Month: July 2021

No Fly Zone

You know it’s kinda hard just to get along today

Our subject isn’t cool but he fakes it anyway

He may not have a clue and he may not have style

But everything he lacks well he makes up in denial

The Offspring, Pretty Fly (for a White Guy)

Not everyone can speak off the cuff well. Particularly in public. And some politicians, well… they probably shouldn’t speak off-the-cuff in public at all, anywhere.

Adham Baba’s latest verbal blunder (FYI: Spanish Flu is not the past tense of Spanish Fly…)

Dr. Adham Baba is Malaysia’s Health Minister. And he has a spectacularly shameful track record of saying the wrong things in public. He’s one of those politicians who shot into prominence courtesy of Perikatan Nasional’s Sheraton Backdoor Coup in February 2020.

Last year the minister became the butt of netizen’s jokes when he suggested, on national TV no less, that drinking warm water could avert someone from getting COVID-19 (complete with a demonstration of how to drink warm water). Not long after, his gaffe about being in a virtual conference with 500 other countries (when he meant 500 delegates from around the world).

He became such an embarrassment that subsequently Malaysia’s COVID-19 daily situation report has since been delivered by the Ministry of Health’s Director General (save a few occasions). And you’d think the vaccination program coordination would be led by the Minister of Health, right? Well, that task (and some might add thankfully) has been taken over by the Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation, on the pretext that this was more under the purview of that ministry.

Let’s think about it – vaccine vials and syringes aren’t exactly rocket science. And Walski suspects that the real reason is because the Health Minister has presented himself to be slightly less than inept. Yes, he’s become that big of an embarrassment. At least in Walski’s eyes.

And so it brings us to Adham Baba’s latest embarrassing mis-delivery: saying Spanish Fly when what he wanted to say was Spanish Flu. And screwed up the year as well (it was 1918).

Trust Malaysia’s premier punk-activist artist Fahmi Reza to generate a quick response!

Walski did consider the possibility that knowing what “Spanish Fly” is could be general knowledge the average Malaysian didn’t have. But Walski doesn’t think that’s the case at all; the number of people who almost immediately recognized the gaffe made was significant. And if they didn’t already know what Spanish Fly refers to, thanks to Adham Baba, Malaysia’s Health Minister, they do now.

Regardless, it’s now become abundantly clear where Adham Baba’s No Fly Zone is: public speaking of any kind!

VaccinedNation

Normalcy was declared. (Normalcy was always a declaration.)

Arundhati Roy, “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness”

So today is the day Walski gets his second SinoVac jab, three weeks after the first dose in late June. About darned time, if you ask him. No, he’s not complaining – he’s just relieved the waiting is over.

Post-First Dose Pose (June 21, 2021)

The second dose today was administered at the same vaccination center, housed in the Setia City Convention Centre in Setia Alam, where I got jabbed the first time. The only difference between three weeks ago and today – a heck of a lot more people.

Which is a good thing – for the past several months it seems like the vaccine roll out was moving at a snail’s pace. Fortunately it has ramped up significantly in the past month, and right now just over 10% of the adult population have received both doses of their COVID-19 vaccines, either the SinoVac (which is what I got), the Astra-Zaneca or the Pfizer varieties.

It’s now been about 5 hours since I got the second dose, and so far the side effects aren’t very discernible yet. Apart from feeling some discomfort from what felt like elevated body temperature (but still below 37º C), and a touch of lethargy (more drowsiness, actually), the first jab was pretty much without major side effects.

Rock ‘n Roll, mofos! Walski’s fully vaccinated…

In the months since the so-called “emergency” was declared earlier this year, the number of new daily cases hasn’t been encouraging. And the many versions of MCO (semi-lockdowns) have not aided in bringing the infection numbers down either. Walski won’t go into the nitty gritty details of why these “efforts” haven’t achieved their desired results, but suffice it to say it’s been the seemingly uncoordinated rollouts, unequal enforcement, and ad hoc caveats introduced midstream that have been the modus operandi. Not impressive, to say the least.

Be that as it may, the ONLY way forward for us to get out of this mess of a pandemic is through mass vaccination. That’s how Walski sees it. And today, Walski joins the 3+ million other Malaysians who have been fully vaccinated.

With the daily dose administration standing at about 300k, and expected to reach 400k per day soon (with more vax channels opened), Walski hopes that we can reach the 75% vaccinated population threshold sooner, rather than later.

The FUBAR of a political mess Malaysia is in aside, it’s a VaccinedNation that will bring some level of normalcy back into our lives here in Malaysia. Perhaps not the normal normal we’ve come to miss, but enough of it to allow us to function better, and more importantly for many, start to earn their living again.