Independent Taipei mayoral candidate Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), former head of National Taiwan University Hospital’s (NTUH) Department of Traumatology, lashed out after another accusation from Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lo Shu-lei (羅淑蕾) over Ko’s professional conduct, with the legislator this time alleging that Ko treated patients as “guinea pigs” for new drugs.
Responding to the allegation, Ko said the criticism was “maddening” and “going overboard,” saying that all clinical trial procedures “adhere to due regulations announced by the Department of Health [now the Ministry of Health and Welfare].”
Lo on Friday said that Ko and his team had been doing “medical product endorsements and treating NTUH patients as guinea pigs,” citing the hospital’s Surgical Intensive Care Unit’s (SICU) Web site for the enrichment of patients’ medical knowledge, in which the hospital’s clinical trial projects are introduced.
Photo: Wang Yi-sung, Taipei Times
The Web site says the unit is aiming at being the “tip of the Greater China market,” where new medical products undergo clinical trials before they become commercially available in the Greater China market and that Taiwan’s SICU could help endorse products or become the seed member.
It also says that the unit is targeting phase-two and phase-three clinical trials to study the efficacy of a medical product in people of Chinese ethnicity to be conducted locally.
Lo said Ko could work with pharmaceutical companies on clinical trials, but the products should benefit Taiwanese, rather than “using our patients as guinea pigs and then selling them [the products] in China.”
“How much profit do you get when you endorse those products? He was a civil servant as an NTU physician. Was he allowed to do product endorsements?” Lo said.
The document Lo cited also asserts that the goal of becoming the “tip of the Greater China market” is a “mid-term” one.
“The long-term goal is to work on local research and development and to stop being the ‘research subcontractor’ of European and US pharmaceutical companies… The projects could help the SICU study team accumulate experience and hone their training,” the document reads.
“The Greater China market has more than 1.3 billion potential consumers from [China’s] Heilongjian [Province] to Singapore, including Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan and the Sinophone groups in Southeast Asia,” according to the Web site.
Ko on Friday night said that clinical trials are a standard procedure for testing any kind of new treatment and an important upstream process for pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries.
“The NTUH has put a lot of effort and money into establishing the clinical trial center and applied for US accreditation for it. It is a major project for the NTUH in order to have control over the upstream biotechnology industry,” Ko said.
“Are you criticizing me or the NTUH who reviewed the projects? Or the health department that had supervised the execution of the projects?” he added.
Ko said that the mudslinging culture in Taiwan’s election campaigns should not be tolerated any longer and called on the public to denounce such injustices.
“Has the KMT paid the price for the ‘Yu Chang (宇昌) case,’ in which it sacrificed the biotechnology industry just to attack [then-Democratic Progressive Party presidential candidate] Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) [during the presidential campaign in the lead-up to the 2012 presidential election]?” Ko asked.
This was Lo’s second attempt to attack Ko in his professional capacity.
Earlier this month, she erroneously claimed that Ko, dubbed the “father of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation” technology in Taiwan, has no knowledge of its installation.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods