A lot of people seem to be under the illusion that once you’ve had a Covid vaccine you are done and protected.  The signs show otherwise – you need to get repeat vaccines and those booster shots typically give you 4 to 5 months of very good protection and after that it starts to wane.  We are sure that pharmaceutical companies will come up with better vaccines that last longer as time goes by, but until they do I am going to continue to get my booster shots and additional vaccines when they are available to me.  I feel one has to take care with one’s health and part of that is reducing one’s reaction to a dangerous disease by making sure, if one is exposed to it, that one’s body has the right amount of immunity added to it by the booster shots.  I am getting the Pfizer booster shot, but if I had the choice I would get Moderna this time, because I very much like the whole mix and match principle and having the benefit of the different companies’ approach to vaccines. 

We all have things that we have bought which we feel we have wasted our money on, and on the other hand you get goods or services where you really get what you believe to be a lot of value.  One of the steps I took a couple of months ago was to subscribe to the ad-free version of YouTube.  It has really made a tremendous difference in my life, particularly because I often like to work with electronic dance music or EDM in the background.  I can now listen to DJ sets from the various festivals without being interrupted every 7 or 8 minutes with a new advert!  We all have different things that we find to be of value, but for me, I only wish that I paid for the ad-free version of YouTube a long time ago, given that I use it extensively – whether it is for those DJ sets, watching replays of major horse races or the very informative YouTube videos that tell you how to do things, work software programs, etc, etc.

The head of the World Bank said that it will be very hard for many countries around the world to avoid recession.  The World Bank is forecasting that growth for the rest of this decade will be below what it was for the last decade.  Growth in the United States and Europe is forecast to slow down, but they say that emerging nations, and SA is clearly one of them, will have the toughest time as a result of the problems that arose from the Covid pandemic and now the war in Ukraine.  To make matters worse, the money that governments owe is increasing and increasing interest rates are going to further increase those debts.