News Round-Up

• “Alize Cornet claims players hid their Covid symptoms at French Open” – After a number of top players were forced to withdraw from Wimbledon after receiving positive tests, the 32-year-old said at the French Open they all just kept quiet, reports the Mail.
• “Girl, 14, killed herself after being ‘denied face-to-face appointments’ during lockdown” – A senior coroner has warned “we are failing young people” and ruled the NHS is guilty of neglect following the teenager’s suicide, reports the Telegraph.
• “Striking GPs need a reality check” – General practice is broken – why didn’t delegates at the BMA’s Annual Representative meeting discuss methods for its resuscitation rather than details of their new contract, asks J. Meirion Thomas in the Spectator.
• “Sajid Javid’s digital NHS revolution could make it harder ‘for millions’ to see a doctor in person, critics warn amid plan to do video consults from mobile app” – The Health Secretary revealed the current NHS App will be upgraded to allow video consultations with GPs and other medics in England by March 2024, reports the Mail.
• “How lockdown failed the young” – Watch Liz Cole and Molly Kingsley from UsForThem talk to Spiked‘s Brendan O’Neill about how society abandoned children during the pandemic.
• “If the NHS wasn’t so busy pushing boosters, children might get the jabs they actually need” – Wasting time and money convincing young people to have a vaccine cannot possibly be justified when they’re blessed with an immune system, says Allison Pearson in the Telegraph.
• “Sesame Street character Elmo is given COVID-19 vaccine shot in PSA urging parents to have children vaccinated” – The Mail reports that in the public service announcement, Elmo was seen speaking with his father Louie about receiving the shot, saying, “Yeah, there was a little pinch. But it was OK!”
• “‘Pandemic babies’ with no immunity are ending up in intensive care across Australia with respiratory illnesses” – Doctors have revealed babies born during the COVID-19 pandemic are becoming seriously ill after contracting viruses they haven’t encountered before, reports the Mail.
• “Majority of COVID-19 Deaths Among Australia NSW Residents Triple & Quadruple Vaxxed” – Data for the week ending June 18th show that 95% of New South Wales residents who died with COVID-19 were vaccinated, set against 95% of the adult population who are vaccinated. Even taking into account the age difference between vaccinated and unvaccinated groups, that hardly bespeaks high vaccine efficacy, says TrialSite News.
• “SARS-2 Didn’t Care About DDR Borders Until the Vaccines” – Eugyppius writes that since the vaccine rollout, and only since then, infection rates in East and West Germany have diverged, which he attributes to the lower vaccine take-up in the former German Democratic Republic.
• “Data suppression and adulteration or just simple incompetence?” – El Gato Malo is scathing about a “data series of unfortunate events”.
• “First reported case of a person getting Covid from a cat” – Report in Nature that scientists in Thailand have established that a tabby passed SARS-CoV-2 to a veterinary surgeon, though such cases of cat-to-human transmission are “probably rare”.
• “Life through the lens of the vaccine-injured” – Caroline Pover in TCW Defending Freedom says the lack of compassion she has seen during the past fourteen months, as she looks at the world through the lens of a vaccine-injured person, has greatly disturbed her.
• “Europe’s new Iron Curtain: The defences designed to keep Putin out as Biden announces a new permanent base in Poland – while Sweden and Finland are formally invited into alliance and Russia blasts ‘destabilising’ move” – The U.S. will build its first permanent military base in Poland while deploying thousands more troops to Romania and the Baltics, while NATO is also boosting troop numbers on its eastern flank, the Mail reports.
• “Electricity Rationing: The Shameful Hallmark of Britain’s Green Energy Failure” – Energy rationing would not have happened if Britain maintained coal capacity, developed shale gas reserves and focused on nuclear power, says Eric Worrall in Watts Up With That?
• “Facebook ‘Supreme Court’ Hit With More Than 1 Million Censorship Appeals” – The Facebook Oversight Board, colloquially known as the ‘Facebook Supreme Court’, received more than a million appeals from Facebook and Instagram users hoping to overturn censorship by the company, according to the Board’s first annual report, reports Breitbart News.
• “LGBTQIA+ – this gay man didn’t order this bowl of alphabet soup” – Gay men should feel free to depart this giant, unrecognisable, collective-identity vehicle, says Deroy Murdock in the New York Post.
• “Ben & Jerry’s forced to end Israel boycott” – The Telegraph reports that the company’s parent company Unilever says “antisemitism has no place in society”. About time.
• “Watchdog goes woke: Government committee uses the term ‘OmbudsPERSON’” – It is thought to be the first time the woke substitute for the word ‘ombudsman’ has been used for official parliamentary business, reports the Mail.
• “Now midwives are told sex is ‘assigned’ at birth” – Report in the Mail that midwives have hit back at a statement on “inclusivity” by their royal college that referenced sex being “assigned” to babies at birth, with some midwives saying the idea of assigning sex is “nonsense”.
• “Cornell library removes Gettysburg Address, Lincoln bust” – Someone complained, and it was gone, reports the College Fix.
• “‘Decolonisation’ is now a dangerous farce” – Cambridge is making itself an object of ridicule for taking this disturbing trend to new extremes, writes Robert Tombs in the Telegraph.
• “Ukraine war is not an example of ‘toxic masculinity’” – History suggests that female rulers are far more likely to start wars than their male counterparts, writes Sam Ashworth-Hayes in the Critic.
• “Boris needs to man up” –  Frank Furedi in Spiked says toxic masculinity is an insidious, politically motivated term that delegitimises male identity by associating manliness with destructive characteristics such as racism, homophobia, hatred of women and violent aggression.
• “Joe Biden: the world’s most dangerous trans activist” – The U.S. president is using the full force of the state to promote divisive and damaging ideology, says Sean Collins in Spiked.
• “How Schools Sexualise Your Children” – Watch the new video from Reclaim The Media, in which Laurence Fox “exposes the worrying degree to which politicised, divisive ideologies – including gender theory, critical race theory, queer theory and ‘transgender toolkits’ – are being taught to children through Personal, Social, Health and Economic education (PSHE)”.

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