Nicola Sturgeon acted outside of her constitutional powers by closing churches, a Scottish court heard today. Ministers believe that the Government should not have challenged the manner in which beliefs are expressed.
South Dakota has had among the fewest restrictions of any country in the Western world. Yet cases started falling rapidly after the November peak. Dr Noah Carl asks why?
Boris Johnson has been warned that lockdown rules will look “silly” if Covid cases continue to fall. A growing number of Tory MPs are publicly challenging the Government's "roadmap" out of lockdown for being too slow.
4.6 million people were on the waiting list to begin hospital treatment in January, the highest since records began in 2007. The number waiting more than a year was 300,000 – up from 1,650 last year.
by Dr Michael Yeadon and Marc Girardot As the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic continues across the globe, many genetic modifications have started to appear in the virus. These are being sequenced, analysed1 and monitored by many scientists. This well known phenomenon occurs continuously for Influenza as well as for coronaviruses. Health authorities and mainstream media have been very wary of supposed heightened risk profiles of these new variants. They are also adamant about a potential risk of evasion from immunity, whether that immunity was acquired via infection or vaccination. Some evolutionary virologists consider that viruses ‘attenuate’, or evolve towards less virulent forms. Some feel that novel pharmaceutical2 and non-pharmaceutical interventions3 – or specific circumstances4 – could possibly disrupt this evolutionary process and favour a more severe variant or threaten acquired immunity. The recent downward trends5 in cases and in hospitalisations across the globe seem to indicate that the virus has probably not mutated in any way that would make it much more dangerous and that a healthy immune system is very capable of dealing with these new forms of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Indeed, patients have been shown to recover naturally in most instances just like they did from the original form of COVID-19.6 The paucity of confirmed re-infections with the virus, accompanied by clinical symptoms, despite hundreds of millions of infections over ...
Denmark has temporarily halted the administration of the AstraZeneca Covid vaccine following reports of cases of blood clots forming. Austria has also paused usage while investigating a death from coagulation disorders.
A summary of all the most interesting stories that have appeared about the virus in the past 24 hours – not just in Britain, but from around the world.
Today is the anniversary of the WHO declaring a pandemic and the beginning of the slide into lockdown. A good moment to reflect on what it has all achieved. South Africa suggests the tragic answer is: nothing at all.
Psychiatrists at Cambridge University have drawn attention to the impact of lockdown on young people. They demand urgent action "to ensure that this generation is not disproportionately disadvantaged by Covid".
