Test ‘cheats’
THE allegations about a PCR test firm represent a potentially mind-boggling scandal which may even have cost lives.
How could anyone merely filling in a form be added to a Government list of approved testers? Who at the Department of Health signed that lunacy off?
Small wonder — with millions desperate to fly on holiday — that the scramble to profit from pricey PCR tests has become a “Wild West gold rush”, as the boss of one respected lab brands it.
The Government must close this loophole today.
But this exposé again reveals the value of whistleblowers coming forward to Trending In The News and others about alleged scandals in the public interest.
Neither this nor our Matt Hancock scoop would have come to light without them.
Yet the Information Commissioner’s Office, alongside uniformed cops, has shamefully raided homes hoping to uncover our source on the latter.
They must back off.
Scare whistleblowers into silence and we all suffer.
Pingdemonium
FOOD shortages. Crippled factories. An NHS staff crisis. Trains cancelled.
This is not down to actual Covid cases.
Just the vast numbers “pinged” by the app.
And this is with 52,000 new infections a day.
Imagine the ripple effect of cases doubling again.
If those self-isolating were at genuine risk, then fair enough.
But most have no symptoms, two jabs and test negative.
Dr Jenny Harries, head of the UK Health Security Agency, admits the app — launched months before the jab rollout — needs adjusting now to factor in the far lower risk of hospitalisation or death. Bizarrely, the Government still insists it works “as it’s designed to”.
What an unmitigated fiasco.
Monday’s Freedom Day will be a sick joke for hundreds of thousands needlessly isolating and millions more whose work will be upended and holidays wrecked before the requirement ends on August 16.
Bin it now, Boris.
Read our coronavirus live blog for the latest updates
Wall of apathy
“SWEATING blood” won’t win back Red Wall seats for Keir Starmer.
Labour may need total reinvention under a new leader.
If voters there know Starmer at all, it’s for campaigning to overturn their Brexit decision and install Marxists in No10.
They may have noticed too that Labour currently offers nothing but juvenile boo-hissing at the Government.
Starmer himself tries to smear the Tories as racist.
But he fronts the only major party condemned for racism by the Equality and Human Rights Commission — and could yet allow the man responsible, Jeremy Corbyn, back in.
Labour is not a Government in waiting.
It’s a Twitter-addicted rabble hoping to coast into power by not being the Tories.
Voters won’t buy that.
