Taiwan has blamed intervention by China for the last-minute cancellation of a vaccine purchase from Europe.
The claim was made yesterday by the head of Taiwan’s epidemic command centre Chen Shih-chung.
It is reported that Taiwan was on the cusp of signing a purchasing agreement with the German pharmaceutical company, BioNTech, for five million doses, but that this fell through at the last minute because China’s Shanghai Fosun pharmaceutical company was given the rights to distribute the BioNTech vaccine in the ‘greater China area’. Chen stated in a radio interview that that Fosun had voiced opposition to the deal.
Chen was quoted as saying: ‘Some people don’t want Taiwan to be too happy.’
Currently, vaccine manufacturers are only selling to governments, due to a global shortage of vaccines. This creates a difficult situation for partially recognised countries such as Taiwan. As all countries that have diplomatic relations with China must accept the One China Policy – that Taiwan is a part of China – Taiwan may face more difficulties in procuring vaccines.
Analysts point out that, despite not being a member of the World Health Organisation, Taiwan has arguably handled the Covid-19 pandemic better than any other country in the world. With a population of 23 million, Taiwan had just 938 cases and nine deaths to date. Moreover, this was achieved without any widespread lockdown policies.
Although Taiwan has arguably been very successful up to now, one area in which its government has received criticism is that of procuring vaccines. Now however, much of this blame may be placed on China.
Taiwan’s former president Ma Ying-jeou called on Taiwanese citizens ‘not to reject China’s vaccine’, although Chen responded by stating that China’s Sinopharm vaccine ‘was never one of our candidate vaccines to begin with’.
*Reported speech in this news item was translated by Centre for Risk Analysis analyst Nicholas Babaya.