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I first visited China in November 1986. I was representing the New South Wales Government on a multinational mission to our Sister State Guangdong. My photo taken for the trip is still in the State archive [click here]. The theme was regional and small business development. The group heard presentations from Chinese bureaucrats and visited a number of factories in rural and industrial areas in Southern China. It was clear then that China was developing at a very fast rate economically.
This is a little exercise in creative writing. The brief was to reimagine the Three Pigs from a different perspective. The original is a parable about the virtues of forward thinking, providence and hard work, so that only the most abstemious pig survives the metaphorical wolf. I thought it was a bit tough on the middle pig who is just trying to find a balance between work and play. So here is my version:
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.