News Round-Up: Vaccine Mandates Breached Human Rights, Facebook Improving Censorship Efforts in the EU and the Woke Culture of UK Courts
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:
Australian court: vaccine mandates in workplaces violated human rights.
UK courts and press fully woke: a male killer wanting to be called a woman is called a woman throughout.
Facebook steps up censorship efforts in the EU.
A British parliamentary group calls for an inquiry into the medicines regulator's failure to inform the public about the dangers of Covid vaccines.
A bad week for electric cars.
Australian court: vaccine mandates in workplaces violated human rights
Australia's Queensland Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that mandating Covid vaccines to police officers and ambulance workers was unlawful, The Guardian reports. Specifically, the court ruled in three cases in which a total of 86 individuals had brought complaints against the state's police and ambulance services in relation to the vaccine mandates imposed on them in 2021 and 2022. Failure to vaccinate at the time meant that police officers and paramedics could be subject to disciplinary action, including loss of their jobs.
In the case of the decision concerning the police officers, the Court pointed out that the imposition of the mandates did not take into account human rights, since the officers were in principle required to undergo a medical procedure without their consent. In the case of ambulance staff, on the other hand, the obligation should have been reflected in their employment contracts but was not. The obligation imposed by both institutions was therefore unlawful.
On 16 February, the New Zealand Court of Appeal handed down a similar decision, upholding the appeal of the defense force members and also declaring that the introduction of vaccine mandates was unlawful. Significantly, several days after the decision was taken, Winston Peters, the country's deputy prime minister, took to social media to criticise the press, which, for some reason, was not very enthusiastic about covering such a decision. At the same time, throughout the Covid crisis, it essentially supported the previous government's strict pandemic policy and vaccine mandates.
Both Australia and New Zealand stood out in the Covid crisis for imposing stringent and unreasonable restrictions and obligations for the whole population.
UK courts and press fully woke: a male killer wanting to be called a woman is called a woman throughout
26-year-old Scarlet Blake was convicted of the murder of a stranger at an Oxford Crown Court in Britain on Monday and given a life sentence with a minimum term of 24 years, writes The Telegraph. Although the name Scarlet suggests that the convict is a woman, this is not the case. Scarlet Blake considers himself to be 'transgender' – a man who says he is a woman.
Throughout the murder trial, Blake has also been referred to as a woman by the court. It transpires that judges in the UK have been instructed to respect the so-called gender identity of persons appearing in court. That is, if a man wishes to be addressed as a woman, the judges will do so.
In addition to the court, Blake has also been referred to as a woman by the press. However, this has understandably led to quite wide criticism. For example, after yet another Sky News report calling Blake a woman, J.K. Rowling, a best-selling author and an advocate for women's rights, wrote bluntly on social media: "I'm so sick of this shit. This is not a woman." Another social media user, however, appealed to the BBC's fact-checking department to fact-check one of the BBC's own news stories in which the same Blake was consistently referred to as a woman.
While such treatment of male perpetrators is simply confusing, it could also affect attitudes towards women, for example. On the more practical side, it distorts crime statistics. In Blake's case, the police have admitted that the brutal murder is now being counted as carried out by a woman in crime statistics. This, in turn, is disputed by the Prime Minister's Office, who promises it will be counted as a male crime. Blake was sent to a men’s prison to serve his sentence.
All in all, the only question is: is there a future for a society that argues about such issues?
Facebook steps up censorship efforts in the EU
Marco Pancini, head of the European Union (EU) division of Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, writes on the company's blog that the company has long been preparing for the EU parliamentary elections. Pancini explains that the company has invested more than $20 billion (€18.5 billion) in "safety and security" since 2016 and has quadrupled the number of employees involved in ensuring that, to 40,000. They include 15,000 moderators who review content posted on Facebook and Instagram in more than 70 languages, including all official EU languages.
Pancini said Meta has taken the necessary steps to bring its operations in line with the requirements of the EU's Digital Services Act. He also pledges that the company will comply with its obligations under the EU Code of Practice on Disinformation.
Meta pledges to fight election meddling and fraud in every way possible. Pancini says it has built the largest fact-checking programme among social media platforms over the years to combat the spread of misinformation and promises to use artificial intelligence responsibly to this end.
