JAB PROGRAM A DANGEROUS FAIL
PRo-vaxxers versus antivaxxers. Which camp are you in? Me? I’m a pro-vaxxer. Had my second AZ back in July. Personally I would have preferred to have had Pfizer or Moderna, but beggars can’t be choosers.
I know quite a few anti-vaxxers – some have even been vaccinated even though they don’t talk about that aspect all that much.
One anti-vaxxer I know swamps social media with “research” most likely conducted on his phone while sitting on the toilet. In his view, people who get the jabs are sheep and that by doing so they are signing up to allow people like Bill Gates, the CIA, ASIO, Big Pharma and even Mcdonald’s and KFC to track their every movement and listen to every word they speak.
Come to think of it, haven’t they been doing that for years, anyway?
And what’s the chance of antivaxxers knocking back ventilators in our intensive care units when it’s a case of barbed wire canoes up in Shitenhausen Creek? Buckley’s and Buckley’s.
john.andersen@news.com.au
WHAT’S IN STORE?
IT’S great Queensland is opening its borders, but boy-o-boy what is in store for the unvaccinated?
Our state government has kept Covid out by shutting the borders and adopting strict quarantine measures. That was the easy part. The hard part will be getting all the systems in place to cope with outbreaks as they happen.
Casual conversations I’ve had with nursing staff when being tested for Covid would indicate there are holes in the systems big enough to drive a Dodge RAM through when Covid finds its way here.
Our state government’s vaccine promotion program has been a massive fail, although from reading the Bully this week, it would appear fists are being slammed on to panic buttons as we speak. Gorden Tallis has been brought in to sound the alarm on Indigenous communities. The fact there wasn’t an active, ongoing program to promote vaccinations in our rural and Indigenous communities last year is a disgrace. Government figures from October 10 reveal only 37 per cent of people in the Charters Towers Regional Council area had been double vaccinated.
Here are some more double vaccination figures: In Townsville 57.1 per cent of the population was doubled dosed as of October 18. Whitsunday 43 per cent as of October 18. Palm Island 29 per cent. October 10 figures: Hinchinbrook 53.4 per cent, Burdekin 47.5 per cent, Mackay 45.6 per cent, Cairns 56.7 per cent, Tablelands 54.8 per cent, Yarrabah 19 per cent, Outback North 46.1 per cent. These are pitiful figures when you consider the vaccination target is 80 per cent.
The ACT is 86 per cent and NSW is 80.8 per cent and rising. I couldn’t find double vacci
And what’s the chance of antivaxxers knocking back ventilators in our intensive care units when it’s a case of barbed wire canoes up in Shitenhausen Creek? Buckley’s and Buckley’s.
nation figures for Indigenous communities in Cape York Peninsula but, if they are similar to Yarrabah, there is potential for disaster.
Why didn’t the state government focus on these communities in 2020?
Indigenous role models such as Jonathan Thurston, Matt Bowen, Jessica Mauboy, Deborah Mailman and Mal Meninga could have been brought in to promote the cause. Another fail.
I’m sick of hearing people say “she’s (Annastacia) kept us safe”. Yes, she has, but she has also set us up for a fall by not going hard on vaccination promotion before now. Stable doors and bolting horses come to mind.
BLUNT EXPLANATION
I spoke to Dr Larisa Labzin, (pictured) a research fellow and immunologist at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience at the University of Queensland this week. Her take on it is that mandated vaccinations will become the norm in workplaces because companies want to reduce the risk of transmission among employees. They want a healthy workforce.
Dr Labzin says that unvaccinated people will be at greatest risk in Queensland when the border opens, at this stage on December 17. She said this will mean that some fully vaccinated people carrying the Covid virus will come to, say, North Queensland, and that they are likely to transmit the virus to unvaccinated people.
She had a nice way of explaining how it works. “If you get the virus it takes your immune system two weeks to make the weapons to fight it. It becomes a race between the virus and your immune system (to see who wins). If you have been vacc i n a t e d your body does n o t have to wait two weeks to make the weapons. It can start fighting the virus straight away,” she said.
Y o u have to infer from what Dr Labzin says that this could still end up becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated.
NOT CRUISING
Farmers are well and truly getting the rough end of the Ananas comosus (that would be “pineapple”). The pineapple industry is in the doldrums and it is all to do with Covid. By June last year, more than 40 cruise ships had cases of Covid on board.
These floating feed lots for humans had become giant floating Petri dishes where billions of Covid-19 bacteria were happily making babies via the horizontal bippety-bop called binary fission.
These cruise ships take thousands of tonnes of pineapples on board and, now that the industry is largely in a holding pattern, there is nowhere else for these pineapples to go but to the southern markets.
Cardwell grower Peter Ottone (pictured right) told me the cruise ship industry took an enormous amount of pineapples.
It wasn’t just North Queensland growers. Growers in the southeast corner are copping a belting as well.
Peter told me the glut was so bad they were being billed after freighting the fruit down to the capital city markets. That translates to what they are being paid for the pineapples at
the market isn’t covering the cost of trucking them down to places like Brisbane and Sydney.
Brisbane Rocklea-based agent Warren Heilig is a favourite contact of mine when it comes to matters of fruit and vegetable supply.
He says a lot of growers are having trouble, a lot of it caused by Covid and a lot of it caused by staff shortages.
He says strawberries are being left in the paddock because growers can’t get pickers. Brussels sprout farmers normally get $20 to $30 a box for their product. Now they are getting $65 a box, but a lot of growers, despite this mouth-watering money, have to leave their sprouts in the field because there is no one to pick them.
Melons are bringing good money for those farmers who can get them to market, but once again a lot of this produce is being left to rot in the paddocks because there are no pickers.
A few weeks ago when I was at Lakeland I spoke to a grower there who had had to leave hundreds of tonnes of beautiful watermelons in his paddock because he couldn’t find pickers.
It’s heartbreaking stuff when you consider the personal effort and cost these people put into growing this produce.