Free Republic

The most high-profile opponent of Australia’s brutal COVID-19 lockdowns, vaccine mandates, and violent suppression of public criticism has been Monica Smit. Her resistance is continuing. She has announced that she will be suing the Victoria police. The court case is scheduled for July 23 and is expected to take 15 days.

To them, apparently, only rich people should have school choice.. School choice has become a hot-button issue after the COVID-19 lockdowns shined a light on the scope of the government’s authority and gave parents a window into public school curricula. Many private schools stayed open while public school systems across the country closed in-person learning for entire semesters, even years, and remote learning lifted the veil on what public school kids are actually learning – and not learning. Private schools across the country reported seeing a significant uptick in enrollment over the past two years, while public school enrollment declined...

18.6% increase compared with 2019... The UK recorded its highest ever year-on-year increase of alcohol-related deaths during 2020, with COVID-19 lockdowns playing a huge role in the rise. Figures released today by the the Office of National Statistics (ONS) show that there were 8,974 deaths “from alcohol-specific causes,” an 18.6% increase compared with 2019. That represents the highest year-on-year increase since records began being collected in 2001. In an attempt to deflect the elephant in the living room, the ONS insisted that there are “many complex factors” to consider in explaining the deaths. However, the Alcohol Change charity warned last...

In the end, we didn’t crush the virus, but we did crush a lot of ordinary people.Did lockdowns take more lives than they saved? It’s an important question. Earlier this month, the Rand Corporation and the University of Southern California, working on behalf of the National Bureau of Economic Research, released a working paper to ascertain just that.Most casual news consumers might not have heard about it, and that’s not surprising because here’s what they found:We find that following the implementation of shelter-in-place policies, excess mortality increases. … We failed to find that countries or U.S. states that implemented [shelter...

Public health authorities in California have unveiled a “Blueprint for a Safer Economy” that requires counties to meet new “health equity metrics” in order to emerge from the current Covid-19 lockdowns. It’s a broad experiment in social justice. Under the plan, counties must reduce “disparities in levels of transmission” in “low-income, Black, Latino, [and] Pacific Islander” communities before they can move forward with reopening. In effect, local businesses must remain closed until local bureaucrats are satisfied that ill-defined racial quotas have been met. The underlying assumption of the blueprint is that race-based coronavirus disparities are the result of “systemic racism,”...