As the elections approach, Meta will also launch an "Election Operations Centre", where employees from different areas of the company will work together to identify potential threats and implement immediate countermeasures.
Meta pledges to focus in particular on three threats: preventing the spread of misinformation, tackling influence operations, and limiting the spread of fake content created by artificial intelligence.
On the face of it, preventing the spread of content classified in this way may not be a bad idea. However, it should be recalled that it was precisely the prevention of the spread of misinformation that was also the subject of much discussion during the Covid crisis. In reality, however, censorship was carried out by social media companies under the guise of combating misinformation under pressure from governments. This prevention of the spread of truthful information has been acknowledged by the founder and owner of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. The earlier talk of foreign influence has also been greatly exaggerated. For example, in the case of the 2016 US presidential election, there was much talk of Russian influence tipping the scales in favour of Donald Trump, who won the election, but it has been explained in hindsight that if such activity did occur, it was marginal and had little or no impact on anyone.
In reality, the danger behind such developments, however, lies in the fact that the effective operations centre that is being set up, with its thousands of 'fact-checkers', will once again start to restrict the dissemination of information that is true but somehow declared inappropriate by the circles of power.
A British parliamentary group calls for an inquiry into the medicines regulator's failure to inform the public about the dangers of Covid vaccines
An all-party parliamentary group set up in the UK Parliament on Covid pandemic response has sent a letter to Parliament's Health Committee calling for an urgent inquiry into the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), The Telegraph reports.
The letter says the agency is acting in a way that puts patients at risk, rather than protecting them, and cites as one example its actions during the Covid crisis when the public was not informed of the dangers of Covid vaccines. It also points out that the Parliamentary group has reason to believe that the MHRA was aware of potentially dangerous side effects following vaccination as early as February 2021, but did not highlight the problems for several months.
For example, safety information on AstraZeneca's vaccine, which said the product could cause life-threatening blood clots, was only made public in April. By that time, 24 million people had already been vaccinated. The occurrence of cardiac problems, myocarditis, and pericarditis, linked in particular to mRNA vaccines, was also reported as early as February but was not made public until June.
In addition, the letter points out that the UK's adverse reaction reporting system Yellow Card, set up by the Agency to monitor the safety of medicines, is not working as well as it should and in some cases is only able to identify one out of 180 cases of a dangerous side effect.
In addition to withholding information, the MPs' letter states that the agency also lacks the capacity or ability to properly monitor adverse reactions to products they authorise for the market.
The Health Committee responded that an investigation is very likely to come.
Bad week for electric cars
US tech giant Apple has abandoned its electric car project, Bloomberg reports. The news came as a surprise to some 2,000 employees of the project. Many of those employees will be transferred to a department working on artificial intelligence, which the company sees as a field with great potential for development. Dubbed 'Project Titan', Apple had been working on the project since 2014, which aimed to create an autonomous vehicle with a limousine-like interior and voice-guided navigation.
Recent weeks have also brought reports from the automotive industry suggesting that the market is not embracing electric vehicles. Ford, for example, has announced the suspension of production of a new model, their new truck F-150 Lightning, citing quality control problems. Mercedes, on the other hand, has said it will abandon its goal of producing only electric cars in 2030 and has promised to produce only the electric vehicle models that drivers want to buy.
In January, when presenting its financial results, Ford announced that it had lost $65,000 (€60,450) for every electric vehicle sold in 2023. Ford also cut its investment in electric car production by $12 billion (€11.16 billion) and announced a delay on a $3.5 billion (€3.26 billion) investment in a battery plant in Michigan. General Motors, on the other hand, abandoned its target of selling 400,000 electric cars this year.
In addition, an analysis published in the United States showed that electric cars are by no means the 'greenest', even if their 'greenness' is measured only in terms of CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions. The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy conducts a similar analysis every year, and this year's winner was the Toyota hybrid car.
The point is that the analysis takes into account not just the emissions from burning fuel while the car is running, but the emissions over the entire life cycle of the car. For example, emissions from mining the minerals needed to make the car, the manufacturing of the car, the weight of the car (lithium batteries are heavy), and the source from which the electricity is generated are also taken into account. So it's not really surprising that electric cars are not the best choice even on a narrow CO2 parameter.