News Round-Up: Covid Vaccine Lies, Men In Women's Olympic Swimming and British Labour's Climate Plans
Every week, the editorial team of Freedom Research compiles a round-up of news that caught our eye, or what felt like under-reported aspects of news deserving more attention.
Over the past week, the following topics attracted our attention:
Australia's top doctor criticises government misinformation related to Covid vaccines: they were neither safe nor effective.
British election: Labour would ban the sale of petrol and diesel earlier than planned.
Transideological theatre project struggles: cannot find an actress for the part of J. K. Rowling in a play trying to mock the renowned writer.
Austria: Muslims make up more than a third of primary school children in the capital Vienna.
CAS decision: men cannot enter female swimming competition in the Olympics.
Australia's top doctor criticises government misinformation related to Covid vaccines: they were neither safe nor effective
Former president of Australian Medical Association (AMA) Dr Kerryn Phelps is one of dozens of doctors who made public submissions to the federal government’s Covid-19 Response Inquiry, news.com.au reports. In her comments, she accused the government of spreading misinformation and putting people at risk. Phelps accused the government of fuelling mistrust towards health authorities while overselling the “safety and efficacy” of vaccines, and ignoring those suffering serious adverse events from the jabs. Phelps says it is clear that not much was initially known about the Covid vaccines and their side effects. “In the urgency to vaccinate as many people as possible as quickly as possible, patients who had suffered significant vaccine injury were encouraged or mandated to have subsequent doses with inadequate evidence for the potential damage this might do to someone who had already suffered an adverse reaction to the vaccine,” she explained, adding that it was very difficult to obtain a medical exemption from the vaccine requirement. Another consequence of this lack of information about adverse events “was that many patients report that they were not believed, or their doctors initially did not recognise the diagnosis or did not have treatment protocols in place”.
Phelps herself reported a devastating side effect that followed the injection of the Pfizer Covid vaccine that she and her partner received at the end of 2022. Commenting on this at the time, she noted that there was “a lot that our public health agencies got right during this pandemic”, and yet significant mistakes were made. It is noteworthy that despite her criticism of vaccines, she is still a proponent of the unreasonable virus containment measures that were in place in Australia and in the whole world. In her recent commentary, Phelps wrote, for example, that pandemic preparedness should be improved and, as one of the measures, N95 masks be made available in schools in doing that.
British election: Labour would ban the sale of petrol and diesel cars earlier than planned
Labour, which has a good chance of taking power in the UK's July election, has pledged to ban the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2030, GB News reports. This means that the decision by the Conservative government of the incumbent PM Rishi Sunak, to postpone the deadline to 2035, would be reversed again.
According to the Labour Manifesto, the climate crisis is the greatest long-term global challenge. They also argue that moving towards 'Net Zero' means opportunities for growth and tackles the cost-of-living crisis. That the reality will be the opposite, with growth impossible, energy supplies unstable and costs high, if based on renewables, is the message from a number of analysts as well as from real life experience.
There are of course other disturbing plans ahead as well when Labour takes power. For example, they announced some time ago that they would allow tougher sentences for crimes against so-called transgender people, i.e. those who identify themselves differently from their biological sex. This would mean that attacks motivated by hatred of the victim's gender identity would be 'aggravated offenses'. This would bring so-called transphobic abuse into line with assault and harassment motivated by hatred on the grounds of race or religion. It is important to note, however, that it is not only crimes of physical violence that are at issue here, but also people's use of language. In other words, there is a good chance that people who say that men and women do exist, could face criminal prosecution and even imprisonment.
Despite these and other similar plans absent of common sense, Labour's lead over the Conservatives is staggering, with 39% of voters saying they would vote for them in the July 4 election, according to polls published on Thursday. Support for Sunak's Conservatives has dropped to third place with 18%. Reform UK, led by Nigel Farage, who has previously led the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), or the Brexit movement, campaigned against mass immigration and in recent years also made his living as a presenter at GB News, has now also preceded them.
