News Round-Up
19 May 2024
by Will Jones
BBC Comes to Terms With Collapsing EV Market
17 May 2024
by Sallust
A French region bans gatherings "due to the heatwave"; Germany mulls an annual winter mask mandate; and China uses its Covid app to target protestors. Some of the worst fears of sceptics are coming true.
Former UN Assistant Secretary-General Ramesh Thakur has warned of a massive expansion of the international pandemic bureaucracy and the powers of the WHO to press countries towards authoritarian public health measures.
At Davos, NATO Chief Jens Stoltenberg said we shouldn't sacrifice “long-term security needs” for “short-term economic interests”, citing trade with Russia and China. But this framing is too simplistic.
The World Health Organisation is to make lockdowns and other non-pharmaceutical interventions intended to curb viral spread part of official pandemic guidance, and has said the work to do this is already underway.
A team of Chinese and US researchers has predicted over 1.5 million deaths in China from Omicron should the country cease to impose its brutal controls. But that is less than half the UK Covid death rate.
Many are concerned that the US amendments to the WHO pandemic treaty will transfer sovereignty over public health policy to an unelected and unaccountable global organisation. How worried should we be?
Shanghai officials over the next few days will further restrict access to food and hospitals in the city, the most severe phase of its extended lockdown yet, as China digs in with its Zero Covid strategy.
In further proof of the futility of restrictions in suppressing an infectious respiratory virus, reported infections in Shanghai continue to rise amidst one of the world's strictest lockdowns.
Markets have been spooked by the prospect of the severe Shanghai lockdown – now in its fourth week – being extended to Beijing as one district in the city is sealed off following a few dozen positive Covid tests.
Authorities in Shanghai have started fencing off areas were residents are suspected of having Covid and fears that similar measures will shortly be taken in Beijing have prompted panic buying.
© Skeptics Ltd.