OPINION

Be afraid, very afraid

Re: "Work at home, urges govt," (BP, April 19).

Many of us learned long ago that when politicians and government officials tell the public that there is nothing to worry about and everything is under control, it is time to become concerned.

Thais are now being told that "with full cooperation, the number of Covid-19 infections should decrease within the next two weeks". We're being assured there will be adequate hospital beds for all new patients.

Phuket businesses are promised that international tourists will be able to return by July. Some schools will be able to resume in-person classes. Vaccines are guaranteed to be safe and effective. We're told there will be a big ramp-up of vaccine production by mid-year and enough vaccines to achieve herd immunity by the end of 2021.

From all that I'm hearing from politicians and officials, it's time to be worried -- very worried!

Re: "We put safety first," (BP, April 21).

Ah! So that's all right then. Our caring PM had the safety of the public at heart when he and his incompetent government failed to ensure an adequate supply of vaccine last year while governments in other countries were busy procuring as much as they could.

How thoughtless of those other governments to risk unsafe vaccines when they could have followed the Thai government's example in making sure that there would be so few people vaccinated, thus the vaccine risk was negligible.

And how public-spirited of those MPs, ministers, senators and other high-profile members of the elite class who jumped the vaccine queue thereby ensuring that our public health workers and others would be spared the trauma of having to risk unsafe vaccines.

Way to go, Gen Prayut! The 30 million people in UK and 200 million in USA who have been vaccinated must be eating their hearts out that they do not have the kind of leadership we lucky Thais have.

I would just like to point out the obvious here. There are approximately 1,500 hospitals in Thailand, not counting neighbourhood clinics. If each hospital can vaccinate 1,000 people per day which is not an unreasonable number under the circumstances, that would result in 1,500,000 people vaccinated per day or 45 million in a month.

We would be back to semi-normal within a month. So what's the hold-up?

Because the authority has not granted permits to the private sector to import vaccines, there are not enough vaccines in general.

Look at the US as an example. On Dec 11, 2020 the US Food and Drug Administration issued the first emergency use authorisation (EUA) for a vaccine for the prevention of coronavirus disease.

The EUA allowed the Pfizer-BioNTech Covid-19 Vaccine to be distributed in the US. That jump-started a far and wide vaccination programme.

Enough people have been vaccinated, of all ages and races, and that has created enough data and samples to give a statistically significant conclusion that all current approved Covid-19 vaccines are safe for humans.

Does the Thai FDA consider our current Covid-19 situation an emergency?