News Round-Up

• “NHS hospitals are told patients no longer need to be kept apart” – NHS trusts across England have been told to return to pre-pandemic physical distancing in all areas, MailOnline reports
• “Shelve your DIY projects, cries NHS as A&Es come under ‘extreme pressure’” – Hospitals are urging the public to ‘be considerate’ and avoid risking injury due to overcrowding, the Telegraph reports
• “Five blunders caused by civil servants working from home” – A catalogue of errors that can be blamed on civil servants working from home, courtesy of the Telegraph
• “How Nicola Sturgeon gets away with Covid rule-breaking” – “There is an underlying belief that the Left can be forgiven their occasional breaches because their hearts are in the right place,” says Tom Harris in the Telegraph
• “Unless Queen Nic resigns first, her calls for Boris to go are pure politics and must be ignored” – “Unless she is prepared to resign for her Covid law break, Scheming Sturgeon’s demand for Boris to quit is nothing more than laughable political posturing and should be roundly ignored,” says Dan Wootton in MailOnline
• “Saying sorry won’t be enough to save Boris Johnson from the voters’ wrath” – The Telegraph‘s Philip Johnston warns Boris that if people don’t believe he feels real remorse “his repeated apologies will fall flat”
• “Smartphone app can detect whether you have COVID-19 with 92% accuracy” – Pfizer have put in a hefty offer to acquire ResApp which uses machine learning to analyse the sounds of your cough, MailOnline reports
• “The scandalous absence of child vaccine damage information” – With the vaccine rollout now extended to five and 11 year-olds, Kathy Gyngell of the Conservative Woman highlights the risks
• “Face mask obligation in Molenbeek dropped again” – The requirement for a mask in the streets and markets of Molenbeek in Brussels was meant to last until the end of April, the Brussels Times says, but it has been dropped ahead of time
• “The Israeli Covid vaccine has taken its last breath” – Haaretz reports on the demise of of BriLife, the Israeli COVID-19 vaccine project
• “What Sweden Got Right About Covid” – Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer in the Washington Monthly point to research which found that among 11 wealthy peer nations, Sweden was the only one with no excess mortality among the under-75s
• “The Mask Mandate Is Illegal: Quotes from the District Court Judgment” – The Brownstone Institute highlights the best bits of the court ruling against the transportation mask mandate
• “The Unmasking of America” – Jeffrey Tucker celebrates the end of the mask mandate at the Brownstone Institute. “The entire machinery of compulsion and control unravelled, not in months, not in days, but in hours and minutes”
• “More Evidence from the U.K. that Masks Don’t Work” – In a piece for the Brownston Institute, Ian Miller takes aim at recent calls from NHS chief Matthew Taylor for the return of Covid measures
• “Big Screaming Headlines” – In the New York Times Morning newsletter, David Leonhardt notes Coronavirus cases have risen in major cities, but hospitalisations have not
• “Lockdown ideology remains a widespread global plague upon humanity” – “Faucism remains prevalent everywhere,” says Jordan Schachtel
• “My life in Shanghai’s never-ending zero-Covid lockdown” – An anonymous postcard from Shanghai, published in the Guardian
• “NSW to end COVID-19 household isolation rules” – New South Wales and Victoria will end one of the last major remaining pandemic restrictions as both states pass the peak of the latest Omicron wave, the Sydney Morning Herald reports
• “SARS-2 isn’t doing much of anything right now” – “And it is highly uncertain, whether it will ever do much of anything ever again,” writes blogger Eugyppius in his latest post
• “Frank Furedi: Beware of the ‘New Normal’” – Professor Frank Furedi joins Dan Astin-Gregory on the Elevate Podcast to sound a cautionary tale about the ‘New Normal’
• “Net zero – a grim fairy tale” – An open letter to the Prime Minister concerning his Net Zero carbon strategy by Dr Deborah Ancell in the Conservative Woman
• “Nicola Sturgeon held Scottish independence meetings at height of Omicron wave” – The Omicron variant and the struggles of Scotland’s NHS did not distract Nic Sturge-on and her senior ministers from Scottish Independence, the Telegraph reports
• “Lazy Britain is now addicted to mediocrity” – “Working from home, HR bureaucracy and wellbeing have turned capitalist excellence into a sin,” says the Telegraph‘s Matthew Lynn
• “Why aren’t we talking about the Islamist uprising in Sweden?” – “Freedom of speech must include the freedom to ridicule Islam,” says Brendan O’Neill in Spiked
• “Black Lives Matter blamed for cops pulling back causing murder spike” – The number of black Americans murdered in 2020 jumped by 32%, the Daily Mail reports, and criminal justice experts are blaming the Black Lives Matter movement
• “IMF slashes Britain’s GDP forecast to 3.7% in 2022” – The IMF slashed it growth forecasts for Britain to 3.7% in 2022 and 1.2% for 2023, according to This Is Money
• “Energy bosses warn of ‘truly horrific’ October price rise” – Appearing before MPs, the bosses of the U.K.’s largest energy companies urged the Government to prepare for yet another shock increase, MailOnline reports
• “As a former English teacher I’m shocked at the BBC reading list” – Allison Pearson takes aim at the BBC’s jubilee reading list in her latest Telegraph column
• “It’s not too late for ministers to see sense on Online Safety Bill” – In a joint piece for the Times, Professor Paul Dolan and Steve Baker MP sound the alert about the Online Safety Bill
• ‘Experts’ get it wrong ” – “It seems many ‘experts’ around today have learned the background knowledge without earning the common sense needed to correctly interpret it,” writes Vivian Robinson in Spectator Australia
• “Twitter’s Jack Dorsey slams media for ‘creating conflict’” – Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, has taken a swipe at the media, accusing it of ‘sowing doubt to promote white supremacy and get engagement’, according to the Daily Mail
• “Don’t pander to the woke pronoun lie” – Writing for the Conservative Woman, Laura Perrins offers a word of advice to employees asked to state their pronouns: “Don’t do it”
• “Throw away your masks” – A flight attendant sings in delight at the end of masks on planes

If you have any tips for inclusion in the round-up, email us here.