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The public feud between the public health ministry and the Bangkok governor’s office continued this weekend with both government organizations making public statements disparaging one another.
The spat comes after the postponement this weekend of vaccinations in Bangkok. Private hospitals, which have been helping the government to administer the vaccines, sent messages and called patients registered through the government’s system to tell them that there would be a delay due to shortages.
The shortages prompted widespread criticism of the government and accusations that the vaccination registration system was inefficient and prioritized the wrong people.
In response, both the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration and the Ministry of Public Health took to social media to take shots at each other.
The Ministry of Public Health released a statement that it had given 1 million vaccine doses to the BMA to administer to the public.
The BMA countered in a Facebook post on its official website that it had only received 500,000 shots from the MOPH.
The BMA added that it had done all it could to administer the vaccine to needy candidates and frontline workers implying that it had not been given the vaccine.
But even as the public back and forth continued embarrassing into the weekend, on Sunday night the Thai Ruam Jia Platform, one of the government’s avenues to vaccine registration, announced that it would suspend its vaccine program temporarily from June 15.