Your Saturday PMP Briefing
FREE fact-based analyses, expert advice, fact-checks, challenging comments & thought-provoking opinions... Editorially independent.
Welcome to the first PMP briefing of the year.
We take this occasion to wish you all a happy and very safe new year.
We also thank you for your warm messages of support and your precious help in supporting our magazine with donations as we work very hard to recover all the content that had disappeared after last year’s hack attack against our magazine.
Enjoy this week’s reading!
— The Editorial Team
Why transmission among the triple-vaxxed shouldn’t alarm you.
Why breakthrough infections in people who have had three jabs shouldn’t alarm you. And why vaccination and protective measures, such as more face mask use, greater testing, and better ventilation, all have an important part to play.
Home Office’s flawed and dangerous “scientific assessments” put children claiming asylum at risk.
The Home Office has announced that it is setting up a new Scientific Advisory Committee to provide advice on ways to check how old an asylum seeker is. To say there are concerns to be had about this is underselling it spectacularly.
UK bird flu outbreak: Risk of wider infection in the general public remains low.
The views of experts and health professionals on a confirmed case of avian influenza (H5N1) in a person in the South West of England, which the UK Health Security Agency says there is so far no evidence of spread of the infection.
Schools are stuck in 2020 too.
It’s a new year. But it somehow still feels like 2020 too. We know so much more about COVID yet we are still having the same conversations we had in 2020, Stephanie Salgado writes.
Masks in schools is not a matter of opinion. It works.
Suggesting that the benefit of wearing face masks at school to limit the spread of COVID-19 is more based on hope than evidence is misinformation. Even when it comes from the BBC.
Capitol assault: The real reason Trump and the crowd almost killed US democracy.
The moment that could have brought US democracy to its knees on January 6, 2021 was a genuine co-production between Trump and his supporters.
Professor Chris Grey unpicking Frost’s resignation, and arguing that it shows how Brexit events and policy are once again entirely about the toxic internal politics of the Conservative Party.
We overestimate how much we think others want the world to return to its pre-pandemic ways, which makes us pessimistic about the potential to make things better.
The NHS and social care are beyond full stretch.
Drawing on the latest performance, COVID data, and recent intelligence fed to him by trust leaders, Chris Hopson, CEO of NHS Providers, explains where the NHS is up to and why the government must be ready to introduce new restrictions at pace if they’re needed.
When will life return to normal after the pandemic?
Surveying by the Office for National Statistics shows Brits are increasingly pessimistic about things returning to how they were before.
21st century Britain: Still the ‘emancipated empire’?
Is history best looked at once we have finished with the future, as UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss seems to believe?
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