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Europe
Russia - More Photos of Russia
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Spain is in the news.
Spain has now become the fourth Eurozone country, after Greece, Ireland and Portugal, to get bailout funds in the growing crisis gripping the Euro.
Unemployment is high and services are being cut to reduce debt and bring budgets into balance. Some economists doubt this is possible within the context of a single currency shared with Germany and France. There have been violent but futile street demonstrations.
I recently had another look at a short story I'd written a couple of years ago about a man who claimed to be a Time Lord.
I noticed a typo. Before I knew it I had added a new section and a new character and given him an experience I actually had as a child.
It happened one sports afternoon - primary school cricket on Thornleigh oval.
As we all now know (unless we've been living under a rock) the only way of defeating a pandemic is to achieve 'herd immunity' for the community at large; while strictly quarantining the most vulnerable.
Herd immunity can be achieved by most people in a community catching a virus and suffering the consequences or by vaccination.
It's over two centuries since Edward Jenner used cowpox to 'vaccinate' (from 'vacca' - Latin for cow) against smallpox. Since then medical science has been developing ways to pre-warn our immune systems of potentially harmful viruses using 'vaccines'.
In the last fifty years herd immunity has successfully been achieved against many viruses using vaccination and the race is on to achieve the same against SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19).
Developing; manufacturing; and distributing a vaccine is at the leading edge of our scientific capabilities and knowledge and is a highly skilled; technologically advanced; and expensive undertaking. Yet the rewards are potentially great, when the economic and societal consequences of the current pandemic are dire and governments around the world are desperate for a solution.
So elite researchers on every continent have joined the race with 51 vaccines now in clinical trials on humans and at least 75 in preclinical trials on animals.