Despite another cluster emerging in Melbourne, our immunisation centres remain empty. It truly boggles the mind.
Say you’re on a country road, and your car breaks down. You call roadside assist, and a dude in a truck comes by, pops the bonnet, and declares you need a new spark plug. You’d get one, right? You’d have no reason not to, because you’re not a mechanic.
Just to be on the safe side, you call a second mobile mechanic. And, sure enough, he pinpoints the spark plug issue. But, so you can tell people you’ve “done your own research”, you keep calling. And you do this another 96 times. The same answer (“spark plug”) comes to you each time, until the last call, which you make not to a mechanic, but to a part-time online life coach, who tells you that spark plugs are never the answer. What your car needs, is a carrot. Why? Because one time, one person put a spark plug in their engine, and their tyres went flat.
Do you take the advice of the carrot enthusiast? Or do you go with the spark plug option?
Get vaccinated, for the love of all things holy.
It is immeasurably frustrating to see the vision of vacant, desolate immunisation hubs – in Melbourne of all places. Given what we all went through last year, given what standard of vaccine administration is going on in other parts of the world, and given how comparatively low our COVID fatality rate was compared to, say, India, the US, or the UK, it’s beyond belief that we’re at a point in our modern history where a vaccine has been made available, is available for a select few of the public, and yet, is not being taken up.
It beggars belief.
It is bewildering to realise that we, as a nation, have seemingly done the hard part easy, and now are doing the easy part hard. We all have arms, all we need to do is put the vaccine into them. And it’s not happening.
Yesterday, after a case of COVID found its way out of South Australia hotel quarantine and into the northern suburbs of Melbourne, the city is, once again, facing restrictions. No lockdown measures yet, but mask-wearing and limits on people visiting homes. Again, this ‘debate’, such as it is, is being polarised on ideological grounds. Screeching rhesus monkeys on the Right are blaming the Andrews government, because of tradition, one presumes. On the Left, one can do little but look at where responsibility lies for quarantine (the federal government) and border protection (the federal government), as well as the vaccine rollout itself (the federal government – sing along, you know the lyrics by now).
VIC COVID cases
🦠 5 new cases o/night
🦠 1 positive this am
🦠 Total 15 in cluster
🦠 New cases at Port Melb office@7NewsMelbourne— Jodi Lee (@jodilee_7) May 25, 2021
Laura Jayes from Sky News mentioned in a (since-deleted) tweet over the weekend that the painfully misinformed ‘vaccine hesitancy’ that’s apparently sweeping through the over-50 set is playing directly into the re-election game of the Morrison government. The apparent lack of interest in obtaining the erroneously inferior-branded Astra-Zeneca vaccine works out nicely for the architects of such a pathetically botched vaccine program. Play up the hesitancy thing, that way they can redirect their failures through a compliant media to drum up the notions of (statistically insignificant) blood clot fears, drowning out any accurate mention of their having fucked up the program from day one.
Jayes’ tweet was completely reasonable and well thought through, so of course she deleted it. She works for Murdoch, after all.
That anyone would take the advice of some idiot Gold Coast ‘holistic hairdresser’, or ‘wellness blogger’ or attention-seeking contrarian dipshit on Facebook than the entire medical establishment, preventing us from enduring the third wave is beyond understanding.
I cannot be vaccinated yet, because I was born in the mid-1970s of all things. If I could get a shot of the A-Z vaccine, I would. In a heartbeat. Inject into my eyeball for all I care. Because I’m rational, not beholden to baseless nonsense.
The incidence of serious blood clots from:
The Contraceptive Pill: 0.6%
The AZ vaccine: 0.00017%
How much time did you spend wracking your brain about the first one?
I really hope that the media are proportionate in their reporting.
— Keir Shiels (@keirshiels) April 7, 2021
See that? The odds of a blood clot from the A-Z is one in 500,000. The odds of dying in a car crash? 1 in 107.
You are 4,673 times more likely to die on the way to the vaccine hub than dying from the vaccine itself. I don’t see “NoVaxxFreeThinker@BillGatesIsaPedo” catching the bus, do you?.
It’s a Tuesday as this piece is being written, and Australia, who the Prime Minister said would be “first in the queue” when it came to the vaccine, is trailing behind Kazakhstan in terms of how efficiently the population is being inoculated. We’re 101st on the global rankings.
China’s delivering 20 million vaccine doses per day, and we’re again talking about applying restrictions, potential closures, third waves, and having closed international borders until mid-2022. Political wonks are saying that this is Morrison reading the electoral fortunes of WA and Queensland and promising ‘Fortress Australia’ as a strategy to get reelection for himself. Maddening.
Blame the Andrews government all you want, but you’ll be about as accurate as blaming the Smurfs. It’s the Morrison Government’s fault here, clearly as corrupt as they are incompetent. If they had done this part – the easy part – well, or invested in purpose-built quarantine facilities (which they’ve had a year to do) this wouldn’t be a problem.
Or, a well-constructed advertising campaign to get the good word out. You know, marketing. If only there was someone in the executive who had a comparable background…
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