Taiwan scrambles for vaccines after Covid-19 breaches its defences

Name: Queues at Taiwan Covid-19 testing site as the island battles surge in cases
Uploaded: 2021-06-13T07:04:16.000Z
Duration: 1 min 16 s
Description: Queues at Taiwan Covid-19 testing site as the island battles surge in cases

The island’s initial success story has turned sour with an outbreak that has infected more than 12,900 people and claimed 437 lives

Taipei is now pinning its hopes on two local jabs as well as donations of overseas vaccines from the US and Japan

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Taiwan is finding it difficult to secure supplies of Covid-19 vaccines from overseas. Photo: AFP

Holly Chik

Published: 3:04pm, 13 Jun 2021Updated: 2:39pm, 15 Jun 2021

Taiwan was seen as the place that got the Covid-19 response just right, until it all started to go wrong.

The island reported just 799 cases last year and seven deaths, while scores of other countries faced mounting fatalities, waves of infections running into tens or hundreds of thousands of people, and warnings of hospitals unable to cope.

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Queues at Taiwan Covid-19 testing site as the island battles surge in cases

But Taiwan’s success story has turned sour in recent weeks after an outbreak – linked to staff at the island’s China Airlines – which began in late April started to spread. The outbreak has now infected more than 12,900 people and claimed 437 lives, sparking a scramble for vaccines that the island had failed to stockpile.

“Until earlier this year, Taiwan’s Covid-19 control had been very effective so the perception was we did not need vaccines or we had more time to wait for better vaccines. This was a major mistake,” said Su Ih-jen, who headed the Taiwan Centres for Disease Control (CDC) in 2003-2004, during the Sars epidemic.

“The fatal error was that the central epidemic command centre did not plan in advance,” said Su, who now leads a vaccine policy project at the National Health Research Institutes Forum, a think tank that advises the government. Taiwan was four to five months behind other governments in placing orders for overseas vaccines, which resulted in late shipments, he said.

Japan and the US have offered more than a million jabs to the island in the past week, but before that Taiwan had only received 870,000 doses of Covid-19 vaccines, enough for just 1.8 per cent of its population.

Tsai Kun-chou, a lawyer with clients in Hong Kong and mainland China, said he managed to get his first shot in early May because he was planning to travel. “Many people want to get vaccinated as soon as possible to return to normal life,” he said.