News Round-Up

• “Boris Johnson: NHS crisis would have been worse without Covid lockdowns” –  “People are now saying too much lockdown caused the current problems in the NHS,” said Boris, quoted in the Telegraph. “I am afraid to say that the opposite is the case in the sense that if we hadn’t locked down…  then the problems we are facing now in the NHS would be even worse”
• “Boris’s ex-spinner Lee Cain hits back at Rishi over lockdown claims” – Former No10 spin doctor Lee Cain has attacked Rishi Sunak’s recent comments on the shortcomings of the lockdown policy, MailOnline reports, branding them “Covid revisionism” in a letter to the Spectator
• “First it was Sunak, now it’s Shapps – who’s next?” – Time for Recovery’s Brian Monteith wonders which Government minister might be next to say that Britain should not lock down again. There were, he writes, at least two other cabinet ministers doing their own research to sense-check the advice from SAGE  
• “CEPI and the guilty men behind global lockdown – Part 1” – The first instalment of Paula Jardine’s investigation into the part that the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations played in the global rush to lockdowns, published by the Conservative Woman
• “Why didn’t more people resist lockdown?” – “I’m all for holding officialdom accountable for mistakes from on high that continue to generate dire consequences,” says Lionel Shriver in the Spectator, but “should the public not also be held accountable?”
• “#Together ‘Question Time’ First Anniversary event” – Watch the #Together campaign’s first anniversary event, featuring Luke Johnson, Dr Steve James, Adam Brooks, Toby and many more
• “It is unwise to rule out lockdowns as a weapon against future pandemics” – In Conservative Home, Henry Hill questions the wisdom of ruling out future lockdowns or any other policy response which “could be efficacious against a future plague which spreads by different means”
• “Excess mortality in children from 28 European countries.” – Tom Jefferson, Carl Heneghan and Jason Oke sound the alarm on rising rates of child mortality in Europe and call for an investigation into potential causes
• “Which Last Longer, Spike Proteins or CDC ‘Facts?’” – A potted history of CDC’s web page about the mRNA vaccines and the “constant churn of revisions” that have been made since it was first published, provided by Jon Sanders at the AIER
• “Lockdowns and the Loss of Love and Family” – Writing for the Brownstone Institute, Mark Oshinskie laments the loss of the “many fateful romantic encounters” which simply did not occur thanks to the lockdowns
• “Three months of N.S.W. data show it’s not the unvaccinated in hospitals with Covid” – Rebekah Barnett wonders if New South Wales Health quite realises that there are barely any unvaccinated patients being hospitalised with Covid. There were just 21 over the last three months, she reports, 0.2% of the total
• “Here’s how the vaccine is causing those weird ‘blood clots’” – Steve Kirsch explains the connection between vaccines and blood clots
• “Documents leaked from the EMA confirms why we aren’t allowed to analyse the vaccine vials” – Steve Kirsch again, highlighting evidence on vaccine risks that was revealed by a data leak from the European Medicines Agency nearly two years ago  
• “Ba.5 Booster’s ‘8-Mice Trial’ Actually Failed” – The FDA has just approved the new bivalent jab which targets both the original virus and the Omicron variant, but it’s “uniquely dangerous”, says Igor Chudov
• “NHS general practice has passed the point of no return” – “Solutions to the crisis in general practice can only be discussed when the stakeholders agree that our GP system is irrevocably broken,” argues Consultant Surgeon J. Meirion Thomas in the Telegraph
• “Oops: Alaskan Electric Buses Run Out of Power in Winter” – Watts Up With That picks up on the story of the first electric buses to run in Juneau, Alaska which have been experiencing mechanical problems since their launch in April 2021 and did not holding their charge long enough to complete an entire route during the city’s winter
• “The Other Big Con – Net Zero Climate Change” – A rant by Doug Brodie of Nairn on Joel Smalley’s blog Dead Man Talking. “Our misguided climate and energy policies have been pushing up energy prices and electricity prices for years”
• “The elite’s green fantasies are finally unravelling” – “The desperate scramble for fossil fuels now makes the posturing of COP26 look almost otherworldly,” says Fraser Myers in Spiked
• “NCLA Suit Uncovers Army of Federal Bureaucrats Coercing Social-Media Companies to Censor Speech” – A press release from the New Civil Liberties Alliance announcing a new lawsuit over the way numerous U.S. Federal Government officials “secretly communicated with social-media platforms to censor and suppress private speech”
• “Google to bans apps containing ‘misleading health claims that contradict existing medical consensus’” –  Google Play has introduced sweeping new rules to ban apps containing “misleading health claims that contradict existing medical consensus, or can cause harm to users”, Reclaim the Net reports
• “Australian Academy of Science Demands Dissent be Silenced” – Watts Up With That takes aim at the Australian Academy of Science which has “demanded  that ‘disinformation’ about climate change, the great barrier reef, and Covid vaccines be censored from broadcast news and the internet”
• “Woke police have completely lost the plot” – The police need to be “out on the streets arresting criminals” writes Iain Duncan Smith MP in the Telegraph. “Not acting like social workers, ferrying people to hospital or virtue signalling on Twitter”
• “As a statue of Joe Orton is scrapped, is anything safe?” – Plans for a statue of gay playwright Joe Orton have been shelved indefinitely, causing Mick Hume, writing in the Daily Mail, to wonder if anybody can ever be safe from the “statue-smashing, history-erasing thought police”
• “Wind farm contract delay diverts £1 billion in savings from consumers” – Consumers could miss out on more than a billion pounds of energy bill savings from the world’s biggest offshore wind farm, the Times says, after its owner delayed a contract to provide cheap power from the project
• “Last orders: U.K. pubs brace for mass closures as energy costs soar” – Reuters reports that thousands of British pubs are fearing financial ruin this winter
• “Putin has pulled off a shock win that could destroy the free world” – “Britain is now in grave danger of falling into Vladimir Putin’s trap,” says Alistair Heath in the Telegraph. His kamikaze economic war is “beginning to inflict immense, permanent damage on the Western way of life”
• “Snooker engulfed in transgender row after former world No 1 calls for Jamie Hunter to be banned” – Snooker is the latest sport to be caught up in a trans row, the Telegraph reports, after transgender player Jamie Hunter was met with calls to be banned from the women’s game after winning the U.S. Open
• “‘Thanks a bunch, Tony‘: Boris Johnson hits out at Labour’s ‘abject failure‘ to invest in nuclear power” – The Telegraph reports that, in one of his final acts as Prime Minister, Boris Johnson took aim at Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Nick Clegg for their failure to invest in nuclear power
• “Blair v Cameron on Nuclear Power“ – Tides of History looks back at a Queen‘s Speech Debate on Nuclear Power between Tony Blair and David Cameron. Tony said he was in favour of it. Cameron and co are ambivalent

If you have any tips for inclusion in the round-up, email us here.