Jerusalem Regilded Here...

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I'm not sure what to make of the current barrage of negative news regarding the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine, but given the extremely slender risk of adverse blood-clotting effects due to its deployment - statistically very, very small odds indeed - and given the absolute urgency to stem the tide of this disease, which carries a statistically very high risk of adverse blood-clotting on infection: I feel that parading this day-in, day-out across the major news channels is just poor management; guaranteed to hamper forward progress in the much-needed mass-vaccination programme.

Add into this the fact that large swathes of the world either cannot afford to participate, have little access to, or have effectively been frozen out of the vaccine(s) rollout because of the pecking order that we are ourselves at the very apex of, and we have that old chestnut: the haves versus the have-nots - a gated community of a privileged few versus the very many beyond the pale. Whatever happened to we're all in this together? I feel slightly soiled by the knowledge that I belong to what is effectively an elite cadre: old, first-world people put before so many more young, outside my own gilded birdcage - which could so easily become a ghetto in itself.

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