With daily numbers rising and government measures becoming more and more lockdownish, the people are starting to get a bit frantic and are pushing the government for vaccines. This is discussion about whether or not people should get the vaccine or not but the fact of the matter is that the the people of Thailand, for the most part, are lining up to get it just because of the promises the government has made to give people more freedom if they do decide to get it.
In my mind this is a terribly way to force people to get it the same way that it is around the world with these "vaccine passports." You don't have to get the vaccine but we are not going to let you do stuff if you don't. That sort of thing.
The chaos from vaccines in Thailand is that they are not rolling them out very well and there doesn't seem to be anyone really in charge. You may recall that the Prime Minister, who was displeased with the Health Minister's rollout of the vaccine, decided he was going to take on the job himself and well, as i turns out it is a lot more complicated than the great leader thought because things have not gotten better.
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While I haven't been following it super closely because I know that I don't want the vaccine and it is unlikely to be offered to me anyway, I have noticed that there has been one distribution misstep after another in Thailand, which given the track-record of logistics in a general sense here, is about as surprising as rain after you hear thunder.
The Thai government just isn't very good at stuff and while it is not just Thailand that is terrible at this, this is the only country I live in.
There are certain vaccines that require 2 doses, but Thailand passed out too many of the original doses. Let me see if i can can explain this in scale. Let's imagine that you have 1,000 doses of a vaccine that needs to be administered 2 times to be effective. Logic dictates that you would select only 500 people for this right? Well not in Thailand you don't. Thailand passed out something like 773 first-round doses before someone stood up and said "hey guys, we don't have enough doses left to administer the 2 jabs per person!"
Of course they did this on a much larger scale than 1,000 but I think you get the picture.
Someone came up with the bright idea that they would just substitute a different manufacturers vaccine for the second dose because they are all the same right? The brilliant idea was that for people that had the Sinovac vaccine already to give them AstraZeneca as a second shot and someone immediately died after they did this. Surprised? I'm not.
This is not specific to Thailand and yes, the person involved might have had some other issues that lead to this happening but the fact of the matter is that I feel as though it was a dumb idea in the first place. Think about any medication that you have taken in the past ok? Normally they tell you to not mix medications and to me, once you start talking about injections, things get even more dangerous.
At some point you got to stop considering this a conspiracy theory. There have been 122 vaccine related deaths in Thailand. There has also been a bunch of complications related to one or more of the vaccines.
Sadly, this person who died from the vaccine cocktail was 39 years old and data that I have looked at indicates that she was in a group that is so extremely unlikely to die from Covid at all that it is very probable that she would still be alive today if she simply hadn't pursued getting the vaccine at all.
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I think Covid madness has gripped not just Thailand but the world in general. We have gotten to the point in my opinion that people are just winging it and nobody really has any idea what they are doing but there is an intense global pressure to rollout this "cure." There was this guy with really bad hair that once said "the cure cannot be allowed to be worse than the problem itself" I think we are well beyond that point now.
Thailand doesn't have enough vaccines, just like most of the developing countries in the world and while I am not a medical professional, the idea behind mixing injections was a seriously flawed idea to begin with.