I received my booster vaccination at lunchtime today (Wednesday, January 12). My first two doses of Covid-19 vaccine were the virus-mediated version from AstraZeneca, with the second of these having been stuck into my arm in early September 20211.
Today I was speared in the same arm with the Pfizer vaccine, which is a messenger RNA (mRNA) type. This time, I hardly felt the needle, presumably because it was finer than those used for my two AstraZeneca doses.
Many people will have seen numerous video clips on Youtube in which a litter of puppies following their human around in a group and when the human is caught, jumping all over them, licking them and wagging their tails furiously1,2. They are adorable videos and they cannot but make you smile.
Some time ago (August 22, 2021), Prime Minister Scott Morrison tried to shift the focus from the daily reports of Covid-19 case numbers. He said that the focus “on case numbers was very important when we knew nothing about this virus and whether our hospital system would be able to cope. A lot has changed since then. Increasingly we need to look beyond just the case numbers to know what our future holds. How we can keep safe and how we get our lives back in a COVID world.
The electorate of Goldstein was named after the suffragist and women’s rights activist Vida Jane Goldstein. She was born in Portland, Victoria in 1869, the eldest of five children and was raised in an affluent middle-class home and educated at Presbyterian Ladies College in Melbourne. Goldstein’s mother Isabella was an early feminist and undertook ‘good works’ in the slums of Collingwood.
I suspected Nick Coatsworth was out of his depth in the modern world when he responded to a question ‘So who are the people to listen to?” asked of him by Peter Stefanovic on Sky News. Coatsworth replied “Well, I think when you hear your leaders speak; I mean, there’s a difference between experts and leaders, Pete.
The idiotic James Morrow has been one of the sources of hilarity and ridicule here before, mostly as one of the monumentally gullible, obsessively antiscientific ‘three stooges’ on Sky News with Rowan Dean and Rita Panahi1,2. Morrow recently wrote a vicious little piece attacking epidemiologists and some of the states’ chief health officers, as well as Dr Norman Swan.