Thread by @zenjournalist

How bad are the problems at Thai royal company Siam Bioscience which have derailed Thailand's mass inoculation drive after just a week and caused delays in deliveries to Malaysia, Taiwan and the Philippines (and maybe more countries we don't know about)? Here comes a THREAD 1/15

As is widely known by now, Siam Bioscience is a totally opaque company which has consistently failed to provide even basic information, and the Thai government is routinely lying to cover up problems at Siam Bioscience because they are terrified of offending Vajiralongkorn 2/15

On June 2, Siam Bioscience held a weird ceremony with no journalists invited, presided over by Vajiralongkorn's right-hand man Satitpong Sukvimol with a speech by Princess Sirivannavari's bff Nualphan “Madam Pang” Lamsam, to mark the delivery of the first 1.8 million doses 3/15

We know from several sources including the Rural Doctors Society that this ceremony was already dishonest, because Siam Bioscience had not been able to produce the doses promised, so half a million AstraZeneca doses had to be imported from South Korea bangkokpost.com/thailand/gener… 4/15

So right from the start, Siam Bioscience was behind schedule, but this was never admitted. The second batch of 1.5 million doses was supposed to be delivered yesterday but Siam Bioscience was unable to do so. This is why Thailand's mass vaccination programme has been halted 5/15

Thanks to the honesty of one official, CCSA operations chief General Nattapon Nakpanich, we know that no vaccines will be received from Siam Bioscience this week, so production is at least a week behind schedule bangkokpost.com/thailand/gener… 6/15

But in fact, production is much further behind than this, because the Philippines was supposed to be receiving 1.3 million doses from Siam Bioscience around now, but they've been told it's delayed a month and they'll only get 1.17 million doses 7/15 reuters.com/world/asia-pac…

Taiwan & Malaysia were expecting deliveries from Siam Bioscience this month too (exact amount not known) and have been told to expect a delay. So it's clear Siam Bioscience is already behind target by at least 3.5 million doses and probably much more reuters.com/business/healt… 8/15

It's not particularly surprising that Siam Bioscience is falling behind. The company has never made vaccines before. They had to scale up their facilities massively, with the help of Siam Cement Group, in the months ahead of starting production. 9/15

As AstraZeneca CEO Pascal Soriot explained in an interview in January: “A year ago, we didn't have a vaccine. When you do that, you have glitches, you have scale-up problems. Therefore, the yield varies from one to three, by the factor of three." repubblica.it/cronaca/2021/0… 10/15

In other words, everybody is in uncharted territory, and the yield from AstraZeneca production facilities, like the Siam Bioscience facility, can be wildly different. Especially at first, some facilities can produce three times more doses than others relative to capacity 11/15

It's understandable that Siam Bioscience, which has never done this before and had to scale up at speed, is struggling. Maybe they'll be able to fix the glitches and increase production. But the Thai government strategy was based on wildly optimistic production targets 12/15

The biggest disaster is that because Siam Bioscience is owned by King Vajiralongkorn, no senior government figure dares admit that production is falling behind. Prayut and Anutin and their cronies are terrified of offending the monarch. 13/15

They are resorting to a combination of outright denial of obvious reality and frenzied finger-pointing, blaming everybody else apart from Siam Bioscience (and themselves) for the mess. At a time when clarity is needed, all we are getting is a shitstorm of lies and nonsense 14/15

This debacle is harming millions of people in Thailand and other Asian countries, all because the Thai government and Siam Bioscience refuse to just tell the truth and explain honestly what is happening. More details in my #SecretSiam newsletter: secretsiam.news/p/epic-fail-th… 15/15