I would be surprised if blindly laying every ride for any jockey isn't a winning strategy TBH.

Out of interest, some quick research shows W Pike has ridden 17 winners in his last 50 rides, by comparison J Mac has ridden 8 in his last 50, it could be argued that he gets a lot of plum rides, but is he winning because he has plum mounts, or is he getting plum mounts because he wins?

The people making the rules are just sweethearts. 

Mandate comes into force January 1st

Wow, what a way to throw his career away.

My day job is in a scientific field and I hear this question a lot (in other circumstances too, not just lately with this stupid plague).  Basically, funding grants are hard to get, funding grants for things that *are not currently a problem* are harder to get, and projects will sit on a shelf for years until some grant funding gets through.  This is exactly what happened to coronavirus vaccine research a few years after SARS popped up and then vanished -- the urgency went away, so the funding went away.  Then there's another struggle to get funding to go from lab work to human trials, and another one to go from stage 1 to stage 2 trials, and so on.  The mRNA vaccines are the poster child for this--technology developed in the early 1990s that never got funded because government agencies and academic research deans thought that mRNA was a waste of time and not worth funding, the lab hung on through peanut-sized grants, and somehow survived.

Enter Covid, where at least 1 out of every 1000 humans on the planet have died of it so far.  We had a global emergency and governments -- plural -- threw enormous amounts of money at the people who have been begging for scraps for decades, and lo and behold, without the massive money and time barriers to getting research done, we have a handful of useful vaccines to help put an end to this global emergency. That's it.  That's the sum total of it.  There's no vast conspiracy, just breaking through government bureaucracy and academic sclerosis.

Making a new vaccine isn't hard, especially if the vaccine is made using decades-old techniques like Sinopharm (inactivated virus), Sputnik (killed virus, similar to the Salk polio vaccine), or the new Corbevax (recombinant protein, fermented in yeast like beer, used for Hepatitis B vaccines, the method is used to make vaccines to give to infants).  

That's what makes this so tragic and stupid.  One of the best jockeys in Australia is willing to throw away a sparkling career because he is using the fact that he doesn't understand how grant funding works as a fig leaf to justify his oppositional defiance.

Oh well, it was fun watching some of his better rides.  

What would macca think?