Publisher of @Spectator, @UnHerd, @Apollo_magazine; Editor-in-Chief @UnHerd; CEO, OQS Media. freddie@oqs.media
London
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When the White House announces that there is an “epidemic of violence against trans people” what does that even mean?
It’s language used to signal virtue rather than describe anything with precision — and it’s coming from the most powerful office in the world.
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Quite amazing how the Omicron wave surged and then turned around at almost the same time across so many countries — almost as if it paid no attention to their divergent policies...
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Suddenly the @Guardian is all over the lockdown harms stories. Where were you at the time? Your unthinking moralistic enforcement of lockdowns helped create the very problems that you are now reporting as news 😡
theguardian.com/world/2022/s…
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The best way for Boris to turn his polls around is to make a big ‘time of living in fear is over’ speech, immediately end remaining Covid restrictions, require every covid related sign to be removed and announce that England is open for business and back to life.
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Here is the full length video report into the mysterious 'Global Disinformation Index' and how it censors political speech across Europe and the US. Please share widely, more people need to know.
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Prof Sir John Curtice lays out some brutal facts to put this Labour landslide into perspective:
— Labour’s vote share in England has *stayed the same* since the last election
— Most of the Tory losses are explained by former Tory voters choosing Reform
— Keir Starmer has won fewer votes than Jeremy Corbyn did in 2017
“In many ways, this looks more like an election the Conservatives have lost than one Labour have won.”
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2x0…
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Literally in the same speech from the PM:
"It is now clear that two doses of the vaccine are simply not enough to give the level of protection we all need"
Then: vaccine passports for nightclubs and large events, with double-vaccinated exempt from requirement to test
🤔
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This exchange shows how close to a propaganda state we got during Covid.
The media taking direct orders from their chums in government to stoke fear and “demand” for virus services that wasn’t there.
#lockdownfiles
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WTAF. @YouTube has taken down our interview with @ProfKarolSikora - Professor of Medicine at @UniOfBuckingham, former advisor to WHO - presumably for sounding too optimistic about Covid-19.
This really is getting sinister.
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"Judge me in a year," he told me in summer 2020.
One year on, Swedish Covid chief Anders Tegnell returned to @UnHerd to look back at lessons of the pandemic.
He was modest and cautious, but his overall message was clear: Sweden got it right.
👇👇👇
unherd.com/thepost/anders-te…
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However sympathetic you are to the populist cause, however “realist” on Ukraine, it is impossible to defend the head of the world’s most powerful nation putting out reckless semi-literate screeds like this
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Wowses. Ex Greek finance minister @yanisvaroufakis tells me Suella Braverman should be "expelled" from the UK for starting this "misanthropic, stupid debate" about immigration — that she is a "ridiculous idiot" and a "poor excuse for human nature"😳
unherd.com/thepost/yanis-var…
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Latest from Neil Ferguson and Imperial estimates Omicron as intrinsically 70% less severe than Delta.
Quite a difference from their 16th Dec report to SAGE: "We find no evidence of Omicron having different severity from Delta."
No mention of why they got it so wrong before.
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The UK Govt Health Security Agency quietly published its report this week into whether Covid lockdowns worked and concludes... wait for it...
"There is a lack of strong evidence on the effectiveness of NPIs to reduce COVID-19 transmission."
unherd.com/thepost/governmen…
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This 26 year old Australian, identified as a 'contact' of a Covid case but never testing positive, was held at an internment camp outside Darwin without her consent for 14 days.
There was no legal process or recourse.
Come on liberals, where are you?
unherd.com/thepost/inside-au…
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But they obviously weren’t socially distanced like this throughout the summit - why is this kind of Covid theatre now considered normal?
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China announces change of Covid strategy:
“Identify population base of the elderly, patients with underlying diseases, pregnant women, patients with chronic diseases and other groups, and formulate health and safety protection plans for them.”
Ummm @gbdeclaration 2 years late?
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Slightly depressed that this story is being covered by “right wing” channels all over the world but not a peep from BBC/Guardian/NYT et al.
Where’s the outrage about the shredding of due process, arbitrary detention, everything you’ve been championing for years?
