbers of producers and leeriness of waning effectiveness, the market drivers, heavily driven by government, give way to an unfolding new reality, says TrialSite News.
• “Scientists question the point of swabs up everyone’s nose: ‘We might have overdone it” – The claim was that mass testing would stop the pandemic in its tracks, and it hasn’t, write Nikolaj Skydsgaard and Jennifer Rigby in the National Post.
• “Students deserve a full, normal uni experience, with pre-Covid levels of face-to-face teaching” – Read the report from UsforThem on the lamentable normalisation of online lectures.
• “BlackRock is right to abandon eco-activism” – Profit, not posturing, is what matters to investors, says Ross Clark in the Spectator.
• “Rafael Nadal says it is his ‘job’ to defend Russians banned from Wimbledon” – Rafael Nadal proclaimed it was his “job” to defend banned Russian and Belarusian players after the ATP Player Council called for Wimbledon to be stripped of ranking points, the Telegraph reports.
• “Fears for historic street names as communities can vote to change them” – The Mail reports that the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill, which was in the Queen’s Speech, will enshrine a name change vote in law – but will local activists scrape together enough support to change them anyway?
• “This new bill is a golden invitation to activists who want to censor content online” – Watch Toby on Triggernometry on the legion problems with the Online Safety Bill.

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