News Round-Up

• “A fifth of Brits have still never had Covid, officials estimate” – Nearly a fifth of people in England have still never caught Covid, ONS officials say, meaning around 10.3 million have dodged the virus since the pandemic began three years ago, the Mail reports.
• “European Parliament chiefs block public scrutiny of von der Leyen over Pfizer contract” – Transparency concerns over the Commission President’s role in negotiations will be handled behind closed doors, Politico reports.
• “Are there places you should still mask in, forever? Three experts weigh in” – NPR asked “COVID-19 experts” how we should keep weighing risk as we enter the fourth year of the pandemic. Inevitably, they say we should wear them forever…
• “Florida Surgeon General Joe Ladapo sends scathing letter to FDA and CDC” – Only one Surgeon General in the entire U.S. sees clearly what is going on, says Steve Kirsch.
• “Focused Protection: Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, and Martin Kulldorff” – A tribute to the Great Barrington trio from Gabrielle Bauer for the Brownstone Institute.
• “One in 45,000” – That was the Covid death risk for people under 50, including people with severe comorbidities, according to new research from Denmark as reported by Alex Berenson.
• “Kwasi Kwarteng: Net Zero is ‘absolutely the right agenda’” – The former Chancellor defends green targets amid the cost of living crisis, according to the Telegraph.
• “Ukraine warned against attempting to retake Crimea from Putin” – The U.S. Secretary of State fears efforts to reclaim the annexed peninsula would be a red line for the Russian President, the Telegraph reports. Or is it because their arms supplies are running low?
• “OSINT picks holes in Seymour Hersh’s Nord Stream claims” – Rob Lownie in UnHerd with a handy overview of the latest points in the Nord Stream whodunnit.
• “Can you really be radicalised by Great British Railway Journeys?” – Douglas Murray in the Spectator lambasts Prevent for going “so far off-track that it believes that books identifying the problem that it was itself set up to tackle are in fact a part of the problem”.
• “Cancel the Vikings” – Rod Liddle in the Spectator wonders what took them so long to realise the “Vikings may have been a bit right-of-centre and therefore ripe for a spot of cancelling”.
• “Sex is real. Erasing it from science is ridiculous” – Getting rid of the words ‘male’ and ‘female’ undermines the clear and accurate language essential to science, argues Oxford evolutionary biology PhD student Ellen Pasternack in the Telegraph.
• “How to solve the campus free speech crisis” – There is a gathering crisis with academic freedom in British universities, at the core of which lies “an unholy alliance between the ‘cancel culture’ illiberal far Left and cowardly university management”, says Steven Greer in the Times.
• “How the New York Times was engulfed by a trans culture war” – The Grey Lady is caught between activist young staff and an old guard who value objectivity, reports the Telegraph.
• “NYT publishes op-ed defending Rowling trans views despite staff revolt” – Mail report that the New York Times published an op-ed in support of J.K. Rowling’s views on transgender issues a day after two open letters signed by its own staff and celebrities accused the paper of anti-trans ‘bias’.
• “When people are asked to point to something transphobic J.K. Rowling has said, they can’t find anything” – Watch Toby tell GB News‘s Dan Wootton that people are trying to “shut down debate” by dubbing J.K. Rowling a transphobe.

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