Health Clearance Instructions: Fill & Download for Free

Just arrived to Suvarnabhumi (Bangkok international airport). If you can read Spanish and want a little more background and adventures, you can check the whole story here.As a Colombian resident I was required a Yellow Fever vaccination certificate, which I did get for my Thailand visa application. Some instruction was given when I step down the airplane, but I didn’t pay attention. After walking a very long corridor I came to the immigration room, and some officer checked my documentation just before I formed in the queue, just the basics: passport, health clearance… what!, I was supposed to check to a health control post before immigration. Okay, easy to solve, I just needed to go back halfway the long corridor to the health control post.I was given a form to fill up, and I had to handle it back with my yellow fever vaccination certificate. My yellow fever vaccination certificate! Oops!, I left it home.I had flown half the world. I was already two days late because I lost my second leg due to migration delays in Miami, which meant that I lost my third leg because I couldn’t be in Houston on time, which meant that I had to find some other ticket in some other airline just to get to Thailand where I was invited to an event (my family in Bogota helping me to find alternatives while I was almost incommunicado with no phone or data plan in Houston)… and now, that I finally arrived to Thailand I was about to not be let in because I left home a small yellow paper in my bed table?Fortunately I had a copy of some papers I needed to my visa application. I had dropped my paper’s folder in the rush in Miami and some of the papers I never saw again, but right there it was a photocopy of the vaccine certificate, which was not valid but enough for the health officer to prove that I indeed had the vaccine, and that I had shown it to the consular officer when they gave me the visa.A couple of days later I was in quarantine in a clinic in Chiang Mai, as they suspected that a cold I had might be symptoms of MERS-coronavirus, but that’s another story.

For me:Loss of free EHIC health care on my trips to the EU.Possible USA style pre-clearance on trips to the EU.Potential additional costs for some supermarket food imported from the EU, due new tariffs, changed suppliers and new cross border paperwork.Considerable increased political activity through public demonstrations, petitions and campaigns.A review on my personal dealings with anyone who voted for Brexit.For my work:A work imposed temporary airline travel ban for trips to the EU. We have been already issued with instructions.Disrupted cross border data flows for daily work.Working with lawyers who will be spending extra time on new data and financial equivalence arrangements.Thank you for your requested answer Steve Moreby.

There wasn’t any anti-Semitism and discrimination of Jews in the USSR—officially.One of the great advantages of Communism over other totalitarian systems is its ability to implement policies, enforce rules and run campaigns completely under the radar. There were no Gulag, no Great Purges, no ethnic cleansings in our newspapers or history books. I learned the word “Gulag” from the official anti-Sozhenitsyn campaign, and long thought that Gulag (abbrevaition of the official “State Directorate of Camps”) was some criminal jargon for our “correctional working facilities”.The same with Jews. There was no official word to keep them down. The secret instructions that dictated the recruitment and personnel policies on different levels were forbidden to even reference. When another of such instructions used to come around, HR managers would walk over to pérvyi otdél (“desk number one”, the Soviet officialese for department of classified information and security clearance), read the document on the spot, sign it, and hand it back at once. No copies, no mention to anyone, ever. If someone ever would mention such a document in public, they would only meet silence and blank stares.The only evidence for the existence of these instructions I saw myself were copies of confidential appraisal reports a sloppy HR manager at my office forgot on my desk. Two personal files of my fellow propaganda workers contained as the initial record an A4 paper sheet with their compressed biographies. No markings, signatures, or letterheads, just plain typed text. At the bottom, these two had the word “Jew” as a separate paragraph, where my other colleagues were mentioned as “twice divorced” and “had a police citation for appearing inebriated in public”.The painting below, “1st of May”, by Yuri Kugach, shows an interesting phenomenon. Jews, especially during the first decades of Soviet rule, were overrepresented on all levels of state administration, in the education, science, health service, media and entertainment. However, you would have hard time spotting Jewish faces on any Soviet paintings or propaganda posters, even those that glorified the different ethnicities in our country.