😔
This 26 year old Australian, identified as a 'contact' of a Covid case but never testing positive, was held at an internment camp outside Darwin without her consent for 14 days.
There was no legal process or recourse.
Come on liberals, where are you?
unherd.com/thepost/inside-au…
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Just met my first pub menu with calories and it’s a disaster. Campaign to reverse this nonsense begins immediately
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Wow. The Times of London devotes its lead editorial to the pernicious influence of the Global Disinformation Index, saying "it has helped to stymie valuable and independent-minded journalism on the basis of little more than ideological prejudice." 🔥
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On August 6th, at the height of the riots, BBC Verify used some of its 60+ staff to report “one of the most shocking” racist attacks.
“An angry mob of white men surrounded and attacked a car with men of Asian heritage inside,” it said.
Using OSINT face recognition techniques to identify and name two of the attackers.
The only problem with the story? The people in the car were white.
In this new report, @UnHerd Investigations Editor @DavidRoseUK looked at 200 BBC Verify stories and found that over 5% had been corrected or retracted.
Why do they keep getting so many things wrong? And who verifies BBC Verify?
👇👇👇
unherd.com/2024/11/who-verif…
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I’m in Vienna on day 1 of the world’s first ‘lockdown for the unvaccinated’ for a forthcoming #UnHerdTV special report.
It’s eerie - and talking to people I can’t escape the feeling that the measure is more punitive than practical.
unherd.com/thepost/inside-au…
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Sorry but I can’t pretend to be outraged. Don’t care, can’t care. All it shows is how stupid the rules were all along.
Meanwhile Russia is assembling tanks on Europe’s border and the financial markets are tanking.
Is there anyone serious left in this country? Helloooooo
EXCLUSIVE: Boris Johnson had a birthday party during lockdown in June 2020 despite rules forbidding social gatherings indoors, ITV News has learnt.
Up to 30 staff celebrated in the cabinet room where Carrie Johnson surprised him with a cake, we're told.
itv.com/news/2022-01-24/bori…
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Beautiful walk around Stanford university campus with @DrJBhattacharya and John Ioannidis.
Despite the intimidation campaigns of 2020 they are not bitter — they have chosen to stay and pursue science, liberalism and academic freedom. With a smile.
Heroes.
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There's something very odd about changing speed limits to 20mph all over London (and Wales) at the same time as rolling out ULEZ in theory to reduce emissions.
The evidence suggests that driving slower at 20mph *increases* toxic emissions...
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The "trans business" has become like a religion, @RichardDawkins tells me, with the change in gender akin to the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation:
Full interview here:
unherd.com/2023/06/was-new-a…
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Can’t even watch the Matt Hancock Covid testimony because it makes me too angry.
The question we should be asking is how such a dangerous and pathetic man got into such a position of power, and how we can make sure it never happens again.
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Ref @joswinson ‘white men’ comment, here’s a reminder of the crowd at last month’s Lib Dem party conference. Prize to anyone who spots a non white face!
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The trouble we will face is that, if Omicron is mild but spreads very fast, then it will be all over the hospitals so hospitalisation and death numbers will look worse than they are (because everyone will have it whatever their other medical issues)
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I am Swedish, went to Sweden multiple times in 2020 and 2021 and I can tell you it was *not* in some kind of 'voluntary lockdown'.
This is pure cope, designed to obscure the powerful evidence that lockdowns were ineffective and unnecessary.
An implied false assertion in discussing pros and cons of lockdowns, is that where/when no lockdowns life was normal as per pre-pandemic. Accounts from Sweden were that caution was generally taken and mixing generally reduced, due to personal and social responsibility.
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What percentage of Covid transmission happens in shops? And what percentage of that will be prevented by making cloth facemasks mandatory? We're surely down to a fraction of 1 per cent at that point.
As a response to 2 UK cases of a new variant it seems utterly tokenistic.
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How bad do the NHS disaster stories have to get for the conversation to move on from “it just needs more money” to “we have to rethink it from first principles”?
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Votes for Labour in:
2017 (Jeremy Corbyn) — 12,877,918
2019 (Jeremy Corbyn) — 10,269,051
2024 (Keir Starmer) — 9,686,329
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Denmark, England, now Finland ends all Covid rules.
Domino effect has begun.
Likely order? Something like Norway, Sweden, Germany, Netherlands, Greece, Spain, France, Austria, Italy 🤷🏼♂️
yle.fi/news/3-12294896
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Prof Neil Ferguson tells Politico:
“I’m quite happy to be wrong if it’s wrong in the right direction.”
But why is making overly pessimistic forecasts an error in the right direction? The fact that gov scientists think that way has enormous consequences.
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Now might be a good time to repost my interview with Devi Sridhar in August 2020, in which she argues for 48 minutes in favour of Zero Covid.
Her most bonkers suggestion (among many): that people living in towns in England *without* Covid should be forbidden from travelling out or in, to protect their Zero Covid town.
That one, strangely, didn't make it into her book.
This wasn't coming from a kook with no influence: Sridhar had more TV appearances than any other "expert* by a wide margin, and was an official advisor to the Scottish govt.
It will always be terrifying how people like that, so divorced from reality and attracted to authoritarian fantasy, were elevated to positions of such influence during the crisis.
Article 👇
unherd.com/2020/08/the-zeroc…
Video 👇
piped.video/watch?v=_9D8qmGj…
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Wow. That's just handy isn't it, from the most quoted advisor in the British media!
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The "with" thing again 🤦♂️
theguardian.com/world/2021/d…
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The language in that Coutts memo is truly chilling.
The words “Inclusivity” and “Purpose” now fulfil the same function that “Socialism” did for Soviet apparatchiks — lofty-sounding cover for acts against people you don’t like.
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It seems like the longstanding question over naturally-acquired immunity versus immunity from vaccination might have been answered.
If it checks out, it will have far-reaching policy implications.
unherd.com/thepost/bombshell…
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70% of Twitter staff; 18,000 at Amazon; 10% of Salesforce.
@DavidSacks tells me the @elonmusk effect is cascading across Silicon Valley.
Suddenly, your job is "no longer based on what your politics are. It’s based on what your contribution is."
👇👇👇
unherd.com/thepost/david-sac…
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Nick Cave's early punk music energy was all about "fucking with people," he told me.
Me: "How do you fuck with people in 2023?"
Cave: "You'd go to church and be a conservative."
👇👇👇
unherd.com/2023/04/nick-cave…
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This is inside a popular restaurant in Stockholm, taken on 17th July 2020. No masks, no social distancing, completely normal.
The whole ‘Swedish people locked down without a mandate’ spin is nonsense.
It had best excess death result in Europe.
Those are the facts.
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What's so depressing here is the sense of spin, nudging, communicating not straightforward facts but "messaging" to achieve an outcome.
People are sick of it.
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Some sobering statistics for those that say we are already basically back to normal:
🔻1 in 4 UK licensed premises (25,000) have not yet reopened as restrictions make them unviable
🔻45% of sports and social clubs remain closed
🔻8,500 premises have shut their doors for good
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Announcement on repeat at Victoria Station:
“Please use hand sanitizer when entering and leaving the station. The little things we do help protect the little things we love.”
Please, @TfL, for the love of God make it stop 🙏🏻
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So many young people I know have tested positive with Omicron, have their Xmas plans ruined and are stuck at home.
Someone should do a club night for only pozzed people. Proof of positive status required for entry…
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Well that didn't last long.
Cases actually started increasing *faster* after the lockdown for the unvaccinated, so Austria is now moving to universal lockdown and mandatory vaccination from the spring.
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A major Danish study reports concerning differences in all-cause mortality between types of Covid vaccine — and barely anyone reports it 🤔
Analysis by @DrJBhattacharya and interview with lead Prof @StabellBenn now up at @UnHerd:
unherd.com/thepost/study-int…
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You hear that? That’s the sound of thousands of CEOs worldwide rapidly re-evaluating the risk-reward ratio of corporate woke activism. Quite a momentous 24h.
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Seems very hard to argue with any of this — @soniasodha being brilliantly reasonable on the @BBC
Sonia Sodha
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It’s genuinely frightening to me how lightly people seem to value their freedoms - readiness to give them up has become, incredibly, a sign of virtue
The solution for coronavirus surely worth considering is to shut borders for all non-essential travel until next year, bail out the aviation and travel industries, then aggressively test, trace and lockdown locally in this country. National self-isolation of people, not goods.
