Department of Land Transport eases rules for licence renewal to mitigate virus risk

PM Prayut Chan-o-cha will order legal action against anyone who “distorts information” about the government’s Covid-19 vaccination plan after the banned opposition politician Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit had raised the topic of “Royal Vaccine: Who Benefits and Who Doesn’t?” on his Facebook Live feed on Monday.

On the Facebook Live, Thanathorn criticised the government’s vaccine procurement and production, commenting that the government is too slow in securing sufficient inoculations.

“Thailand pinned its hopes only on AstraZeneca which allowed local pharmaceutical manufacturer, Siam Bioscience, to produce its vaccine. The government had not held talks with other countries until Jan 3 when it announced it will buy 2 million doses of vaccines from Sinovac which is a very small quantity… enough for only 1.5% of the population.”

Siam Bioscience is a royally-sponsored company that has partnered AstraZeneca to produce the vaccines for Thailand and other countries in the region.

According to Dr Nakorn Premsiri, director of the National Vaccine Institute, Siam Bioscience invited the British-Swedish pharmaceutical group AstraZeneca to visit its plant to see whether it met the criteria required to produce the vaccine at a minimum of 200 million doses per year. The government approved 600 million baht to improve the plant’s facilities to produce the Covid-19 vaccine according to the requirements of AstraZeneca.

Responding to Thanathorn’s comment, the PM says he will order prosecution for anything “that is distorted and not factual” that gets published, whether in media or on social media and that he has to protect the government’s credibility from those who are “irresponsible” with their remarks.

SOURCE:Bangkok Post

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The new wave of cases has been on a downward slope in recent weeks. Today’s count of 59 new Covid-19 cases is the lowest daily count since mid-December. A coronavirus-related death was also reported today in the Centre for Covid-19 Situation Administration’s daily briefing.

A 48 year old Thai woman died after testing positive for Covid-19. The woman worked as a driver for migrant workers. No other information was released about her in the CCSA’s English-language report. It’s unclear if she had pre-existing conditions.

Out of the 59 new Covid-19 cases, 28 are local transmissions, 23 cases were detected in proactive testing and 8 cases detected in quarantine for those entering Thailand from abroad.

Since the start of the pandemic, Thailand has reported a total of 12,653 Covid-19 cases and 71 deaths. The new wave of Covid-19 cases has spread to 62 of Thailand’s 77 provinces.

Active Covid-19 cases in Thailand as of January 19, according to Worldometers.

SOURCE:CCSA

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Social media users are up in arms after registration for the government’s Kon La Khreung (“Let’s Go Halves”) co-payment scheme filled up within 10 minutes. The scheme, first introduced as an economic stimulus measure in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis, gives shoppers 50% off the purchase of everyday items, up to 150 baht a day and capped at 3,500 baht for the duration of the scheme.

The third phase of registration had a quota of 1.34 million users, but interested parties had to be quick. Having lost their chance to register, many disgruntled people took to social media to complain, with the hashtag #คนละครึ่งเฟส3 (#Let’s Go Halves3) trending on Twitter.

Several netizens say they filled out the online registration form at exactly 6.01am but were then forced to wait for the one-time password to be delivered to their phones before they could complete the process. In many instances, by the time they received the OTP code, registration was full. Some say they had to wait over 5 minutes to receive the password, which caused them to miss the small window for registration.

According to a Nation Thailand report, one person has described the scheme as nothing more than a government PR stunt, pointing out that, despite being funded by taxpayers’ money, only some people can avail of it.

SOURCE: Nation Thailand

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