Meltdown #7: Social Inoculation
After all this time, we’re still COVID naked
The nation is starkers, barely vaccinated
Front line orderlies
Drivers, the elderly
People are frustrated, leaders berated
Sydney’s now the laggard locked down city
Meanwhile Melbourne’s sitting proud and pretty
How the tide has turned
But mistakes not learned
How to protect both life, and social liberty
But is Australia just too risk averse
Is suppression obsession our national curse
A post-vaccine order
For freedom, no border
Living with COVID or lockdowns - what one is worse?
All footy teams raced to Melbourne in a lockdown flee
We‘re one of few States that’s now COVID free
Once the pariah
Now the messiah
To play back-to-back games at the MCG
Scott’s foot in mouth sets AstraZeneca teeth gritting
For what’s the proper age that it’s safe to be committing
Guidelines as confusing
As our lives that he’s abusing
Our entire future depends on COVID permitting!
So he hatches a hotchpotch four stage plan
Half of overseas Australians are now banned
Then by end of the year
If vaccines get here
We may finally get back to where we began
We’re over inoculated to COVID drivel
Social commentators continuing to quibble
We’re in the thick of it
But frankly sick of it
So saturated with media dribble
On a war game footing for Pfizer shots
Like Hunger Games or a Survivor plot
Our battle lines
Have fallen behind
A jab well done, it’s certainly not!
It’s a race for our lives to vaccinate
To hobble Delta before it mutates
A race for reputation
To not stop the nation
To block COVID’s racetrack to replicate
But we’re last in the OECD rollout race
From near eradication, we’ve lost our place
We’re tied up in knots
Firing cheap shots
Need a Steve Bradbury to pick up the pace
Some limericks wax lyrical with alliteration
Repeating letters like lockdown proliferation
With mixed metaphor
To portray the war
On the most plundering pandemic of our generation
Meanwhile the world abandons Afghanistan
Took two decades to lose to the Taliban
Back to barbarism
To harbour terrorism
An unwinnable war in a lawless land
The UK will drop restrictions and soon take a breath
Large sporting occasions no longer suppressed
No masks on faces
Despite rising cases
Vaccines have reduced morbidity and deaths
Here’s to living with COVID post vaccination
Less risk to life and hospitalisation
With immunity indeed herd
Not shaken or stirred
When we’ve finally inoculated the population
Kevin Holmes • 9th July 2021
