News Round-Up

• “Voters are looking beyond partygate – and that’s Boris’s problem” – Fraser Nelson in the Spectator says the economic chickens of lockdown are coming home to roost. “The recklessness with which the economy was shut down was always going to carry a price. Johnson had the chance to reopening early last year after the vaccine success, but let Whitty et al. talk him out of it. How much thought did he give to the likely economic consequences of this? Where was his cost-benefit analysis? But it fitted a trend. Tax-and-spend Labour has been replaced by borrow-tax-print-and-spend Conservatism – and we’re now seeing the results.”
• “Is Sir Keir Starmer’s Beergate gamble about to backfire?” – The Mail says pressure is mounting on the Labour leader over the ‘Beergate’ probe after the newspaper obtained details of fines already issued by Durham police over Covid breaches.
• “An independent inquiry into Covid’s origins is long overdue” – The premature dismissal of the Wuhan lab leak theory casts a shadow over the scientific community, says Matt Ridley in the Telegraph.
• “Covid Vaccine-Related Swelling Lasts Longer Than Initially Reported” – The duration of swelling in the breast after COVID-19 mRNA vaccination is longer than previously reported in vaccine clinical trials, according to new research published in the American Journal of Roentgenology as reported in SciTechDaily.
• “Saskatchewan surgeon sues Health Authority and College of Medicine after being terminated and defamed for questioning Covid vaccines for children” – The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms reports on the claim it has filed on behalf of Dr. Francis Christian, formerly a Clinical Professor of General Surgery at the University of Saskatchewan.
• “Life in Shanghai’s Lockdown” – For over two months, fear and insecurity dominated China’s most populous city, says Blake Stone-Banks in Persuasion.
• “Did Covid Vaccines Save Tens of Millions of Lives?” – The mathematical models erroneously assume the same level of mortality susceptibility across all populations, writes Roger Koops at Brownstone.
• “Covid Vaccines and Fertility” – Why is there a substantial decrease in births in Germany and Switzerland, nine months after the beginning of Covid mass vaccinations, asks the Swiss Doctor.
• “Evidence from the Netherlands strongly suggests: the current BA.5 Omicron wave is a consequence of mass vaccination” – Rintrah Radagast on Twitter points to intriguing data from the Netherlands showing the least vaccinated municipality has skipped the later Omicron waves.
• “Cheers! ‘Climate backtracking’: Germany Pushes for G-7 Reversal on Fossil Fuels in Climate Blow” – Germany is pushing for the ‘Group of Seven’ nations to walk back a commitment that would halt the financing of overseas fossil fuel projects by the end of the year, reports Watts Up With That?
• “I Got Thrown Off Etsy and PayPal for Expressing My Belief in Biological Reality” – Apparently, selling mugs and shirts that glorify violence against ‘TERFs’ is just fine. But ‘I 💜 J.K. Rowling’? That‘s hate speech, says Colin Wright in Quillette.
• “Scotland’s Hate Crime Act is an authoritarian mess” – Hate-speech laws are a threat to democratic debate, argues Jamie Gillies in Spiked.
• “Biden’s Title IX change is dangerous for kids” – OCR’s decision to redefine ‘sex’ as ‘gender identity’ is troubling for three main reasons, says Leor Sapir in UnHerd.
• “Wilfred Owen and Philip Larkin GCSE removal ‘cultural vandalism’” – Removing poems by Philip Larkin and Wilfred Owen from a GCSE course has been described as “cultural vandalism” by Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi, the BBC reports.
• “Man suing the NHS over trans surgery he regrets shares his ordeal ” – The Mail has the story of Ritchie Herron, who has waived his right to anonymity to share his ordeal after he claims the NHS failed to take his mental health crisis into account before performing irreversible surgery.
• “The police literally describe them as non-crimes but they’re still recording them and wasting time and precious resources” – Watch Toby on GB News discuss whether police should investigate jokes by comedians like Joe Lycett.

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