OJAS

I've received various notifications of initial appointments (in triplicate so far!) by SMS out of the blue directly from the hospital in Pattaya performing the vaccinations - usually with a couple of days' notice if I'm lucky!

Well, I duly sent a grumpy email to this address yesterday, and, surprise, surprise, I received the following reply more or less by return, which confirmed my suspicions as suggested up thread that duplicate registrations are being weeded out! Your registration has been approved. The reject email was for the duplicate registration which you may have accidentally completed. Please do not worry as it would not affect your status in the registration. You will be sent an appointment details once your vaccine has been allocated by the Ministry of Public Health. At this point, the majority of registrants' info has been sent to each province and to the Ministry of Public Health, and more continue to be forwarded. The waiting time could vary from group to group and province to province. Normally those in the high priority group are notified within a few weeks. Please note that each province's vaccination scheme is progressing at a different pace, owing to the different capacity of local medical facilities and the fact that the system prioritises those in the vulnerable groups such as persons aged 60 or over and those with underlying medical conditions first.

Probably best to just ignore the SMS or email. If you were to show up for the Expatvac appointment you would probably be first asked to sign a piece of paper which amongst other things confirmed that you hadn't already received a COVID-19 jab in any event (based on my experience at Pattaya last Monday in connection with my initial Pfizer jab courtesy of the BCCT).

As can initially successful but subsequently unsuccessful (on visa-related grounds) applicants who never received any follow-up email (as in my case), presumably!

What if you don't have a suitable smartphone on to which to download said whizzo app?????

Well, certainly no-one who isn't a proud possessor of a suitable smartphone on to which to download said whizzo app would probably be allowed to eat out, it seems to me!

But can you at least please let us know whether said "tiny immigration office in the outback" is located in Isaan? If it is, @MJCM might be interested as he is planning to do exactly the same as you and appears to be located in that part of the world!

@MJCMAn important point for you to bear in mind for when you do make the switch - which, as far as I can tell, hasn't yet been made in this thread - is that your new retirement extension will be dated from when you submit your application to your local immigration office rather than from when your current permission to stay expires. So, if you have been in the habit of applying for marriage extensions as soon as the window has opened for doing this up to 30 days before the expiry date of your current permission to stay, it might be better for you to hold fire until nearer this expiry date on this particular occasion. This would, however, only be an issue for you for the year in which you made the switch - unless, of course, you were planning to alternate between retirement and marriage extensions!

At least, you could all, thanks to the Maharat Nakhon Ratchasima Hospital, start a little email mini-forum to compare experiences if you so wished!????

Fat chance of that happening any time soon here in Rayong Province, I think, until each and every Thai national aged 0 and above has first been jabbed as necessary ! ???????????? https://xn--42cf4bzce1atwz0cyc7f1d.com/

I can assure you that it was most definitely the BCCT in my case since, in common with @cnmltd, I received an email from them in confirmation of the SMS containing appointment details which I had received from the Bangkok Pattaya Hospital. I had previously registered with the BCCT on a previous incarnation of their website at:- https://members.bccthai.com/bcct/asp/application.asp?TpID=99 Interestingly, it would appear that the BCCT have now widened the scope of their initiative to include everyone of any nationality (not just Brits) who fulfil the criteria of being aged 60+ or suffering from at least 1 of 7 stated chronic illnesses. Something which everyone on here, regardless of nationality, who is experiencing nonsensical hassles with their Expatvac registration might now wish to take note of.

I, too, received an SMS on Saturday from BPH confirming an appointment for the Pfizer vaccine at 6th floor, Central Festival, Pattaya today (as now is) 13:00-14:00. As subsequently noted by cnmltd this relates to the BCCT initiative referred to in the following thread rather than the MFA expatvac shambles, so kudos to the BCCT, I think:-

Neither did I! But, on looking back through my email inbox, I see that I received 2 initial "success" notification emails after (eventually) registering on the Expatvac website but only a single subsequent "rejection" email. Which makes me wonder whether they might, in fact, also be weeding out duplicate registrations in this cack-handed manner. Unfortunately the MFA staff member to whom I spoke a few days ago showed no interest in taking my personal details so as to investigate this matter further. Might you, perchance, be in a similar position to mine as regards receiving initial "success" emails in duplicate and only a single subsequent "rejection" email?

