News Round-Up

• “Matt Hancock told lawyers he should be immune from court action over Covid” – He said he should not be the target of judicial reviews over his department’s failure to safeguard care home residents simply because he was Secretary of State – and that it should be the whole Government instead, reports the Mirror.
• “Jacob Rees-Mogg: We were denied evidence we needed to make anti-lockdown case” – Ministers were not told of evidence from Chris Whitty that it would be safe to reduce quarantine period, the former Commons leader has said, according to the Telegraph.
• “Matt Hancock’s plan to block funding for disabled children if MP opposed lockdown” – Matt Hancock discussed a plan to block funding for a new centre for disabled children and adults as a way of pressuring a rebel Tory MP to back new lockdown restrictions, reports the Telegraph.
• “The secret spreadsheet that targeted MPs critical of lockdown” – With backbench Tories speaking out about harm caused by Covid measures, the Health Secretary and his team set out on a strongarm operation, reports the Telegraph.
• “The inconvenient questions the Covid inquiry must answer” – Baroness Hallett needs to go beyond the direct costs of the disease and quantify the unintended damage that Covid policy inflicted, writes Esther McVey in the Telegraph.
• “WHO Urges Countries to Reveal Intelligence on COVID-19 Origins After FBI Director’s Statements” – The World Health Organisation has asked governments with intelligence on the virus to come forward, after a growing number of U.S. officials signalled that it may have resulted from a Chinese lab leak, the Epoch Times reports.
• “The Lockdown Files’ message is clear: we must never again suppress democracy by giving power to power-hungry people.” – Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson with the original text of their Express article.
• “I protested masks at local school board” – It wasn’t exactly a Churchillian moment, says Bill Rice, Jr..
• “Matt Hancock cancelled after indiscreet WhatsApps ‘upset’ travel industry” – The Institute of Travel and Tourism has axed the former Health Secretary from speaking at its annual conference in Qatar as messages reveal he was highly critical of the sector, according to the Telegraph. Now obviously we’re against cancel culture. But it is Matt Hancock.
• “How the WHO was captured” – Private capital wields far too much influence, says Thomas Fazi in UnHerd.
• “Critical Thinking is Our Only Weapon Against the Doomsayers” – We must train ourselves in scrutinising texts, seek out true information and apply rigorous reasoning, says Thorsteinn Siglaugsson. 
• “The politics of fear is the enemy of democracy” – The elite’s doom-mongering over Covid was an insult to our intelligence and our rights, says Brendan O’Neill in Spiked.
• “Chris Whitty ‘warned ministers against enforcing hated sex ban during Covid pandemic’ because ‘people aren’t likely to listen’, Matt Hancock’s leaked WhatsApps reveal” – Under the original Covid lockdown imposed in the U.K. on March 23rd 2020, Boris Johnson told Brits to stay at home and avoid contact with people living in other households, but there was private disagreement about what this should mean for couples, reports the Mail.
• “The Real Threat of 15-Minute Cities” – These ultra-modern, tech-saturated monstrosities use hundreds of thousands of sensors to vacuum up copious amounts of personal data, writes John Mac Ghlionn for the Brownstone Institute.
• “The green elites really do want climate rationing” – A new paper has exposed the miserable reality of Net Zero, says Laurie Wastell in Spiked.
• “With the ‘expert’ Covid view blown up, green terror must be next” – In an uncompromising leading article the New York Post argues that “green fanatics” are just as much in the dark about the climate situation as Anthony Fauci et al. were about Covid, and “it’s time we stopped listening to them, for good”.
• “A Minnesota court can’t overturn science – but it can destroy women’s sport” – It’s not a ‘gender based assumption’ to say males are generally stronger than females – it’s fact, writes Julie Bindel in the Telegraph.
• “Great Britain has no place for blasphemy laws” – Religious tolerance should be promoted in multi-faith Britain, not theocratic intimidation, says Rakib Ehsan in the Telegraph.
• “NHS must reinstate ‘woman’ in cancer and pregnancy webpages, staff demand” – Health workers write to NHS bosses condemning the “discriminatory” move of shifting to gender-neutral language, saying it “insults women”, the Telegraph reports.
• “‘That Was a Lie!’: There Was Never a Scientific Consensus On Lockdowns, Masks, or the Vaccine” – Watch Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya say that “a cartel almost, of very powerful scientific bureaucrats took over the whole apparatus of science”.

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