Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Thailand as a possible medical hub for Chinese in ASEAN. Kind of interesting, I was reading an article that at first glance it would not have seemed to have anything to do with this. It was from the Bangkok Post, bangkokpost.com, the article is titled: Government Plans AstraZeneca Jab Rollout. Within the article, I found this. Quoting directly: "Mr. Anutin, that is the Minister of Public Health here, said that Beijing is considering making Thailand a regional vaccination center for Chinese citizens living in ASEAN." Quoting further: "He said the country has asked his Ministry to help provide vaccines to 200,000 Chinese citizens living in the Kingdom. Beijing will provide the vaccines for free, Mr Anutin added."

A couple of interesting things there. One is just the notion of Thailand acting as a hub in ASEAN for expatriate Chinese but also that there are 200,000 Chinese citizens living in the Kingdom. That is a pretty staggering number. If you recall from other videos on this channel when we were discussing the total number of retirees in Thailand, or the total number of expats in Thailand, it was somewhere around about 100,000 was our guesstimate based on some of the UN numbers; maybe possibly even 110,000. But if you look at that, it looks like Chinese expat numbers have a double on the "Farang" folks, so again interesting stuff. 

I will be curious to see how this progresses but Thailand definitely has a key and pivotal role to play in ASEAN and always has. From a geographical standpoint, it does make sense. Thailand has always been known as a medical tourism hub and then on top of that with the vaccines rolling out it really is not outside the realm of reason if you will or realm of possibility that Thailand could act as a medical hub for Chinese expats in Southeast Asia.