Today started with a wonderful salmon-pink sky causing a radiant warm glow in all the windows. It belied the freezing temperatures outside!
We decided to go for an early walk along the beach at Bridlington. It was one of those magical winter days with a low sun and reddish pink glow on the horizon. That is another ten thousand steps. My fitness campaign extends uninterrupted for 282 uninterrupted days! I’m averaging sixteen and a half thousand steps a day! (You can tell that I’m proud of the achievement!)
Back home I’ve been playing some Linton Kwesi Johnson – he’s so good! Always fires me up!
Meanwhile, out in Coronaland there has been another milestone. The Oxford vaccine has been passed as safe and is going to be rolled out from next Monday. The end of the pandemic is now in sight. We have a weapon that can zap the virus.
The Oxford vaccine has a couple of advantages over the Pfizer vaccine in that it is a lot cheaper and does not have to be stored at minus 30 degrees. It can be stored in ordinary fridges. That makes it easier to deploy and administer.
There is still a big debate raging about vaccination. There have always been a small number opposed to any clinical procedures. They were boosted by a series of flawed reports on the MMR vaccine (Measles, Mumps and Rubella) wrongly relating it to autism. Since then there have been a mass of bogus stories and conspiracy theories on the web. Many of these are cynically put out to prey on peoples’ fears.
The end result has been much death and misery.
Vaccination is good. It has completely removed smallpox (a massive killer) and could soon eradicate many other virus diseases (if it wasn’t for the scare stories).
As it is more people are refusing vaccination and we have the return of diseases that had almost been eliminated.
Since the MMR scare there have been 144,000 deaths from Measles and countless cases of blindness and brain damage. All of which could have been avoided.
The risk of an allergic reaction to a vaccine is tiny. The risk from the disease is much much greater.
The trouble is that the media, and particularly the internet, picks on a few cases, magnifies them out of all proportion and scares people.
It is all part of this crazy undermining of science that the evangelicals, religious fanatics and Trump have been doing. The right-wing propaganda machine has been pumping out fake news.
I can’t wait for my vaccination. It can’t come quickly enough. I know it’s safe.
The virus is going mad in all those countries with incompetent leadership! The UK, USA and Brazil show giant leaps in infection rates – 53,135, 201,106, and 58,718 new cases respectively. The death rates are also going berserk – 456, 3628 and 1,111 respectively. One wonder how long Trump can go on playing golf while three and a half thousand Americans are dying each and every day? One wonders how Bolsonaro retains any shred of credibility or Johnson can go on bluffing and pretending. These populist fools are a lethal disaster. The contrast with countries like New Zealand and Vietnam, who continue to have NO deaths, is stark.
So much for hoaxes or small flu’s – the arrogance and complacency has cost hundreds of thousands of lives!! Morons!!
In the UK there is talk of us all going back into severe lockdown or tier 4. Soon we’ll all be in Tier 20 – locked up in strait-jackets in padded cells!
It looks like the schools will not be going back but will be back on distanced learning for a week or two.
I can feel the fear. It is palpable. Christmas and New Year will harvest a a lot of dead relatives! The health services are already full to bursting. Some scientists are predicting catastrophe!
My advice – stay in! Stay safe! Many ends are nigh!!