So we're locked down again. Gladys and her storm troopers. Or, in Victoria, Chairman Dan.

China finally got it right, the variant that cannot be beaten, that can be passed on simply by walking past an infected person.

I notice some countries including England have just given up and removed all restrictions even though they have thousands of infections each day.

Perhaps if the vaccinations had been done in a hurry, we could have ignored it too, however not to be.

Actually it is notable that here in Vic where Chairman Dan, seems to have a morbid hatred of rural people and wants to turn rural Vic into yet another wildlife reserve full of feral Pigs, Dogs, Deer, dying & burnt out forests and weeds like most of them currently.

We see nothing but blame shifting, for them pandering to certain sporting groups, behaving like spoilt bawling brats in a toy shop, who by having mass spectators have spread the bug everywhere.

It is becoming clearer, out break after out break that we still have the wrong city centric people with no practical experience in biosecurity and neither understand or have not learnt anything from previous pandemics. They persist in doing the exact opposite to thousands of years of methodology that worked.

Mystery infection says you have failed in identifying means of transmission. Its staring at them, hidden in plain sight. Due to having no practical experience and being just academics: They will not see it.

Mother England has something we don't have here - a huge drug factory geared up to make vaccines - NB: we have a smaller one and it was brought on line just to make the Astra vaccine. Things that have not helped with the rollout have included the EU banning the export of the Astra vaccine here (or elsewhere outside the EU), initial limited availability of the Pfizer vaccine and the left-wing media's silly fear campaign on blood clotting. Whilst it's definitely preferred that no-one dies from taking vaccines, this is simply not possible. Any type of medical treatment comes with risks. Many people develop allergic reactions to basic medications such as aspirin and paracetamol. In Australia, in around 10 million shots, those who have succumbed can be still counted on one hand and the virus itself has killed far more.

The over-reaction to the vaccine rollout seems pointless because most, if not all, of the issues are beyond the control of any government. If we'd have kept manufacturing in this country then there'd be plenty of vaccines to go around, though a world-wide pandemic like Novel Coronavirus was probably the last thing on anyone's mind at the time decisions like that were made.

To be honest, whilst all governments have made mistakes, I don't blame them for this - we've had two or three pandemics hit Australia in the last 240 years, including the Spanish Flu, Small Pox and Bubonic Plague and the closest of those to now were around 100 years ago.

On a more serious note, we have more to worry about than a few lockdowns. I sincerely believe that if Chairman Xi remains in office for another five years, the Allies, including Australia, will be at war with China. China has become bolder and more beligerent under this autocratic fool and it remains to be seen how much his subversion and subterfuge can be resisted by the West before he does something extremely foolish.

Ahh! But if you realise that a country has stuff all manufacturing capacity, or is vesting itself of it. Then you only have to introduce a biological warfare agent, blockade and it will be fighting with spears, boomerangs & throwing "tinnies" at them.

I agree with the China sentiment. But it's also our own people who closed down the local production and outsourced it all to China. All China has to do now is suddenly massively increase the prices of all these goods, or simply refuse to send them, and we are totally stuffed. And we can't just start rebuilding again, as the machines that do the rebuilding also come from China. We did it to ourselves.

I've already heard that the Chinese vaccine is not very effective, and whatever happened to our own vaccine factory that was going to solve our worries? It seemed to have fallen down a crack somewhere.

Outsourcing our jobs to another country as we are to lazy to do them, or have not educated our people, we even import doctors rather than train them.

I did work for and with a labour hire company. What an education that was and its still happening. There were thousands of rural jobs going and I see it made worse with Covid, not from lockdowns but from them getting pretty much triple, that I am getting from the pension, after rip offs. So why get your hands dirty, when you can get sit down money to sit at home texting imaginary friends.

The Back Packers were the bulk of the workers as they needed the money and of the domestic lot few could handle work. True example: One would give notice at pruning time for say 60 workers, for a week. On the first day, you might get 50 and by the end of the day, you would loose a few as it was too hard.

Next day through failing to heed advice & lack of stamina, you would loose about twenty and expecting that, have ordered replacements for some. By the end of the week it would not be unusual top pour in more back packers as soon as they turned up at the office or rang in and often over a third of the locals would be gone.

In one typical example at the end of a three day grape picking session, there was a couple around 20 to 30 and the rest 50 plus working overtime.

Vaccine factory is likely another Darwin to the Alice rail. Around a hundred years making themselves tired talking about it & they would need to find workers from overseas to build it.

I often wonder why the national anthem is not "Advance Australia Where"?

