Day: 3 June 2020

Free Speech Union Asks Ofcom to Withdraw Censorious Coronavirus Guidance or Face Judicial Review Breakfast television presenter and dangerous thought criminal Eamonn Holmes In my capacity as the General Secretary of the Free Speech Union, I wrote to the Chief Executive of Ofcom Dame Melanie Dawes on April 24th to complain about its reprimand of Eamonn Holmes. According to the regulator, the breakfast television presenter had said something that "could have undermined people's trust in the views being expressed by the authorities on the Coronavirus and the advice of mainstream sources of public health information". Holmes’s sin, in Ofcom's eyes, was to say on ITV’s This Morning on April 13th that any theory running counter to the official Government line – such as the one linking 5G masts to COVID-19 – deserved to be discussed in the mainstream media. This was in spite of him saying the 5G conspiracy was “not true and incredibly stupid”. Ofcom said this view – the view that such theories deserved a public hearing, not that they were in any way right or plausible – was “ill-judged and risked undermining viewers’ trust in advice from public authorities and scientific evidence”. In my letter to Dame Melanie, I pointed out that if Ofcom is going to prohibit views being discussed on television that might risk undermining ...

by Mikko Paunio, MD (University of Helsinki), MHS (Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health), adjunct professor (general epidemiology) at the University of Helsinki At the heart of the WHO’s risk assessment, at the start of the pandemic, was the assumption that only 1% of those infected would show no symptoms.New data from China buttress fears about high coronavirus fatality rate, WHO expert saysCharacteristics of and Important Lessons From the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) Outbreak in China The claim that few of the infections would be symptomless – and thus that everyone would become ill and that many people would die – paved the way to weeks of horror stories on the BBC, CNN, and in the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian. And even more sober outlets like the Financial Times and the Economist followed suit, with little by way of analysis of what was actually known. In fact, the WHO’s claim was quickly rebutted by a member of its own Infectious Disease Catastrophe Committee,New data from China buttress fears about high coronavirus fatality rate, WHO expert says but too late to prevent panic spreading. The result was a lockdown across much of the world, the collateral damage from which will do far more harm than the virus. A major serological survey from Spainhttps://www.lamoncloa.gob.es/serviciosdeprensa/notasprensa/sanidad14/Documents/2020/130520-ENE-COVID_Informe1.pdf now shows ...