Here’s a book I am unlikely to read: George Orwell’s estate approves retelling ‘1984’ from woman’s point of view. The title is to be Julia.

Julia you will recall was Winston Smith’s lover as part of a plot designed to outline the nature of a totalitarian state in which the past is erased and recreated at every turn to suit the government’s narrative of the moment (“Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia”). It’s been a while since I read the book, but the bits I remember were the two minute hate, the thought police, Room 101, Big Brother and Newspeak. Not to mention Emmanuel Goldstein. Actually I remember quite a lot about I book that so far as I know I read only a single time and that when I was in university, possibly even in high school. Anyway, a very very long time ago. An amazing book although I have seen movie versions of the story. It’s part of the language, although it seems today to have in many ways become a how-to book.

The book was not a love story, and to the extent that Julia figured in the plot it was only to demonstrate the massive power the state holds over its citizens. This is a brief bio of the proposed author:

Sandra Newman is the author of the novels The Heavens, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and The Country of Ice Cream Star, longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and named one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post and NPR, as well as several other works of fiction and nonfiction. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s and Granta, among other publications. She lives in New York City.

This is a description of one of her books: The Heavens.

A work of rare literary brilliance and emotional power, The Heavens is a mesmerizing novel of love and dreams that moves between a reimagined New York City and Elizabethan England and asks how our world comes to be.

A depressing thought that one of the great political classics will now be deprived of all interest in what will almost certainly be a feminist treatment since no doubt Winston Smith was not the perfect companion and broke many of the latest views of boy-girl relations as 1949 will be seen today. Of course, the book might be written using Peng Shuai as the model for Julia.

But I thought this comment in the discussion at Instapundit explained quite a lot of why this is happening.

1984’s copyright expired 1/1/21 so it’s not clear that the foundation could have done much about this anyway.

Might go and re-read the original. Re-read Brave New World a few months ago and ended up writing an article that has been submitted for publication. I wonder what surprises there still are in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

This is from Adam Creighton in today’s Oz: Hysteria of Covid to endure for years, says top Trump medical adviser.

Scott Atlas, who was a top health adviser to former president ­Donald Trump, has warned that “destructive and ineffective” Covid-19 restrictions could loom over economies for “years” because of an “unscientific obsession” with stopping cases.

Dr Atlas, a former medical doctor and now Senior Fellow in health care policy at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, said Australia had illustrated the folly of lockdowns and the “shocking power of governments to shut down everything – schools, businesses, personal movement and even the right to see your own family”.

“Australia had an explosion of cases with some of the most draconian policies imaginable,” he said, speaking to The Australian about his new book, A Plague Upon Our House, which is highly critical of the US Covid-19 response and two of Mr Trump’s other health advisers, Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx.

“As an American, and I think it applies to Australia, I think it’s shocking how people acquiesce to this sort of thing.”

There was also this letter to the editor that highlighted so many of the issues that matter to so many amongst us.

I cannot yet add my voice to the chorus rejoicing in Australia’s relatively high vaccination cover. Rates of 80 per cent and 90 per cent are milestones, not destinations. With one in five or one in 10 unvaccinated, the risk to those more vulnerable, many elderly, vaccinated but with waning immunity is unacceptable.

The same proportions of children attending daycare and pre- and primary school will come from homes with unvaccinated, highly mobile young parents and adolescent siblings. Until they can become eligible for vaccination, children under 12 deserve to be fully cocooned by immunised adults.

As a clinical immunologist, I know that people who can’t be vaccinated on medical grounds are vanishingly rare. We now have hard data to support this: 19 million Australians have received at least one dose and only 556, or 0.003 per cent, have met the criteria for permanent medical exemption.

The main focus now should be on helping across the line those who have been convinced that the vaccines aren’t safe for them. This is for their benefit as well as the community’s. In my experience, almost all are reasonable people, unreasonably influenced by others with loud voices and self-appointed expertise.

It saddens me to still hear of women considering pregnancy or who are pregnant avoiding vaccination based on internet opinion when there is irrefutable evidence of a higher risk from Covid in pregnancy – of maternal death, miscarriage, premature birth and stillbirth.

Please, more focus on how far we still have to go and less on how far we’ve come. I’ll start rejoicing when we reach 99 per cent; that is a destination of which to be proud.

Professor Graeme Stewart, Westmead Institute for Medical Research, NSW