Covid

Boris Johnson certainly managed to rally the troops on their first day back from recess this afternoon as he told the Commons that all remaining domestic Covid restrictions were coming to an end.  The most explosive moments of the past few months haven't been about the continuation of Covid restrictions From this Thursday, the legal requirement to self-isolate following a positive test will come to an end. Until 1 April, people who test positive will be advised to stay at home, but after that 'we will encourage people with Covid-19 symptoms to exercise personal responsibility, just as we encourage people who may have flu to be considerate to others'.

The presumption of many MPs — and maybe many of you — is that the Met is bound to issue a fixed penalty notice to the Prime Minister for attending parties in Downing Street, because the half dozen 'events' he attended look, swim and quack like a party, and therefore must have been a breach of Covid rules. So what is Boris Johnson's defence? He thinks he has one, so he is paying out of his own pocket for a lawyer — who is also being used by his wife Carrie Johnson. And the Met Police have sent the relevant questionnaires for the PM and Carrie direct to this lawyer. As you know Boris Johnson's consistent claim is that he thought and was advised that the events he attended were 'work', not illegal parties. But what would 'prove' that these were work, not parties?

With case rates falling and Omicron (hopefully) in decline, it's a good time to remember some of the more hysterical predictions about the last Covid variant. For the South African doctor who discovered the Omicron strain has today given an interview to German newspaper Welt in which she reveals she was 'pressured' into describing the variant as more dangerous than it really is. Dr Angelique Coetzee was one of the first to report the new variant in November last year and said it caused 'mild' symptoms for those in her country. But she claims she was told by scientists and politicians from around the globe that her description was wrong – and specifically references Britain as being one of those countries which tried to discourage her findings.

Today’s school-aged students are in grave danger. A murderous virus is ripping through the population, leaving a tragic body count in its wake. We need aggressive preventative measures. Classes need to go online, indefinitely if necessary. The experts must be heeded. The science must be followed. This epidemic is simply too dangerous; we cannot afford to play games with our children's lives. I’m talking, of course, about the preeminent public health crisis of our time: lawnmower deaths. The threat that lawnmowers pose to our nation is no joke. According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s National Electronic Injury Surveillance system, 90 Americans die every year from lawnmower accidents. Over the past decade, 3.

A new Johns Hopkins systematic review cuts in two the narrative that government-imposed mandates meaningfully prevent coronavirus deaths. The review looked at 34 different studies analyzing business and school closings, shelter-in-place orders, and international travel bans. It included data from US and European Covid mitigation efforts, along with endeavors in India, South Africa and China. Almost two dozen of these studies were peer-reviewed, while the other 12 were working papers. The results of this meta-analysis are striking. Lockdowns reduced Covid mortality by an average of only .02 percent. Shelter-in-place orders were slightly better at a 2.9 percent average, but nothing worth crowing about.

Did lockdowns save lives? We will never have a definitive answer to this vital question because it was impossible to conduct controlled experiments — we don’t have two identical countries, one where lockdown was imposed and one where it wasn’t. Nor is it easy to compare similar countries, for the simple reason that every country in the world — bar Comoros in the Indian Ocean — reacted to Covid by introducing at least one non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI) by the end of March 2020. There was no clear link between lockdown stringency and fewer deaths in the spring of 2020, A team from Johns Hopkins University has, however, assessed the many (albeit flawed) studies into whether lockdown works — a ‘meta-analysis’.

In the mid-2000s, I was an avid fan of mixed martial arts. My friends and I would pool our money to order the pay-per-view events of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the combat sport’s largest promoter. One of the fixtures of UFC broadcasts was — and remains — the color commentary of Joe Rogan. Most people of that era would have been more likely to recognize Rogan as the host of Fear Factor, a hokey NBC gameshow in which contestants attempted to withstand such challenges as being covered in live insects or dropped into deep water while trapped in a car. But my buddies and I were more impressed with his UFC broadcast work. He was knowledgeable about the sport and infectiously enthusiastic, to the degree that we wondered whether he was coked out of his mind.

That Boris Johnson regards the Gray update as an opportunity to come up for air was very clear from his statement on the report in the Commons. The Prime Minister's opening remarks struck what seemed to be a reasonable balance between apologising, offering some operational changes to No. 10 (to show he was taking the report's recommendations for 'learning' seriously) and trying to buoy up Tory MPs with a reminder of what his government was achieving. Brexit, freeports and the comparatively early end to Covid restrictions all came up. He might have been pleased with himself as he commended his statement to the House, but things went downhill after that. The first deterioration in the situation came as Sir Keir Starmer gave one of his best speeches in parliament to date.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., son of Bobby Kennedy, is a conspiracy theorist and an anti-vaxxer. He's also an environmentalist lawyer, progressive talk-show host, and near-embodiment of horseshoe theory, having become something of a pin-up for Covid-era cranks. According to Scientific American, this scion of Camelot has, since 2005, "promoted anti-vaccine propaganda completely unconnected to reality." According to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, his Children's Health Defense organization claims "unvaccinated children are healthier than vaccinated children" and condemns the parents of vaccinated children for "enrolling their kids in experimental Covid vaccine trials." On Sunday, Kennedy Jr.