“China eats weird animals disease”

Southwest Airlines canceled more than 2,000 flights Friday through Sunday, and hundreds more on Monday because employees called in sick, or refused to sign up for overtime hours over the holiday weekend, a Southwest Airlines pilot told American Greatness.

Southwest blamed “air traffic control issues” and inclement weather for the cancelled flights, but the problems were actually a direct result of the airline’s announcement on October 4 that all of its 56,000 U.S. employees were required be vaccinated against COVID-19 or face termination.

Unemployed by Christmas is the future thousands of City of Toronto workers could be facing if they remain unvaccinated for much longer.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the worker shortage that unvaccinated employees would create. The wheels are now in motion.

Civil servants are rarely “fired” in Canada, expect no permanent job losses.

Will the city ever recover from its pursuit of Zero Covid?

Last week Melbourne acquired the dubious honour of becoming the Lockdown Capital of the World: it has now spent 252 days in lockdown, overtaking Buenos Aires, where restrictions were in place for 245 days. By the time the current — sixth – lockdown is scheduled to end on 26 October, Melburnians will have been in lockdown for 267 days, or 45% of the time since the pandemic officially began.

A series of supply chain bottlenecks has created a monumental shortage of goods across America, with shelves in pharmacies, department stores, grocery stores and more sitting empty while cargo ships, freight trains and trucks struggle to distribute goods quickly enough to keep up with demand.

Dozens of cargo ships are waiting to dock in California and may be stuck for months in a traffic jam of ships the likes of which has never been seen before.

Millions of dollars of American goods are sitting in warehouses in China and Asia, awaiting shipment. Even once the goods reach American shores, mostly from China, the process is stunted by a lack of on-the-ground staff who can distribute them.

The Trudeau government’s mandatory vaccine policy for federal civil servants is like its supposed mandatory hotel quarantine for international travellers last spring.

By that, I mean it is tough talk that amounts to nothing. The vaccine policy exempts tens of thousands of civil servants and will do very little to protect Canadians from COVID-19.