I looked out the window the other day and realised that the plague was still going on. Apart from wrapping myself in cellophane whenever I leave the house and having a nervous breakdown whenever I inadvertently encounter human contact* I had pretty much forgotten about it. There have been so many other things for me to worry about.
Well ok, no there haven't. There have been things for other people to worry about. There were the floods for example which caused a problem for people who had bought houses on a flood plain (strangely enough) and in our rural areas a plague of mice was overrunning human settlements and driving terror stricken refugees onto the streets clutching their few remaining belongings as they fled the rodent horde. One of those problems actually solved the other.
The flood also solved another problem that the government had brought upon itself. The sudden inundation of large parts of NSW allowed the federal government to blame delays in the vaccination of the most disease prone segments of the population on the floods. Once the flood waters, heavy with drowned mice, had abated the government had to fall back on its usual reserve position of blaming the state governments. Normally this works because its believable, frequently true and nobody could bother working out where exactly to allocate the blame anyway. On this occasion though the premiers of my noble home state and the overheated retirement home across the border arose in their collective wrath and pointed out that the reason they weren't vaccinating enough people was because the federal government hadn't given them enough vaccine. The federal government said it would get back to them or something.
Possibly due to the fact that the government's vaccination target has been missed by about 75% the next thing the government did was blame the EU for not sending us the vaccine we bought. Just in case your heart strings weren't tugged enough it also accused the EU of holding back the million doses we had bought for Papua New Guinea which is struggling with a national health crisis and its fair to say the pandemic isn't helping. Shortly thereafter the government backtracked on those comments while sort of saying them out of the side of its mouth and loudly announced that it wasn't criticising the EU or anything.
This has become standard operating practice for our federal government; make series of idiotic but somewhat confusing statements, issue clarifications which don't clarify anything and then sneak out the backdoor while everybody tries to figure out what, if anything, was actually said. At some point somebody remembered that we're making the vaccine in this country and asked how that was going. Apparently its going well. Really really well. Can we have some then? No.
My own vaccination does not appear to be any closer to becoming reality. I'm in the wrong age bracket. I'm too old to be considered the future of the nation and not old enough for my death to embarrass the government. Hopefully by the time they get around to sticking a needle into my arm they will have ironed out the bumps, or rather clots, in the vaccine. There is still a concern that one of the vaccines has the potential to reduce human blood to the consistency of badly cooked porridge. This has happened so frequently that the number of casualties worldwide could fill a room. As public health crises go it isn't perhaps the worst we have to deal with right now.
* My puffin points out I was doing both of those things well before the pandemic started**
** My plague doctor has noted that this is a classic case of imbalanced humours and an excess of black bile. He recommends a treatment of leeches, cupping and occasional bleeding. My puffin was almost disturbingly excited when he mentioned "bleeding".
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