After Taiwan managed to contain the COVID-19 pandemic for more than a year, a surge in locally transmitted cases began in the middle of last month.
Most people seem to believe that the best solution is to quickly vaccinate everyone to achieve herd immunity as soon as possible.
The vaccine issue is an incendiary matter, and the advances made in developing a Taiwan-produced vaccine has caused much controversy.
At the end of the 20th century, the hepatitis B virus (HBV) was rampant in Taiwan. When I started teaching at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University in the early 1980s, when the school was called National Yang Ming College of Medicine, I helped a medical team composed of members from Yang Ming and Taipei Veterans General Hospital to clone and sequence the HBV genome, and begin work on a vaccine.
Due to our late start, the government decided to import HBV vaccines, because saving lives was more urgent than completing the research locally. The decision successfully prevented the virus from spreading and significantly reduced the occurrence of liver cancer in Taiwan.
Although our project was aborted midway, the medical team did not complain. After the team was dissolved, the members turned to researching the formation of cancers, and the results fostered the development of biomedical engineering in the nation.
There is nothing wrong with the government trying to develop and enhance the domestic vaccine industry, but the severe COVID-19 situation presents officials with a dilemma. Even though the results of the phase 2 clinical trials for the local vaccines have yet to be released, and there is no guarantee that they are safe and effective, the government has signed contracts to obtain at least 5 million doses each from two local manufacturers.
Meanwhile, the government’s purchase of foreign vaccines has been delayed by Chinese intervention. Local governments and civic groups anxious to tackle the problem on their own are criticizing the central government for blocking the direct importation of vaccines and for staking Taiwan’s fate on domestic vaccines.
This is causing the public to doubt the safety and efficacy of domestic vaccines before they are able to reach the market. A May 28 survey by Chinese-language Global Views Monthly found that more than 60 percent of the public are unwilling to take a locally made vaccine. This has cast a shadow over the future of domestic vaccines.
No one would deny the importance of domestic vaccines, and the development of locally made vaccines is necessary strategically from the perspective of medical logistics and national security.
As vaccine research and development in Taiwan nears success, professionalism must be the focus. Researchers must be allowed to concentrate on their work, give it their all and assess the results with the strictest academic objectivity.
Vaccine development and biomedical engineering in Taiwan remain extremely vulnerable, and they should not be hijacked for political or personal interests.
In the past, knowing the importance of the HBV vaccine, the government used a two-pronged approach — procuring foreign vaccines while developing a domestic one, until the urgency of the situation prompted it to prioritize foreign vaccines. This helped it to successfully defeat the HBV virus.
This experience is perhaps an example that Taiwan can learn from today.
Choo Kong-bung is an adjunct researcher at Taipei Veterans General Hospital’s Department of Medical Research.
Translated by Eddy Chang
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