That has already happened. China has stymied the supply chains of integrated circuits and car makers around the world have shut down production of affected models as a result. This has increased the price of used cars. Added to this is the end of local manufacture of cars. This alone saw a 5% increase in the price of models that competed with those once made here. Despite an increase in brands over the last ten years, there's less choice now and all brands just make the same stuff. Try buying any SUV that has the same boot space as a Holden or Falcon station wagon. Not possible, such an animal doesn't exist. Those wanting the luggage space now have to buy utes and they end up wrecking their backbones with the harder suspension.

It is true that Sinovac and Sinopharm, China's two brands of vaccine, are garbage. According to what seem to be reliable reports, you'd be just as well off with injecting water for the good it will do. Most of the countries that China has exported its vaccines to are third world nations that cannot afford to spend money on Western ones and if they could afford them, they'd probably be well down the pecking order on delivery times.

I just finished watching a report on Youtube that states that 7,000 medical practitioners in Thailand have received Sinovac, with 10% of the recipients contacting coronavirus following the inoculations. That is not a good batting average. With everyone being different, no vaccine is 100% effective but Western vaccines have a much higher success rate.

One sure way to have China launch a military attack on Oz would be to shut off their iron ore supply. Shades of the US cutting off its oil supplies to Japan which eventually led to the attack on Pearl Harbour.

China is largely dependent on us for iron ore to the tune of some 60% of their ore imports. It is currently throwing money at various Third World countries in the hope of making cheaper ore deposits available to it, thereby reducing its dependence on Oz.

There are a lot of people calling for iron exports to be shut down but I don't see the benefit. China is paying through the roof for our ore and if we shut the gate they will just get what they need off Russia, Africa, the US and maybe Brazil, the latter which is in default under a dodgey Belt and Road deal, and Australia would be left without the big dollars China is paying. To me, it makes sense to keep selling it to them from an economic point of view. China is already in a mire because it took the heavy hand with coal and we are now selling coal to other countries. She knows that Australia is the only country with the infrastructure to sell the quantities of iron ore and coal that the world is buying so it is not going to make the same mistake again in a hurry.

Yes it's hard to decide what to do about the iron ore. Sure, we need the money and we may as well get it while we can (it won't last forever). But, that same iron is being used to build the engines of war that China will use to attack us. So what should we do? It's difficult to say.

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Now, for my totally unsubstantiated theory about the origins of the Delta variant...

As you may recall, not so long ago, Chinese and Indian troops clashed near their common (disputed) border. Some Indian soldiers were reputedly kung-fu'd to death. China of course did not state how many of theirs died. Then there was a stand-off for a while. And then suddenly the Chinese troops pulled back in a "gesture of friendship". Since when has China ever done that before?

I theorise that during the standoff, a virus-laden drone was sent over the Indian contingent, infecting them. When they went home they took the virus with them to their barracks and their families, and away it went, reaving its way among the population. And from there, the world.

A classic but hard to prove example of biological warfare.

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Cutting off ore to China, apart from being essentially an act of war (which is the point I was making), would be like cutting off our nose to spite our face. No sensible person is suggesting doing that.

Re COVID, I believe the scientific consensus (oxymoron?) is that it originated in China. The question is whether it was from a zoonotic source or a manufactured one.

The theory on how to make it came out of USA.

The theory on how to make it came out of USA.

It's no secret that the Americans trained Chinese lab staff years ago in techniques for engineering viruses as part of a joint research venture, however, the Americans decided in early 2018 that lab bio-security wasn't good enough there and abandoned the effort.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/14/state-department-cables-warned-safety-issues-wuhan-lab-studying-bat-coronaviruses/

That's an opinion piece. Just because it's in the WP doesn't make it true.....

I didn't read the article because the website was plastered with ads and leaving the site was easier than navigating around all the irrelevant content. Because of this I can't and won't comment on the article's specifics but I can say two things:-

1. The US has pummelled funding into various things over the years and it has come back to bite. I don't blame the US for any of this, though there is some credence to the idea that the funding should not have been provided in the first place, with the benefit of hindsight. Whether this be 'scientific research' or funding for Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Iraq, etc, there's been times when the US has probably wished it had directed its money towards other ventures.
2. I have the sincere belief that the Chinese Communist Party has either through misadventure or deliberate negligence, released the Novel Coronavirus to the world's population. Note that I have no ossie with the people of China or people of Chinese descent. My beef is with the Chinese Government itself. Chairman Xi is a prick, excuse the French and I also have the sincere belief that he has not only caused a lot of trouble but is about to cause a lot more. We need to be prepared for anything that follows his effort to date.

End of rant.