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At the end of January 2026, Wendy and I embarked on our first trip for the year. This was a cruise beginning in Mauritius and ending in Cape Town South Africa, followed by a few days in Dubai.
We flew to Mauritius and after a night in town at the almost invisible (certainly to our driver), yet very comfortable Citadelle Mall Apartments, we joined the ship.
At the end of January 2026, Wendy and I embarked on our first trip for the year. This concluded with a few days in Dubai.
On Feb 28, just three weeks after we left Dubai, Bibi Netanyahu, in cahoots with Donald Trump, attacked Iran, annihilating the Ayatollah and his entire cabinet in one foul swoop. As 'The Weekly', TV program remarked: "When you've ended eight wars (as Trump repeatedly claims), you get a ninth one free".
Jordan Baker and Jeff Purser were married on Saturday 3rd of December 2011. The ceremony took place on the cliff top at Clovelly.
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.