In November of 1993, Peggy Creveling arrived in Bangkok, Thailand, to meet up with her husband, Chad, whom she'd met at the well-known U.S. military academy of West Point some years before.

As she explained to me recently, he was busy that day, working on the Stanford, University internship that had brought him there. Left to her own devices, Peggy decided to explore the city, by herself, on foot.

While the U.S. tax evasion-prevention law known as FATCA has been getting all the headlines lately – certainly here at the American Expat Financial News Journal – FATCA’s global counterpart, the OECD/G20 regime known as the Common Reporting Standard, has quietly been continuing to sign up new jurisdictions.

While the U.S. State Department isn't known to have changed its stated policy of not providing "direct medical care to private U.S. citizens abroad," including vaccines, the Democrats Abroad Thailand has told its members that those expats living in Thailand who are U.S. military veterans may now "register for vaccination" with the Pfizer vaccine, through their local VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) or American Legion posts. 

The U.S. State Department has reiterated that the U.S. "currently does not have plans to distribute Covid-19 vaccines to Americans overseas," according to the American Citizens Abroad, which has been calling on the government to provide vaccines directly to American expats struggling to get them in certain countries in which such vaccines are in critically short supply.

As this publication and others have been reporting in recent months, Americans resident in Thailand have become increasingly vocal in their calls for the U.S. government to provide them and their families with Covid-19 vaccinations, as it has done for their fellow U.S. citizens – and taxpayers – back home...

Americans living in Thailand say their continuing calls for the U.S. to provide them with Covid-19 vaccinations – in recognition of their status as U.S. taxpayers, owing to America's citizenship-based tax regime – still are not being acted upon as they would like, even as the numbers of infections and Covid-related deaths continue to rise steadily in the Southeast Asian country.

Foreigners currently resident in Thailand "must receive 20% of a 1.5 million [dose] batch" of Covid-19 vaccines that the U.S. has commited to donate to Thailand, the chief of Thailand's National Security Council has been quoted as telling the country's media organizations.

A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers has written to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken to urge him to make Covid-19 vaccines available to American expats at U.S. embassies and consulates overseas, even as U.S. embassies around the world continue to state on their websites that the U.S. government "does not plan to provide Covid-19 vaccinations to private U.S. citizens overseas."

While many Americans back home are voluntarily opting out of being vaccinated against the Covid-19 coronavirus, American expats around the world are furiously struggling to obtain the vaccine for themselves and their families. And as they're doing so, many are grumbling about the fact that being U.S. taxpayers, they should have as much right to free and available vaccines as their Homeland counterparts. 

Thailand's senior immigration official has told journalists that a controversial law requiring foreigners, and/or their landlords, to report their whereabouts to Thai authorities within 24 hours of any changes is outdated and needs to change.