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Fourth batch of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine arrives in Taiwan

ROC Central News Agency

10/01/2021 11:49 AM

Taipei, Oct. 1 (CNA) Taiwan received a fourth batch of the Pfizer-BioNTech (BNT) COVID-19 vaccine early Friday morning, the second shipment of the vaccine delivered to the country in 24 hours.

The latest shipment arrived at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport at 5:16 a.m. on a China Airlines charter flight from Frankfurt Airport in Germany. According to Terry Gou (郭台銘), founder of Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., it contains approximately 600,000 doses.

It is part of a total order of 15 million BNT doses procured by three private entities in Taiwan -- Hon Hai's YongLin Charity and Education Foundation, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), and the Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation. All the 15 million doses are being donated to Taiwan's government for public vaccination.

 

The vaccine that arrived Friday brought the total number of BNT doses delivered to date to about 2.98 million, according to Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) data.

After being unloaded, disinfected and checked through Customs, the vaccine was transported to a designated cold chain warehouse, and sealed for inspection by Taiwan's Food and Drug Administration, which will take one to two weeks. This is the standard procedure before the vaccine can be distributed for use, the CECC said.

The CECC is expected to reveal more details about the vaccine at a press briefing at 2 p.m. Friday.

One day earlier, a shipment carrying 540,000 vaccine doses of the same brand was delivered to Taiwan from the German vaccine maker.

The two shipments are also the first batches of the BNT vaccine with customized labels on its packaging.

According to images provided by the CECC on Thursday, the vaccine packages were labeled fully in English, including the instructions and the name of the Chinese pharmaceutical company "Fosun Pharma," which has partnered with BioNTech. The only Chinese characters on the labels read "prescription drug" (處方藥物) in traditional Chinese.

Fosun Pharma has been designated as the distributor of the vaccine in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Previous deliveries of about 1.8 million BNT doses that Taiwan received in September contained packages labeled with the name of the vaccine in simplified Chinese (复必泰), while Fosun Pharma's name was in English and Chinese. They were labeled that way because they had been redirected to Taiwan after China refused those two batches.

Meanwhile, Gou (郭台銘) said in a Facebook post on Thursday that the next batch of the BNT vaccine, containing about 200,000 doses, is expected to arrive in Taiwan next Monday.

(By Yeh Chen and Teng Pei-ju)

Enditem/AW