Taiwan gets 400,000-dose vaccine boost while COVID-19 cases rise
19 May, 2021
Taiwan will get 400,000 even more AstraZeneca COVID-19 doses on Wednesday (May 19) from the COVAX global sharing program, the government said, since it faces a good dwindling way to obtain shots during a spike in household infections.
Taiwan has reported almost 1,000 new infections in the past week or perhaps so, resulting in new curbs in the administrative centre, Taipei, and shocking a populace that had become familiar with lifestyle carrying on almost normally.
But its inventory of vaccines is speedily falling. It has just received a bit more than 300,000 to day, all from AstraZeneca. At least two-thirds of these have been distributed.
Cabinet spokesman Lo Ping-cheng told reporters that the roughly 400,000 additional doses would arrive in Taiwan in Wednesday afternoon from Amsterdam.
The shots are via COVAX, which distributes vaccines to lower-income countries, Lo said.
Taiwan has said it likely to get more than 1 million AstraZeneca shots via COVAX.
Taiwan has ordered 20 million doses, mostly from AstraZeneca but also from Moderna, though global shortages have curtailed materials.
In a statement on Wednesday, Taiwan's Centers for Disease Control stated after a virtual workshop on vaccines on Tuesday with the very best US, British, Japanese and Australian diplomats in Taipei that vaccines should be fairly distributed.
"Fair access to effective vaccines is the ultimate methods to curb the global COVID-19 pandemic. We look forward to more effective and satisfactory vaccine development and advertising, and call on all countries to work together to get rid of the COVID-19 pandemic," it said.
Taiwan is mobilising its diplomats to attempt to speed up access to even more vaccines, and is found in talks with the United States for a show of the COVID-19 shots President Joe Biden plans to send abroad.
Brent Christensen, the de facto US ambassador to Taiwan, said at the same event that "talking about COVID-19 vaccines can be a sensitive subject matter", according to a duplicate of his remarks posted by his office.
"We recognise that all country and region reaches different stages in their COVID-19 vaccination programmes," the remarks said. "Unfortunately, various still face complications gaining usage of vaccines."
Source: