Today's Must-Reads - 19 April 2023

A selection of the latest news, studies, reports and articles

I spend a lot of time each day gathering together new information and interesting articles. I then pick one or two of the most interesting topics and write about them. However, that leaves a lot of missed out information that I’m not sharing.

Below is a summary of all the latest articles and information that I’ve found. Today, this is a slimmed down version for all subscribers but will be for paid subscribers only a lot of the time in the future.

Please consider taking out a paid subscription because it enables me to spend longer reporting on the news that isn’t, but should be reported.

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Climate Change

• No more cheap flights is the new reality for air travel. Airlines face an expensive and challenging few decades as climate compliance laws get stricter. Lower and middle class people will have to say goodbye to flying which will be reserved only for the rich. Enjoy your holiday in the caravan down the road.

Covid

• China began developing two Covid vaccines before the official outbreak says the Telegraph. A US senate report concluded that the pandemic most likely came from a lab leak. The Covid-19 pandemic was, more likely than not, the result of a research related incident.

Covid Mandates & Lockdowns

• Brownstone looks at a crumbling regime: lessons for the social sciences and humanities. The core problem originates out of a hastily devised ‘scientific consensus’ in the early days of the COVID-19 crisis that imposed unprecedented and heavy-handed measures of social control for combatting the novel and highly infectious respiratory virus. While it is easy to assign opportunism to a handful of actors in such institutions, a more profound concern exists. The silence and silencing of biomedical scientists critical of the rapid and all-encompassing “scientific consensus” indicates a crisis not only for science but for academia itself and its role ensuring the survival of democratic institutions.

• Princess Cruises are advising mask wearing on their ships again. Due to recent positive cases, one of its smallest cruise ships has reverted back to mask wearing.

• The BMJ says in-person schooling is essential even during periods of high transmission of Covid. School closures also have other long-term consequences for children. As a result of the pandemic, UNICEF reports increased rates of childhood marriage with up to 10 million more girls being at risk of becoming child brides by 2030. UNICEF highlights that school closures lead to girls spending more time at home and unsupervised, increasing their exposure to sexual activity, sexual violence and unwanted pregnancy, exacerbate school drop outs due to financial pressure on households and parents during the pandemic and increase negative effects on nutritional safety among 370 million children not receiving a school meal in 150 countries.

Economy/Energy/Finance

• The housing bubble in Germany looks like it’s popping as well. House prices are down 10% from their peak.

  

Health

• Mortality for young Americans is increasing at an alarming rate. Life expectancy for the average American in now 76 years, hitting the lowest point in nearly two decades after declining for the second year in a row. John Yang and Dr. Steven Woolf explore what the factors are and why is it happening.

Politics

• How to lie with statistics - CBC edition. CBC are currently annoyed with Musk/Twitter for claiming that they are a Government-funded media outlet. So let’s go onto their website and see how much of their funding is from the Government (pink bars in chart below). It looks like a smaller proportion than revenue (blue bars) until you notice the greyscale tilda on the y-axis, quietly disappearing $1 billion!

  

• On Monday, British MPs debated whether the government should hold a referendum on the UK’s involvement in the WHO pandemic treaty. Danny Kruger MP and others warned that the proposed treaty on pandemic prevention and preparedness represents “an assault on our freedoms” and would create a “vast public health surveillance mechanism”.

• Are you on Twitter’s secret VIP list? Big names like Mr Beast and Joe Biden are reportedly on a special watch list of tweeters who get an artificial visibility boost on the platform.

• A court filing by the Guantanamo Military Commission reveals the possibility that there was CIA involvement in the 9/11 attacks…Two of the hijackers were being closely monitored by the CIA and may, wittingly or not, have been recruited by Langley long before they flew planes into the World Trade Center buildings.

Science

• A video and transcript of William Briggs at Hillsdale College discussing Why Science is Broken.

Ukraine

• Is Washington trying to distance itself from Zelensky? Politico says Ukraine could be looking at another Maidan. President Zelensky has become part of the problem as he is a leader with autocratic tendencies. Politico says this may sound surprising, looking in from the outside - LOL. The article also discusses his dodgy dealings and corruption.

Vaccines

• Remember how The Science said you had to get two doses of the original monovalent mRNA vaccine before getting the bivalent version? Well now that all the stock has been used up, I mean The Science has changed (I certainly don’t mean after scientific trials to see if it’s safe because that hasn’t happened), the FDA are advising unvaccinated individuals to go straight to a single dose of the bivalent version.

• And for older adults and people with weak immune systems, the FDA has cleared another booster shot for spring protection.

• What is a safety signal and why does it matter? Ramesh Thakur doesn’t believe the significance of this concept in medical science and public health interventions is widely understood in the general public.