AstraZeneca seeks to extend delivery timeline

spoon · July 20, 2021

Its complacency. Thailand has been lucky to enjoy low infection rate for the most part of 2020, and able to bring down second waves pretty efficiently. I think we observe similar trend with taiwan and australia as well, where the goverment are able to contain the spread but fail to order their vaccine supplies. Now that delta variant wrecking havoc, turns out that their strategy or lack of strategy backfire.

Ive said this before, that some countries will be ill-equiped to fight the spread simply because they have chosen to ward it off out of the countries from the get go, so their whole system to combat the virus have not been tested. Add incompetant and corrupt gov in that mix, you get what u see now in thailand.h

Though my guess was a bit off since i thought that phuket sandbox might be the reason. Instead, its their lack of border control or possible some high so refusing to quarantine is the reason. Of course, any competant gov would see this mistake and start to impose strict lockdown, but instead, we saw songkran holiday was allowed. Its not the first we heard this though, it has been repeated over and over in many countries prior to this, when everyone is scrambling to learn about the virus and how to control it. It just that thai couldve learned from other countries mistake and avoid the current disaster.

My country malaysia isnt doing any better in containing the virus though. And i dare to say due to similar reasons. We were doing well early on, get complacent, and thought we could control it even if we see some increases in the daily cases. Politicians kept saying they cant impose strict lockdown to save economy (mainly factories and construction) until its too late and our hospitals are hammered.

The only thing that we did ok is vaccine acquisition. We are not the best and ordered enough supply early on, but we picked up early and start negotiating contracts and even join covax albeit a bit late. And it is due to our second waves, that started in october due to a state election resulted from power grabbing move by politicians there.

And the current third wave right now, our minister managed to expedite some vaccines orders through further negotiation and of course some donations as well. Another move recently is to expedite vaccination in the two states that see high daily cases, (KL and Selangor). By August 1st, all adult is these two states will at least get their first dose, and any resident who have not receive their appointment yet or those without identification (illegal) can simply walk-in to get their vaccine. Hopefully cases will go down soon, as today daily cases are 12.9k with 6-7k are in these 2 states alone. We are vaccinating around 400k+ doses daily now, for a 32mil population country.

Back to the topic, Malaysia is one of the country that is waiting for astrazeneca deliveries from thai factory. However, the delay will not affect us much for now as we have ordered i believe 30% more doses than required to vaccinate the whole population.