Taiwan receives 1st shipment of second-gen COVID-19 vaccine
ROC Central News Agency
09/17/2022 03:42 PM
Taipei, Sept. 17 (CNA) The first shipment of 804,000 doses of second-generation Moderna Spikevax COVID-19 vaccine targeting the original virus from 2020 and the Omicron BA. 1 subvariant arrived in Taiwan late Friday night and is scheduled to be distributed to local governments starting Sept. 24.
The bivalent vaccine doses arrived at the Taoyuan International Airport at 10:56 p.m. on China Airlines flight 5245, which had departed from the U.S. city of Atlanta.
They will undergo an inspection and packaging process before they are distributed.
A second batch of about 800,000 doses of the vaccine is scheduled to arrive in Taiwan on Sunday.
CECC head Victor Wang (王必勝) said the vaccine is effective against the original COVID-19 viral strain of 2020, as well as the Omicron subvariants BA.1, BA.2 and BA.5.
According to plans set out by the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC), the vaccine doses will be offered in two stages as booster shots, with the first stage targeting people aged 65 or older, residents at long-term care facilities, and people who are at least 18 years old with immunodeficiencies.
President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) said late Friday night that the latest shipment of vaccine doses was proof that her administration had not lost sight of its duty to contain COVID-19 outbreaks in the country, ahead of the local elections in November.
In a social media post, she called on people to refrain from exploiting the issues of the country's vaccine procurement and disease prevention efforts to discredit her administration in the run-up to the elections.
The president's remarks came a week after Yen Po-wen (顏博文), the executive director of the Buddhist Compassion Relief Tzu Chi Foundation, said in a media interview that his foundation had encountered difficulties when trying to purchase and donate COVID-19 vaccines to the Taiwan government last year, when Taiwan experienced its first major outbreak of the disease, resulting in around 800 deaths.
Yen said he received calls from political and business heavyweights at the time, urging his foundation to give up. He also claimed that a government official told him "Don't think about it."
Following Yen's allegations, Taiwan's main opposition party Kuomintang and Taiwan People's Party blasted the government for disregarding human lives and alleged that the administration had delayed the purchase of Pfizer-BioNTech (BNT) COVID-19 vaccine in order to benefit Medigen Vaccine Biologics Corp., a Taiwanese vaccine maker that has developed its own COVID-19 vaccine.
Tsai's administration and her ruling Democratic Progressive Party have been accused by opposition parties since last year of playing politics with vaccine imports, causing delays in acquiring vaccines. Vaccines finally became widely available in Taiwan last autumn.
Tsai's administration has strongly denied the allegations and has insisted it has worked hard all along to obtain vaccines for Taiwan.
To date, Taiwan has taken delivery of 92.67 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines, including 68.41 million doses through government procurement and the rest via private and international donations, Tsai said.
The president also reiterated her thanks to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), the Tzu Chi Foundation and Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. for donating a combined 15 million doses of the BNT vaccine to the government last year.
The companies and Tzu Chi stepped in in June last year, when government procurements were criticized as being slow-paced and insufficient to meet Taiwan's needs at the time.
(By Yeh Chen and Sean Lin)
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