News Round-Up

• “J&J’s Covid vaccine taken by 19 million Americans is pulled by FDA” – The Food and Drug Administration has revoked authorisation of Johnson & Johnson’s Covid vaccine, the Mail reports.
• “Why Rishi Sunak fears the Covid inquiry” – The Spectator’s Katy Balls explains why the Prime Minister might be reluctant to hand too much over to the Covid inquiry.
• “Alina Chan and Matt Ridley: The lab leak hypothesis” – Michael Shellenberger and Alex Gutentag are joined by Alina Chan and Matt Ridley on the Public podcast to discuss the origin of COVID-19 and what may be the biggest cover up in history.
• “Why did USAID fund the Wuhan lab?” – Writing in UnHerd, Ashley Rindsberg takes a deep dive into USAID’s funding for risky research in a Chinese lab.  
• “Is it time for Britain to leave the WHO?” – An explainer on everything that is wrong with the World Health Organisation, courtesy of Christopher Snowdon in the Spectator.  
• “Is the plan to impose a public health technocracy faltering?” –  Some cautious optimism about the WHO treaty from Wesley J. Smith in the National Review.
• “Google to clamp down on staff who work from home” – The tech giant is going to include office attendance as part of employees’ performance reviews, the Telegraph reports.
• “The Met Office ‘extreme team’ preparing for the U.K.’s drastically changing weather” – The Telegraph reports that the U.K.’s top meteorologists have formed a crack squad to save us from ourselves.
• “Caroline Lucas standing down as MP to focus on climate change” – Caroline Lucas has said she is not going to stand at the next election, the Telegraph reports, because her constituency work is getting in the way of her tackling climate change.  
• “Good riddance to Caroline Lucas” – “The departing Green MP embodies everything that’s rotten about environmentalism,” says Fraser Myers in Spiked.
• “Justin Trudeau says wildfires were caused by climate change” – Trudeau says that the fires are entirely the fault of climate change, but Canadian officials have for years been warned that better forest management is needed, the Mail reports.
• “Putting the awful Eastern U.S. wildfire smoke in perspective” – Andy Revkin points out that tens of millions worldwide suffer from pollution levels far worse than those in Manhattan right now.
•  “Do hawks care about gay rights?” – Noah Carl considers the motivations lying behind the pro-gay stance of America’s foreign policy elites.  
• “On Section 230 and Instagram’s child pornography problem” – “The White House and social media companies care more about censoring views they don’t like than the facilitation of child porn – and rape – on their platforms,” says Alex Berenson, highlighting a Wall Street Journal exposé on the paedophile networks that run through Instagram.
• “The kids aren’t ‘trans’ – they just don’t want to grow up” –Mary Wakefield, writing in the Spectator, offers an explanation for the unstoppable rise in the numbers of young people who call themselves trans: “The whole phenomenon is (amongst other things) a desperate desire to remain childlike.”
• “Oxfam’s vile ‘TERF’ video typifies the charity’s disrespect for women” – “The TERF video is not some mistake or aberration,” writes Laura Dodsworth in CapX, “it emerged from the same wellspring of sanctimonious absurdity that characterises Oxfam’s every move in this area.”
• “The inversion of history” – Douglas Murray bemoans the latest “efforts to dismantle, problemetise and indeed disappear our history” in his latest column for the Spectator.
• “Cut immigration now, before it’s too late” – Alp Mehmet, Chairman of Migration Watch, calls on readers of TCW: Defending Freedom to support a campaign in favour of reducing migration to less than 100,000 a year.
• “The trouble with returning the Benin Bronzes” – Robert Tombs explains in the Spectator why the history of the Benin Bronzes is somewhat more complicated than the directors of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology realised when it decided to return them to Nigeria.
• “I’ll never throw out my DVD player – the woke police can’t delete my box sets” – The Telegraph’s Michael Deacon celebrates the great joy of a DVD collection that, unlike streaming services, cannot be censored.
• “Social conservatism in U.S. highest in about a decade” – 38% of Americans say they are conservative on social issues, according to this Gallup poll, up from 33% who said the same last year.
• “Big Pharma has bizarrely never been this untouchable” – Independent journalist Rav Aurora joins Ben Shapiro to discuss how media outlets suppressed his stories about Covid mandates and vaccine side effects.

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