Taiwan, which once stood alone and was hailed as a model student of epidemic prevention when the New Guinea pneumonia epidemic was ravaging the world, has recently experienced a sudden breach in epidemic prevention as the number of confirmed New Guinea pneumonia cases continues to climb and the number of deaths has also reached a new high. The worsening of the epidemic has not only raised public concerns about the procurement and source of the vaccine, but has also intensified political attacks and defenses across the Taiwan Strait and within the island of Taiwan.
Reuters noted in a report that the spat between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait has in fact not ceased since the outbreak. Taipei accuses Beijing of spreading false news and preventing Taiwan from participating in the World Health Organization, while Beijing claims that Taiwan’s rejection of the mainland’s vaccine is a political game with people’s lives.
The focus of attention is now on when and where Taiwan will obtain enough vaccines. According to the latest statistics, Taiwan has obtained a total of about 700,000 doses of the Astor Oxford (AZ) vaccine, but it will soon run out, and it is difficult to determine the date of supply of subsequent vaccines.
Taiwan’s opposition Kuomintang (KMT) held a press conference on the 24th, and although it did not directly call for the import of mainland vaccines for fear of being criticized for being pro-communist or wearing a red hat, it severely criticized Tsai Ing-wen’s government for failing to get the vaccine right; while former KMT chairman Hung Hsiu-chu called on Tsai’s government over the weekend to approve the import of vaccines from mainland China as soon as possible, claiming that mainland vaccines have been accepted internationally and that Taiwan certainly cannot wait any longer. “The real enemy is the virus, not the mainland,” Hong said. Another small party advocating cross-strait reunification, the United Progressive Party, went directly to the Central Epidemic Command Center in Taipei on Thursday to petition for the acceptance of mainland vaccine imports.
However, DPP legislator Chen Ting-fei said that the Chinese mainland will definitely operate the issue of Chinese vaccines in Taiwan, and the words and actions of the KMT and TPP are in cooperation with Beijing to “make trouble”, which will affect the whole process of epidemic prevention. Chen Ting-fei also believes that the Chinese vaccine has not yet had any standard quarantine report, so “when it arrives in Taiwan, who dares to administer it?” She hopes that Taiwan’s epidemic command center will uphold the highest standards and not loose them because someone is messing with them.
Taiwan has ordered about 30 million doses of the vaccine through various channels. In addition to the 700,000 doses of AZ vaccine that have already arrived and are about to be administered, Taiwan has been allocated 4.76 million doses of vaccine through the Global Access to Vaccines (COVAX) platform; has ordered 10 million doses of AZ vaccine (700,000 of which have already arrived) and 5.05 million doses of Moderna vaccine from pharmaceutical companies on its own; and has pre-ordered 10 million doses of Taiwan’s own vaccine, scheduled to be released in July this year.
To date, only about 1% of the Taiwanese population has been vaccinated against the new coronavirus. The difficulty at hand is that distant water is not enough to quench the thirst of the immediate population, and all these vaccines ordered have no exact delivery date, which is a major reason why the vaccine has evolved into a cross-strait political dispute and even an internal political dispute in Taiwan.
As the outbreak in Taiwan continues, the national alert level 3, which was scheduled to end on May 28, may have to be extended at that time, and if the epidemic is difficult to contain for a while, the DPP government is likely to face increasing calls and pressure to open up the mainland to vaccines.
The Biden administration has already announced that it will release 80 million doses of vaccines to support other countries by the end of June, but these recipients are mainly Latin American countries. Taiwan’s Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung recently held a video conference with U.S. Health Secretary Xavier Becerra, but neither side disclosed whether the U.S. had committed to providing vaccines to Taiwan.
Even some Taiwanese companies are now under pressure to open up the use of mainland vaccines. Reuters quoted a source as reporting that Taiwan’s Honghai, which makes Apple phones, has been approaching Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical and Taiwan’s central epidemic command center to give its employees and their families the BNT vaccine, which is distributed by Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical but produced by a German pharmaceutical company. Perhaps the use of vaccines distributed by mainland companies but not produced by mainland pharmaceutical companies could be a way to resolve the DPP government’s dilemma over the vaccine issue in Taiwan.
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