Well … I wonder. I mean, it’s been three years now, and in all that time they hadn’t even bothered to pick up the phone and speak to him previously? They weren’t even aware that he was (somewhat) well-known, and never watched any of his videos? They’d never done a bit of cursory research to see if he might be right?
I can’t help wondering if they were just going through the motions, and the moment he left, went back to whatever they were doing and forgot all about it. It’s Thailand, after all, and if there’s anything that Thailand is famous for (apart from the obvious) it’s corruption. Pfizer almost certainly handed out some very large emoluments to Thai authorities to get the job done.
But it’ll be worth keeping an eye on it. Who knows, it might lead to something.
In other news, the UKHSA basically admitting to fraud:
We explained previously how COVID-19 deaths are recorded in the United Kingdom. There are two main reports:
- Deaths within 28 days of a reported COVID-19 infection (deaths with COVID)
- Death where COVID-19 is mentioned on the death registration (deaths from COVID)
We started counting deaths with COVID-19 for rapid pandemic monitoring when there was a need to publish figures on a daily basis to inform decisions about our pandemic response. This information can be collected much more quickly than death registrations, so it can be used as an early warning signal of changes in trends to support public health actions. By using this measure, we were able to cut the reporting lag associated with death registrations from 11 days to 2-3 days. The deaths with COVID-19 metric has been used as the leading death indicator on the Gov.uk dashboard until 26 January 2023.
Apparently, they considered it most important to get numbers published quickly, even if those numbers were not representative of reality. The government has admitted, at various times, that somewhere between 20% and 50% of recorded COVID deaths had nothing to do with COVID at all (and we could debate endlessly over exactly how important COVID was in the remaining cases). It’s nice to see confirmation of that in black-and-white.
Funny that Taiwan has made very similar changes to their reporting methodology at exactly the same time. I wonder if any high-level phone calls have been made, say, from the WHO? Nah, there’s no such thing as conspiracies.