Ross Clark

One of the unfortunate side effects of a steeply rising oil price this year is that it seems to have undermined the potential profitability of the Cambo oil field off the Shetlands. Announcing this morning that it was pulling out of the project, in which it had a 30 per cent share, Shell said it had re-examined the figures and ‘concluded the economic case for investment in this project is not strong enough at this time.’ No, it doesn’t make much sense to me, either. If Shell was happy to go ahead with the Cambo project this time last year, when oil was $40 a barrel it is hard to see what has changed to make it less economic with oil at $70 a barrel and the longer-term outlook for oil prices much higher.

Ministers accused of overreacting to the Omicron variant will feel vindicated by the comments of Moderna chief executive Stéphane Bancel. In an interview with the FT, Bancel said he expects his company’s vaccine to suffer a ‘material drop’ in efficacy against Omicron – on the grounds that the new variant has 32 mutations to its spike protein. The protein, which the virus uses to attach itself to human cells, is targeted by the Moderna vaccine. The vaccine seemed to cope with previous variants – but they had fewer mutations. Bancel said the company’s scientists had told him: ‘This is not going to be good.’ Yes, it will be possible to re-design the vaccine to cope with Omicron, but it will take several months.

Throughout the Insulate Britain protests there was a suspicion that the group was deliberately trying to get its members behind bars during the COP26 conference — a suspicion that was enhanced when a spokesperson for the group told the Guardian on 24 October:  It’s fair to say that there is absolute disbelief and surprise that the campaign has lasted this long. We assumed that we would not be allowed to carry on disrupting the motorway network to the extent we have been. We thought that people would basically be in prison… if our actions are as dangerous and as disruptive as is being claimed, then I think the question has to be: why are we being allowed to continue day after day?

The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation has recommended that Covid booster jabs be offered to people in their forties, after they became available to the over-fifties earlier this year. But, as recently as August, the World Health Organisation opposed booster jabs. It said in a statement:  ‘In the context of ongoing global vaccine supply constraints, administration of booster doses will exacerbate inequities by driving up demand and consuming scarce supply.

Are vaccine passports being used in other countries in an attempt to cut Covid infections – or to try and boost vaccine take up by curtailing the social lives of those who refuse? The latest change in policy in Austria would appear to confirm that for them, it’s the latter. From today, access to restaurants, bars and any event with more than 25 guests will be limited to people who can prove they have been fully vaccinated, that they have previously recovered from Covid or that they have had one jab and a negative PCR test. In four weeks’ time, only the double-jabbed and those who can show they have recovered from Covid will be allowed in. Austria, like many EU countries, has had a vaccine passport scheme for several months.

It is 12 years now since a tranche of emails were scraped from the server of the University of East Anglia in what became know as Climategate. An East Anglia climate server was hacked, and the documents were pored over. The story won’t go away, not least because the BBC has just put out two programmes on the subject: a TV drama called the Trick, and a Radio 4 documentary called ‘The Hack That Changed the World’.

The net around the Wuhan Institute of Virology continues to tighten. A letter from Lawrence Tabak, principal deputy director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States, has shed more light on the grant which the institute made to the EcoHealth Alliance for work at the Wuhan Institute.  One of the experiments, it reveals, involved testing to see whether the spike protein of a naturally-occurring coronavirus found in the bat population was capable of attaching itself to a human receptor, via experiments with mice engineered with a human gene. The experiment amounted to ‘gain of function’ research (something the NIH has denied) – modifying viruses so that they have qualities which don’t exist in nature.