The idiotic Barnaby Joyce was on Radio National with journalist Patricia Karvelas and told her that the “best test of a competent government is that people don’t die” and that Australia has one of the lowest death rates from Covid-19 in the world.
Prior to a National Cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Scott Morrison had another brain fart. In a silly attempt to reduce the problems with supply chains induced by his long wished-for opening up of ‘the economy’ and its predicted concomitant massive increase in infection rates of the Omicron variant of the Sars-Cov-2 virus, he floated the idea of allowing children (under 18s) to drive forklifts1.
I first became aware of this some hours after it happened, and I find it hard to fathom what was going through Morrison’s mind, such as it is, when responding to a question from a journalist. At a press conference, said journalist asked Morrison what he thought about “the man that’s been charged over the death of the missing nine-year old girl”.
Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce says panic buying and hoarding is leading to shortages of COVID-19 rapid antigen test (RAT) kits as Australians struggle to find the kits. Joyce said 200 million tests were on their way, and that Australians should only buy what they needed. He said: “Unfortunately, people are taking vastly more home than they need” and that people should not “take more than what you require because that means someone else misses out”1.
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.