Fat lot of use that would be to him, I think, if he can't get a signal on it (see immediately below)! UK banks who require transactions to be verified by SMS insist, without exception, on passcodes being sent by this means solely to UK mobile numbers.

I suspect that there are a quite a few other CPBK account holders back in the UK who are also in your position of not having a mobile signal, so it is reassuring that the CPBK seem more than willing to cater for the situation in which both they and those of us living abroad find them/ourselves as regards the receipt of passcodes in practice. Yes, the CPBK are, indeed, the only other UK bank I'm also aware of who are prepared to provide passcodes required for performing certain online banking functions by email. Most other UK banks still appear to require the use of card readers which the CPBK ditched a couple of years ago.

Did this arrive OK in the event?

May I kindly suggest that you read the final part of my posting again with considerably more care that you have clearly already done. For ease of reference I repeat the relevant lines (which, for some reason, you have chosen to omit from your quote) below with the key word which you seem to have overlooked in bold:- "..the British government's equally (if not considerably more) disgraceful policy that surplus UK vaccines are to be made available exclusively to anyone on this great planet of ours who is not a UK expat."

Well, it's certainly the policy being eagerly adhered to here in Rayong Province! But by all means carry on skipping up and down your soi in a state of ecstatic delight, fulsomely singing the praises of the Thai government to the very highest heavens as being the best thing since sliced bread in COVID-19 control! https://xn--42cf4bzce1atwz0cyc7f1d.com/

Well it is the case that, as part of the Great Vaccine Giveaway of surplus UK doses announced with considerable pride by ol' Boris prior to the G7 summit in June, Thailand is currently the beneficiary of 415,000 such doses (a Google search of "UK vaccines to Thailand" yields 2 confirmatory Bangkok Post links which, of course, we are not permitted to quote on here). Yet no assurances were sought by Boris or his minions that these doses would be earmarked for us Brits, meaning that they will probably, instead, end up in exclusively Thai arms, consistent with the Thai government's disgraceful "Thais first" policy and the British government's equally (if not considerably more) disgraceful policy that surplus UK vaccines are to be made available exclusively to anyone on this great planet of ours who is not a UK expat.

Same goes for me! Just called the MFA number myself and had a more-or-less identical experience to yours - except that, in venting my frustrations about the whole process, I did give the poor lady a bit of an earful, I regret to say! Thankfully, I do have other irons in the fire on the vaccination front in case I don't receive a further email from the MFA with an edit link for whatever reason.

In addition, Bangkok appears to rule over the health of everywhere else in LOS, given the relative ease of getting jabbed there (if a number of recent posts on this thread are to be believed) when compared to currently next-to-zero prospects generally speaking in the boonies, even in red-zone provinces.

Might well have been the same official who provided me with the following equally absurd "advice" for those with imminently expiring passports who needed to apply for extensions of stay at the start of the pandemic nearly 18 months ago, but who were unable to apply for replacement passports thanks to VFS office closures which lasted a good 3 months! We would suggest approaching the local immigration to discuss the implications of your passport and visa situation. They may be able to suggest alternatives given the current circumstances.

A pathetically ludicrous suggestion IMHO. Looks like it's the personal office phone number of 1 of those MFA wuzzocks who was responsible for creating this utter shambles - in which case it is likely to be perpetually engaged morning, noon and night for weeks and weeks on end, I would have thought!

I personally would have thought that a breakdown by Thai province would have been more relevant. But, of course, this being Thailand..................