News Round-Up

• “Trump dismisses COVID-19 vax safety claims, says he saved 100 million lives” – Trump suggested that he saved 100 million by pushing the development of the vaccines, arguing that some were calling it “the greatest thing that ever happened”, Newsweek reports.
• “One in six people depressed, say health chiefs” – One in six people are depressed, health chiefs have said as they warned those on medication against going cold turkey, reports the Telegraph.
• “Working from home ‘has not worked’, Wall Street bosses tell Davos summit – as Citigroup chief says slackers should be hauled back into the office until their productivity improves” – The British boss of Wall Street banking giant Citigroup told the WEF gathering that “slackers” working from home will be “hauled back to the office” for coaching, reports the Mail.
• “The teachers strike is the wrong move, for the wrong reason, at the wrong time” – Unions were among the loudest voices calling for pandemic school closures, and striking will make the damage worse, writes Mark Lehain in CapX.
• “The FAA has very quietly tacitly admitted that the EKGs of pilots are no longer normal. We should be concerned. Very concerned.” – After the vaccine rolled out, the Federal Aviation Administration secretly widened the electrocardiogram parameter range for pilots so they wouldn’t be grounded, says Steve Kirsch.
• “Experts conclude Japan’s Covid restrictions are ethically, legally, and socially unjustifiable” – Guy Gin with the latest from the Land of the Rising Sun.
• “Anatomy of the sinister Covid Project, Part 2” – Paula Jardine in TCW looks at the part played by Robert Kadlec in the development of America’s biodefence plans.
• “Healthy user bias is obvious in booster data as well” – T. Coddington on I Numero graphically displays the healthy vaccinee effect, showing that high vaccine take-up correlates strongly with numerous prior health indicators, meaning all observational studies are confounded.
• “Understanding Science Means Being a Sceptic” – Paul Sutton with “another example of how the ‘woke’ side in our grisly culture war don’t understand what science is, simply using the word to signal imagined virtue and crush debate”.
• “The American Centers for Disease Control pledges a million dollars for the development of ‘a public health tool to predict the virality of vaccine misinformation narratives’” – Having failed to eradicate a virus, the public health agency will now try to eradicate viral ideas, says Eugyppius.
• “Gas boiler ban fury firms forced to sell heat pumps Brits can’t afford” – The latest attack on the nation’s 26 million gas boilers will see the Government slap £5,000 fines on companies unless they sell costly heat pumps to people who don’t want and can’t afford them, the Express reports.
• “The Tory obsession with Net Zero will be their undoing” – Green energy is the policy on which the Westminster parties are more out of touch with their voters than any other, writes Nigel Farage in the Telegraph.
• “Electric car battery maker Britishvolt enters administration with the loss of hundreds of jobs” – Britishvolt, the electric vehicle battery maker, has collapsed into administration in a blow to the U.K.’s hopes of fostering a homegrown gigafactory champion, reports the Telegraph.
• “Don’t cancel Jeremy Clarkson” – Meghan Markle appears to be on a mission to prove that cancel culture really does exist, writes Tom Slater in the Spectator.
• “Who do Harry and Meghan think they are?” – The Sussexes’ response to Jeremy Clarkson over his column in the Sun betrays an authoritarian streak, writes Freddy Gray in the Spectator.
• “The real reason behind Amazon’s Jeremy Clarkson ‘cancellation’” – The Telegraph suggests that the real reason Amazon is going cool on the Grand Tour host is that his huge contract no longer makes sense.
• “Jeremy Clarkson’s cancellation is the final proof: humour is dead” – Madeline Grant in the Telegraph says that while his joke about the Duchess of Sussex wasn’t funny, the reaction to it revealed a “much more chilling trend”.
• “Has ITV now axed Jeremy Clarkson? Channel says it has ‘no further commitments’ to Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and star after next series and postpones celebrity specials – as Amazon cancels press call for Clarkson’s Farm amid Meghan column backlash” – Clarkson fans fear he is being “cancelled in front of our very eyes” by the “woke” mob, after it was reported Amazon Prime could drop his shows – Clarkson’s Farm and The Grand Tour – by next year.
• “Why Davos only makes the world’s ‘polycrisis’ worse” – The World Economic Forum thinks only in top-down, corporatist ways, argues Samuel Gregg in the Spectator.
• “Scotland should explore allowing eight year-olds to change their gender, says MSP” – A prominent supporter of Nicola Sturgeon’s gender reforms has said Scotland should “explore” allowing eight year-olds to declare their own legal gender and that she believes humans may be able to change biological sex, the Telegraph reports.
• “This ban on ‘trans conversion therapy’ is utterly misguided” – Clinicians could soon be criminalised for treating people with gender dysphoria, writes Jo Bartosch in Spiked.
• “Nigel Biggar: the academic who dared to say Rhodes should stay” – When the Oxford theologian wrote that the British Empire was not all bad, he faced a backlash; now he defends his views in the Times.
• “The end is near for Covid vaccines. In Japan, two more professors speaking out” – James Cintolo tweets that Prof. Masanaka Nagao from Hiroshima University School of Medicine and Prof. Shigetoshi Sano from Kochi University have said: “We believe these vaccines are related to serious immune abnormalities.”

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