TOKYO, June 12, 2021—It’s been a mystery for the Japanese why PM Suga doesn’t open more national COVID-19 vaccination centers at locations more accessible for the elderly than the current two locations, one in Tokyo and the other in Osaka. On June 12, 2021, The Prospect learned the reason.
A Prospect reporter, who is in his 70s, June 12, 2021 lined up at the Tokyo vaccination site, located in a slightly inconvenient area off the Otemachi business district of Tokyo for his first Merdona vaccine shot.
The site, according to the Japanese government’s websites, including that of the Ministry of Defense, which administers the innoculation operation there, is managed by the MOD. The reporter walked through the passageways that vaccination people were supposed to go through expecting to see muscular Japan Self-Defense Force personnel in combat fatigue and their beautiful female counterparts.
He was wrong. Most of the personnel working at the site were apparently civilians, so the reporter asked where they were from, and some of them replied that they were sent from Pasona Corp., Japan’s top temp and contract worker dispatch agency – whose CEO Yasuyuki Nambu is widely known as Suga’s chum and its key advisor, Heizo Takenaka, is also notorious as the superior to Suga when Takenaka was serving as a minister at one time.
So, even though the Japanese media said that the site was managed by the MOD, the placw was in reality run by Pasona. Opening the site as well as the Osaka site probably was an idea floated by Nambu. Both locations have so far proved unpopular for its location and other reasons, but it doesn’t matter for Nambu since the operation of the two sites were auctioned off to Pasona in a non-competitive government procurement bidding.
Proposals to open more large government vaccination sites to date are ignored by the Suga cabinet because that would require holding open, competitive bidding, and would end up drawing bidders more competirtive than Nambu’s Pasona, according to a person familiar with government procurement and bidding.
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