Transideological theatre project struggles: cannot find an actress for the part of J. K. Rowling in a play trying to mock the renowned writer
A theatre production in the UK is struggling to find female actors for a play that criticises, not to say mocks, the views of author J.K. Rowling, writes The Telegraph. The author of the Harry Potter stories and a women's rights campaigner Rowling is known for criticising transideology, particularly men who identify as transgender and call themselves women. Such men want to compete in sports with women, for example, use toilets and changing rooms meant for women only, want to be put in women's prisons if they are prosecuted for rape as an example, and insist that all other people treat them as women. Rowling has spoken out widely about such cases and has strongly criticised such people and the system that allows and even protects such behaviour.
She has already been under a constant attack by the trans activists and death threats have been made against her. Actors who have become world-famous thanks to the film versions of her Harry Potter stories – Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson – have also publicly vilified her.
However, Rowling seems to have more silent supporters than opponents in the acting community. The play, which is scheduled to premiere in August at the Fringe theatre festival in the Scottish capital Edinburgh, with a working title that calls the author by an exceptionally crude word for the female genitalia, is having trouble finding female actors. So far, no one has accepted the part of Rowling and no one has been found to play Emma Watson. To date, 90 actors have already refused to take part. However, male actors to play Rupert Grint and Daniel Radcliffe have been found.
Austria: Muslims make up more than a third of primary school children in the capital Vienna
In the Austrian capital Vienna, 35% of schoolchildren come from the Muslim community, making it the largest religion among the pupils, Remix News reports. This is essentially the same as the number of pupils from families of any Christian denomination. Catholics make up 21% of students, Orthodox 13% and Protestants 2%. The remainder are non-religious.
Compared to 2016/2017, the last time such a survey was carried out, the number of Muslims has increased significantly. At that time, Muslims made up 28% of students. Catholics were at 31%.
Christoph Wiederkehr, Vienna's left-wing deputy mayor in charge of education, said he was not concerned by such developments. “Faith is a private matter and freedom of belief or religious freedom is a very valuable asset,” he said.
But there are those who see dangers. Social scientist Kenan Güngor, who advises the Austrian government, for example, recommends changing school curricula to place more emphasis on democratic values. This, he says, would combat what they are taught outside the classroom. He is clearly referring to the life skills taught in mosques. “There are more and more people converting to Islam – they then tend to be more radical,” Güngor warned.
That Güngor is quite correct on this point becomes evident when one looks at the violence perpetrated by radical Islamists in Austria's neighbouring Germany over the past few weeks. Last week, for example, we wrote about how a radicalised Islamist attacked Michael Stürzenberger, an anti-immigration activist in the German city of Mannheim in the state of Baden-Württemberg, and ended up killing the policeman who came to deal with the situation in a knife attack wounding the policeman’s neck. But on Wednesday this week, in Frankfurt, an Afghan immigrant made a knife attack on a 41-year-old woman who had fled the war in Ukraine, leaving her seriously injured.
These incidents do not directly concern schools in the Austrian capital, but should make all officials equally vigilant and take the threat of radicalisation seriously.
CAS decision: men cannot enter female swimming competition in the Olympics
The swimmer Lia (formerly William) Thomas, born as a man and now claiming to be a woman, did not qualify to apply for a place on the US women's swimming team for the Paris Olympics, Reuters reports. The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) on Wednesday rejected his appeal. Thomas is a former National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I swimming champion from 2022, but shortly after his victory, World Aquatics voted to restrict the participation of transgender athletes in elite women's competitions.
The restriction meant that a male athlete had to have had a 'transition' to opposite sex before the age of 12 and not have gone through puberty. In other words, the normal development of the child must have been impeded before the time the male children become significantly more physically capable than girls. Although the methods used to do this are unscientific and harmful to children's health (see e.g. here), the logic of sports officials is that men who call themselves women should not have a physical advantage over real women and that competition should be fair.
Thomas, who began to openly consider himself as a woman as a freshman at college, hoped to overturn such a decision through CAS and qualify for the United States Olympic team trials, saying that such a treatment, in his view, was not only invalid and unlawful, but that it was also discriminating against him. CAS did not see it that way and this means Thomas cannot compete among women.
Please do NOT refer to Lia/William Thomas as 'she' or 'herself'!