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We have been talking a lot about the fact that the Thailand Pass is slated although it is not a foregone conclusion that it is going to fall by the wayside as well as the so-called "Test & Go" program which has brought back to the forefront something we haven't talked about on this channel in a while and that is "Vaccine Passports". Quoting directly from a recent article from ASEAN NOW, that's aseannow.com, and they were quoting from the NNT. The title is: CCSA to Consider Proposal to Suspend Test & Go and Thailand Pass. We have discussed this article kind of at length but there was a specific excerpt in here that I thought was noteworthy. "Tourism and Sports Minister Phiphat Rathchakitprakarn stated that the proposal will be presented at the CCSA meeting on April 22. If approved, the changes will most likely be effective on May 1. With the lifting of these restrictions, tourists will be able to enter the country using Vaccine Passports rather than having to wait for days for their documents to be approved."

We discussed this at length and especially going back I don't know it's over a year now, well maybe it was last autumn, autumn of '21 or summer of '21 talking about the so called COVID Pass they tried to come up with here in Thailand which I am utterly against just on a personal level regarding bodily autonomy, personal freedom, medical privacy, right to travel; the reasons I'm against it are myriad. On top of that, there is no appreciable benefit that anybody has ever been able to really put out there. I have yet to see any appreciable benefit presented and I am happy to be corrected. Put something in the comments if you think there is a benefit to these so-called Green Passes for just walking around and living your life. I just don't see it. The only thing I can figure out is it seems to be a surveillance technique. I can't see exactly what the Public Health angle is with respect to this because for one thing it doesn't change anything, that particular methodology. Okay somebody that contaminates another population, I mean at a certain point when you are at community spread it is just inevitable that's going to happen so what is the purpose of that technology. 

Now in this context when they use the term “Vaccine Passport”, it is a slightly nuanced difference in degree in terms of meaning, what they are talking about, basically your vaccination card. Your documentation pertaining to vaccination. And as we discussed going all the way back into 2020, there is historical precedent for countries requiring individuals who wish to enter the country, especially foreign nationals, specifically foreign nationals who are entering their sovereign territory, to require certain documentation pertaining to vaccination. Under the current circumstances though, one, the creepiness of all of this global, again it can only be described as kind of a push for a sort of a personal surveillance that comes to the point of getting into your medical privacy. Okay, international travel, that's one thing. You are dealing with a sovereign country and they have certain requirements to enter their country but when you are dealing with day to day, that's a different thing; not what we are talking about here. I am really hoping Thailand takes a long hard look at this and perhaps rethinks this for a lot of different reasons. One, at this point everybody who wants this treatment can get it so what's the purpose of this documentation other than again to create a new onus, a new obstacle, a new thing people just have to do. It really is a restriction of freedom and to what end? Again, I didn't necessarily agree with it but I could at least understand the argument some one year, a year a half ago here in Thailand when these treatments were not widely available, where they said: “Look, if we are letting in foreign nationals, we want to make sure that they have had some kind of treatment for this because we don't want to essentially, we have sovereignty issues; we have public health issues; we don't want to introduce something into Thailand that could harm people.” Okay I understand the argument there but at this point, I just don't see that is still a rational argument to be made under the current circumstances. Anybody who wants to get treatment for this can do it so what's the point of requiring anybody to do anything on it anymore? I just don't see the purpose and especially at the point where this thing is considered endemic. At that point, I think it is time to just put this all behind us and be done with it.