A new UnHerd Britain poll released today confirms that Britons still support lockdowns. When asked if they agreed with the statement that, in retrospect, lockdowns were a mistake, 54% of people disagreed, compared with only 27% who agreed.

Most interestingly, the results were very similar across different socioeconomic demographics and even among Labour and Conservative voters. This is certainly related to the fact that the founding myth of lockdowns — that they were a necessary evil to avoid an incalculably high number of Covid deaths — is still held by most people to be true, even though it is not supported by evidence, and ends up trumping all the negative effects of the policy.  ...  Continue reading

Outside of Germany, few people have heard of Karl Lauterbach, Germany’s Minister for Health. But he’s one of the key figures in the Western Covid response. Once hailed as a hero, he’s now engulfed in the biggest vaccine-injury scandal to have emerged since the pandemic. 

Lauterbach has served in the role since December 2021, under the traffic light coalition led by Olaf Scholz. Often described as “Germany’s Fauci”, Lauterbach — a professor of health economics and epidemiology and long-time member of the SPD — rose to national prominence early on into the pandemic as a Covid hardliner.  ...  Continue reading

Overnight, The Telegraph published an investigation dubbed the Lockdown Files. It is comprised of more than 100,000 WhatsApp messages, totalling 2.3 million words, sent between the then-health secretary, Matt Hancock, and other ministers and officials at the height of the pandemic.

The paper obtained the messages from Isabel Oakeshott, co-author of Hancock’s Pandemic Diaries, with whom the minister had shared the messages for the purpose of writing the book. Oakeshott says she felt it was in the public interest to release this sensational cache of private communications now because she fears that the recently launched official government Covid-19 Inquiry, which I wrote about yesterday, risks becoming a colossal whitewash. Besides, the Inquiry could take years to conclude. “We absolutely cannot wait any longer for answers,” she says. ...  Continue reading

The New York Times is taking the European Commission to court over Ursula von der Leyen’s refusal to release the text messages she exchanged with Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, in which she personally negotiated the purchase of up to 1.8 billion doses of the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine. This is the latest episode in an ongoing saga which paints the EU in an extremely bad light. Here’s what we know so far.

Shortly after the signing of the deal in April 2021 — the bloc’s biggest yet, worth a staggering €35 billion (tens of billions of euros above the cost of production, according to one analysis) — the New York Times reported that von der Leyen had single-handedly negotiated it via a series of text messages and calls with Bourla. At that point Alexander Fanta, a journalist at the German news site netzpolitik.org, wrote to the Commission asking to access the text messages and other documents relating to the exchange between von der Leyen and Bourla. The Commission claimed no such documents existed. ...  Continue reading

Last week, the European Union ruled that the maggot-like larvae of lesser mealworms — a type of shiny black beetle — and house crickets (in partially defatted powder form) may be used in the production of several foods, including pizza and pasta-based products, bread, crackers and breadsticks, meat preparations and soups, snacks and sauces, biscuits, chocolate confectionery and even beer-like beverages. This means that EU citizens may soon find themselves eating bugs without even knowing it. Sure, the regulation states that foods containing insects must be labelled, but just how flashy those labels turn out to be remains to be seen. More importantly, should we care? ...  Continue reading

After months of wrangling, EU energy ministers finally approved the first ever cap on gas prices, which is scheduled to come into force in February. The aim of the measure is to curb the crisis that has been rocking Europe over the past year as a result of gas and energy prices surging to unprecedented levels.

To understand how the cap works, it’s important to understand what is driving the energy crisis in the first place. It’s commonly thought that the spike in gas prices is a consequence of Vladimir Putin ramping up bills in retaliation for Western support of Ukraine. But that’s not how energy markets work. ...  Continue reading

Angela Merkel is no longer “the most powerful woman in the world”, as TIME Magazine described her in 2015, but when she talks, her words continue to have a global resonance. Her recent interview in Die Zeit is a perfect case in point. In it, she made a rather controversial statement regarding the Minsk agreements negotiated in 2014-15. This series of international agreements aimed to end the Donbas war fought between Ukraine and armed Russian separatist groups, by agreeing to a ceasefire and the start of negotiations on some form of autonomy for the self-proclaimed republics of Luhansk and Donetsk. ...  Continue reading

Elon Musk’s recent release of the so-called Twitter Files, via journalist Matt Taibbi, is profoundly concerning. The correspondence — as well as various leaks, FOIA requests and ongoing lawsuits has begun to shed light on the level of collusion between the US administration, not to mention its countless three-letter federal agencies, and social media companies. As many suspected, the so-called “war on disinformation” has little to do with protecting the public from false, misleading or dangerous content, but is really about censoring and suppressing dissenting voices, even at the cost of exposing the public to state-sanctioned disinformation.  ...  Continue reading