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Case numbers are *decreasing* in South Africa @sajidjavid @BorisJohnson. Feels like this might be worth looking into before you lurch the country into yet more restrictions
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As the Netherlands considers its first post-vaccine lockdown, I'm in the @telegraph trying to work out how the most nominally liberal governments became the most illiberal of the new era:
telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/11…
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Punchy language from 1200 Church of England and Catholic priests writing to govt against vaccine passports. They didn’t hold back!
bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56781724
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Suddenly there is wide open space for a new populist movement in the UK:
- anti-globalist/technocrat
- pro-freedom
- culturally conservative
- non free market-fundamentalist
Neither Tories or Labour anywhere near. Will anyone emerge to seize the opportunity?
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✔️ No more facemasks
✔️ No more work from home guidance
✔️ No more Covid passes
It’s not everything, but England is saying farewell to Covid life ahead of most of the rest of the world.
England is now uniquely positioned to show the world the way out of the Covid era.
(And if Boris sees this opportunity, it might just save his premiership)
Me at @UnHerd:
unherd.com/2022/01/covid-cou…
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Any red wall Tory MP who thinks Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss will help them win their next election is having a laugh.
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It’s not the specific revelations of the #lockdownfiles so much as the *tone* that we should remember.
Too much government power always ends up with pathetic little men getting off on it and disregarding the real-world impact of their whims.
Authoritarianism 101.
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NEW
Profs @SunetraGupta @MartinKulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya met over the weekend in the US to write a declaration calling for a different #Covid approach. They're in Washington DC today meeting admin officials.
Text and interview up now on @unherd
unherd.com/2020/10/covid-exp…
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Hunt.
The same Hunt who approvingly quoted China sealing in its citizens in their homes during lockdown.
Beneath the genial centrist exterior there's a hard-edged technocrat with a thirst for power and an admiration for authoritarians.
Watch out!
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NEW 📽️
@DrJBhattacharya and other scientists are suing Anthony Fauci and the Biden admin for breach of 1st amendment rights over Covid era censorship.
If successful, it would set a historic precedent for freedom of speech.
Full interview on #UnHerdTV:
unherd.com/thepost/jay-bhatt…
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I've just read the first formal report of the UK's Covid enquiry by Baroness Hallett. While she is meticulously careful to avoid arriving at any conclusions on important questions (eg were lockdowns worth it?) she has included a few sentences that leap out from the page: 🧵
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Can we please have a universal amnesty on absurd breaches of absurd Covid rules, ideally alongside a promise never to introduce them again?
Then can we please start talking about more interesting things?
Thank you!
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John Sopel and Emily Maitlis, fresh from attending George Osborne's wedding last weekend, are now co-hosting Tony Blair's policy summit today.
Must be so liberating for them to have left the establishment BBC and be free to rattle the cage with fresh ideas!
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Ta da! @YouTube reinstates our @ProfKarolSikora interview - no doubt persuaded by the huge negative attention they were getting on here, so thanks Twitterers ✌🏻
For people without noisy friends, this kind of big tech censorship is the end of the road. Scary.
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"Covid measures have become theatrical rituals intended to convey seriousness, reassure the compliant that their sacrifices have not been in vain, and punish the noncompliant."
Park Macdougald @hpmacd on Novak Djokovic @UnHerd
unherd.com/thepost/novak-djo…
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The latest estimates of protection from infection from 2 vaccines (<50%) leave the case for domestic vaccine passports in tatters.
telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/08…
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In which Richard Dawkins
- acknowledges that being religious is better for human flourishing
- takes back his Covid-era vilification of vaccine refusers
- condemns universities for not protecting dissident faculty like Kathleen Stock
unherd.com/2023/06/was-new-a…
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Within the past 24h:
1. Thierry Breton, EU Commissioner and chief regulator, sends a threatening letter to Elon Musk
2. Musk responds by telling him to “literally fuck your own face”
3. The EU commission distances itself from Breton
Rather clarifies where the power lies 😳
The European Commission has denied that its internal market commissioner had approval from Ursula von der Leyen to send the letter, with one EU official saying, 'Thierry has his own mind and way of working and thinking'. on.ft.com/3WYQ0ea
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Did the BBC, CBS etc go live to Wuhan at any previous new year? No. Now the Chinese govt arranges a lovely (somewhat obnoxious) PR display and all the Western news networks obediently take it? 🤨
Once the coronavirus epicenter, thousands pack Wuhan, China and let go of balloons to celebrate the New Year cbsn.ws/3o4kVSq
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No wonder people are terrified about this thing never being allowed to end when every day there are stories like this in the media - it’s not hysteria, it’s an entirely rational anxiety
🚨 Experts have warned that restrictions on large gatherings could remain in place for 'the next few years'
telegraph.co.uk/global-healt…
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The central fantasy in the Cummings testimony is that he and a couple of brainiacs invented lockdown late in the night in Number Ten, bravely going against the consensus.
In reality it was simply the UK falling into line with the same policy as the rest of the Western world.
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One thing’s for sure: after today’s protests if there *isnt* a dramatic spike in Covid cases in 1-3 weeks it will be tricky to argue that outside social distancing is even worth talking about
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Blast from the past: July 2020.
In retrospect, it's amazing how heretical and brave it seemed for Anders Tegnell simply to stick to normal principles of evidence-based policy.
But the rest of the world — including many still influential people on here — had gone mad.
July 2020
Anders Tegnell, in charge of Sweden's COVID response, said he did not mandate masks because they are unscientific and provide false reassurance.
He was fiercely criticized for this.
From 2020-23, Sweden had the lowest excess death rate in Europe.
Tegnell was right.
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And half way through he should say that Partygate has showed him the absurdity of trying to micromanage all society via centralised diktat - and vow that he will never make that mistake again
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The Health Protection (Vaccination) regulations 2009 place a legal requirement on the Secretary of State for Health to accept the JCVI recommendations when it comes to national vaccination programmes:
legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2009…
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This is horrific. Hopefully will help people see that the currently fashionable authoritarianism takes us to a dark place
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Asked about the aviation industry, the prime minister says: "The best thing for them is to get flying — and that's absolutely critical".
Great idea! Why didn't they think of that?
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You have to wonder whether, if Boris had followed his original instincts and taken a braver course on Covid more similar to Sweden, he would still be prime minister today.
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Plan B is bad policy, bad politics, and should be resisted or ignored.
Me in @UnHerd
unherd.com/2021/12/new-lockd…
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Ouch. From both Left and Right, it’s a far cry from March. Number Ten is making decisions based on opinion polls, but the thing about public opinion is *it changes*.
Rather like the media, it’s with you... until it isn’t
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Latest YouGov data on who British *Conservative* voters would prefer to see win the US election:
Harris - 55%
Trump - 28%
Don’t know - 18%
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*NEW INTERVIEW*
Dr Steve James, who challenged Sajid Javid over vax mandates, tells me
- why he hasn't got the vaccine
- why is prepared to lose his job over it
- why 10% of NHS staff agree with him
A minority voice, but deserves to be heard.
unherd.com/thepost/dr-steve-…
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"BBC Verify" is being pushed very hard on the nightly news, Newsnight etc
Given the appalling record of so-called fact-checkers over the past few years, the creation of an official Truth Department within the national broadcaster is a mighty hostage to fortune.
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"All a lockdown does is reduce infection levels for the period of time it's in force," Neil Ferguson tells the BBC. "Once you release the lockdown, infection levels start going up again."
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For adults, I'm strongly pro free speech and against censorship.
For under-16s, I'm in favour of a social media ban, if it can be practically implemented.
This is not a contradictory position.
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Slightly stunned by this.
A new UnHerd/Focaldata poll out today reveals that 54% of Britons aged 18-24 agree with the statement: "The state of Israel should not exist" 😶
unherd.com/newsroom/majority…
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@BBCNews decides to send a push notification to 1.5m Brits at 9pm on a Friday night to inform them that Gwyneth Paltrow’s skiing accident trial is… ongoing.
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