has mutated into a relentless daily bombardment of information and intrigue and I suspect most humans are now immune to the massive impact it continues to have on our daily lives. Much like cabin fever, there is undoubtedly a new variant called Covid fever which causes a myriad of niggling issues, one of them being lethargy. The last blog written in this series was published on 21st January 2021 and despite really good intentions to do so, the simple act of sitting down and writing some more stuff about this pesky little virus has proved to be elusive.
has definitely not disappeared so that does not present a logical reason for not tapping away at the keyboard. If truth be told, this virus has outflanked and the very best medical brains on this planet and continues to do so. The anniversary of the arrival of gifted to the World by the Chinese, and gone and there is absolutely no clear indication of where the virus is headed or when it will end.
which has developed a mutation all of its own. The new word and global obsession are VACCINES. It all started roughly 9 months ago with big in the USA throwing the entire laboratory at the challenge of developing a vaccine which could be safely administered to prevent infection. In the normal progression of vaccine development, there is a lengthy timeline to ensure safety and eliminate any harmful, long term side effects. simply forced big pharma to throw away the rule book and by the end of 2020, there were a number of vaccines developed, approved and ready to be administered. The basic premise is that once roughly 70 percent of any countrys population has been immunised, the herd immunity cycle and the virus is contained. That is the theory!
The list of vaccines developed is indeed long and lengthening by the week. We have all read and heard about Moderna, Pfizer, Astra Zeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Novavax and Oxford to name a few. The Chinese and Russians have developed their own vaccine types. The developed World led the race to secure their vaccine dosages whilst the rest of the pack gasped frantically and thrashed
around wildly to make similar moves. South Africa simply messed up on a monumental scale and as things stand today, roughly 220,000 people have been vaccinated (all of them high flying undeserving politicians and deserving health workers). The country which has punched way above its weight is Israel which has managed to administer vaccines to most of its 8.7 million citizens. That is impressive but hardly surprising; after all, this is a country with some of the best brains on the planet and which has successfully repelled attempted invasions from Syria, Egypt and contained their Palestinian neighbours for years. I have had the privilege of visiting Israel twice and it is truly astonishing to witness their agricultural enterprise and ingenuity in harsh desert conditions. America is a little behind the curve but to date 143 million doses have been administered. A very sophisticated mathematical model has been developed to provide a guide to how long a country will take, given its parameters, to fully vaccinate their populations. South Africa was given an estimate of 18 years! I kid you not!
This really happened. Obvious that Malema and his party are simply an offshoot of the ANC waiting for their moment to reattach,similar to the spike protein of
before in human history. In the midst of all this frantic noise there is a need for a reality check. A question posed and which remains unanswered is: What if the vaccines reduce the severity of but not the transmissibility? The issue here is that the vaccine could convert someone who had into an asymptomatic carrier spreading the virus. We forget that the vaccine trials were designed to see if the vaccine prevented symptomatic not total infections.
