>"[Kim] mobilised the young labour units, called dolgyeokdae or "Shock Brigade"... thanking some 100 000 young men who volunteered to join the plans."

Ha! Sure, they "volunteered!" Totally not corvée/conscripted labor at all guys!

As for the "shock brigades," I quote Joshua Stanton in an article he wrote about the construction of a tourist resort KJU built AFTER the ban on tourism in NK.

>"just stop here, mid-sentence, and ponder the idiocy of taking people away from their normal jobs that might involve useful work to build a fucking resort hotel and then having the gall to call them “shock troop brigades”..."

https://freekorea.us/2018/12/of-course-kim-jong-uns-tourist-resorts-will-fail-of-course-we-can-help-with-that/

It reminds me of this cheesily-militaristic, Charge-of-the-Light-Brigade-style speech NK gave in regard to a ski resort they built ten years ago.

https://www.piie.com/blogs/north-korea-witness-transformation/slave-blog-economic-policy-roundup

If they're vaccinating their own people, it's likely they're giving priority to the military (thanks to NK's "Military First Policy" and to their "Core Class."

NK divides their population into three strata; "Core" (regime loyalists), "Wavering" (average citizens) and "Hostile" (everyone the regime considers disloyal and undesirable).

During the 1990s North Korean Famine, NK prioritized aid delivery to its Core Class (and even allowed them to skim/steal some of it to sell on the black market for profit). The rest of the population got nothing and is where most of the casualties came from.

It would not surprise me if they would/did do the same in regard to Covid vaccines as well.