News Round-Up

• “Dr. Fauci and the Covid Rule of Experts” – Humdinger of a piece by the Wall St Journal Editorial Board – the voice of common sense in American public policy
• “Lockdown hysteria led to an NHS cancer catastrophe – and the Government is in denial” – “Remember when, every night, the news used to update the total of Covid deaths?” asks Allison Pearson in the Telegraph. “I’d like to see the BBC and ITV start reporting the daily toll of lives lost because cancers (and heart disease) were found too late”
• “We’re at pandemic levels of death. Why is no one talking about it?” – “Excess deaths have averaged 1,000 a week for 15 weeks of this year,” writes Michael Simmons in the Spectator. “Yet unlike Covid deaths, they are met with silence”  
• “The balance of forces at the fag-end of the Covid-era: update from Australia” – Down under, “the Fat Lady in the comic Covid opera is still singing” Phil Shannon tells L*** Lockdown Sceptics. But thankfully only “on half-lung power”
• “Australia’s Lockdown and Vaccine Narrative Has Fallen Apart” – “The biggest mistake,” writes Ramesh Thakur for the Brownstone Institute, was to hand over control to “chief health officers who tend to be bureaucrats more than leading scientists”
• “Unvaccinated Queensland teachers slapped with pay reduction” – Around 900 Queensland teachers, teacher aides, administration staff, cleaners and schools officers will have their pay docked on account of their failure to take a Covid jab, 7News reports
• “The NHS isn’t buying a Covid wonder drug – and its excuse makes no sense” – The Telegraph’s Suzanne Moore takes issue with the NHS’s decision not to purchase the drug Evusheld, despite its potential to protect vulnerable people from Covid
• “A belated vindication for school re-openers” – Over in Reason Mary Katherine Ham reviews The Stolen Year, a book chronicling the horrors wrought by keeping American kids away from school for more than a year
• “We need a robust ethical framework to curb the state’s use of behavioural science” –Psychologist Gary Sidley highlights the ethical implications of the Government’s use of ‘nudges’ to manipulate the population into abiding by the lockdown restrictions
• “Farewell to St. Anthony Fauci” – “Maybe Fauci was just a lot like Donald Trump or Joe Biden,” suggests Freddy Gray in Spectator World. “Old, faltering, and heavily influenced by the people around him”
• “Journalists who hate journalists (and journalism)” – Alex Berenson has found evidence that it was not only the Government that wanted Twitter to throw him off the platform, but his fellow journos as well
• “Twitter Restores Account of U.K. Doctor Sceptical of COVID-19 Vaccines After Permanently Suspending It” – Dr. Clare Craig’s Twitter account has been restored, the Epoch Times reports, just hours after it was permanently suspended
• “You are now allowed to claim masks don’t work” – Tim Pool reports that YouTube has updated its policies and no longer bans claims that masks do not play a role in preventing the spread of Covid
• “You Can Be Sure That Net Zero Carbon Emissions From Electricity Generation Will Never Be Achieved. Here’s Why” – “If you have a chance to make a bet, you’ll be extremely safe betting against Net Zero generation of electricity any time during your life,” says Francis Menton in the Manhattan Contrarian
• “Biden’s War On Natural Gas Will Kill” – Michael Shellenberger points out that President Biden could save lives by simply expanding rather than supressing natural gas production
• “The Dream of Nuclear-free, Net-Zero Nirvana” – D. V. Williamson, the Free-Range Economist, charts the course of “a predicted and predictable nightmare” that is unfolding in Central Europe as the cold season approaches
• “Hungary’s Michael Fish moment as top forecaster fired for ruining ‘Europe’s biggest fireworks show’” – A firework display celebrating a Hungarian national holiday was postponed after forecasters warned of an extreme storm, the Telegraph reports. The storm didn’t happen and the forecasters have been sacked
• “Salman Rushdie: The Hour is Late” – “The cowardice of the West in the defence of free speech is not unexpected,” writes Frank Haviland in the New Conservative. “But the pace at which capitulation has become fashionable is truly frightening”
• “Will Truss or Sunak really defeat the woke blob?” – “Conservative rhetoric requires conservative action,” says Henry Hill in UnHerd, as he challenges the next PM to show he or she is serious about ending woke recruitment practices in the armed forces
• “The police must show they care more about tackling crime than being woke” – Writing for CapX, Luke Tryl discusses the results of a poll which found that the public is much more likely to agree than disagree that “the police are more interested in being woke than solving crimes”
• “Exam boards to record GCSE and A-level results of transgender pupils” – After consulting with Stonewall and others, exam chiefs have drawn up plans to record the GCSE and A-level results of trans pupils, MailOnline reports
• “Create U.K. public holiday to remember horrors of slave trade, says race expert” – “If you think about just how important slavery was to Britain and how horrific it was, it should be a national memorial; there should be a day off,” says Professor Kehinde Andrews, quoted in the Guardian. To date, he hasn’t suggested a day of remembrance in Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco for the Barbary slave trade
• “Chinese censors alter ending of Minions movie” – Chinese authorities have changed the ending of Minions: The Rise of Gru to ensure the villain is caught by the police, according to the Times
• “Olaf Scholz’s implosion is a brutal lesson for Keir Starmer” – “Labour seems to think Scholz and his SPD are some sort of model to follow,” says Iain Dale in the Telegraph. “They’d be far better off looking elsewhere”
• “Bullying and racism are rife in Cabinet Office, says leaked report” – An internal review of the Cabinet Office, seen by the Times, has found that one in 10 employees in the Cabinet Office suffered from bullying, harassment or discrimination
• “Meghan Markle’s Archetypes podcast review – almost entirely preposterous” – James Marriott reviews Meghan Markle’s new podcast Archetypes for the Times. It’s a “tastefully soundtracked parade of banalities, absurdities and self-aggrandising Californian platitudes,” he says. Shock!
• “This is just absolute nonsense” – Dan Wootton is not impressed with Meghan’s new podcast

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