While providing outpatient services in the past few weeks, almost all patients asked me: “Why did so many people die after receiving the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine? We talked about the issue during several family meetings, but cannot decide whether to allow older family members to be inoculated.”
I explained to them that Taiwan is an aged society with a large population of older people, who might have several comorbidities, such as diabetes, or conditions affecting the heart, lung or kidneys.
They are at higher risk of dying with or without being vaccinated. Birth, age, illness and death are unavoidable to all. Is the death rate among older Taiwanese who have recently been vaccinated too high?
The number of births in Taiwan is close to that of deaths, slightly more than 170,000 each year. If the number of annual deaths is divided by 365 days, it shows that 470 people die every day on average, and most of them are older people.
When that many people die every day, coincidences happen, including deaths of recently vaccinated people, and some people simply call these deaths “coincidental.”
Every death should of course be carefully examined, and people should not believe rumors or repeat whatever others say so as not to cause a panic. The conclusion is that people should get vaccinated if they are in good physical condition, and not get the shot if they are temporarily unwell. People should feel at ease about getting vaccinated.
The government has worked hard to obtain vaccine doses and make them available for free at a time when they are unavailable in many other countries, and Taiwanese should be grateful.
It is certainly better if older people are accompanied by family members to their vaccine appointments, so that they can be taken care of and feel at ease.
There are many more pros than cons in terms of COVID-19 vaccination. If older people are still worried, they can consult their family doctors.
Pregnant women, who are to get inoculated in the next round of vaccinations, might have the same concerns and feel insecure if they do not do research beforehand.
A US study asked more than 1,000 people about how many pregnancies they thought ended in miscarriages. The average assumption was 3 percent of all pregnancies, but data showed that the rate was 25 percent in the US and 13 percent in Taiwan.
Given Taiwan’s number of births, there should be about 170,000 pregnant women in the nation every year. If 30 percent of them, or 50,000 women, choose to get a vaccinated, an estimated 6,500 women, or 13 percent of pregnant women who got vaccinated, will have miscarriages — regardless of whether they got vaccinated.
If a miscarriage occurs shortly after vaccination, the family is likely to suspect that the jab was the reason. If the media try to sensationalize this situation, things could go very bad.
Every suspicious death or miscarriage should be met with sympathy, and the possibility of a correlation between miscarriages and COVID-19 vaccinations should be studied by medical researchers, as only this would reveal the truth.
With background knowledge about the generally high death and miscarriage rates, perhaps it would be easier for people to remain calm and avoid the panic that occurred when the government’s vaccine rollout started.
Wang Fong-yu is chairman of the Kaohsiung County Medical Association.
Translated by Eddy Chang
With each passing day, the threat of a People’s Republic of China (PRC) assault on Taiwan grows. Whatever one’s view about the history, there is essentially no question that a PRC conquest of Taiwan would mark the end of the autonomy and freedom enjoyed by the island’s 23 million people. Simply put, the PRC threat to Taiwan is genuinely existential for a free, democratic and autonomous Taiwan. Yet one might not know it from looking at Taiwan. For an island facing a threat so acute, lethal and imminent, Taiwan is showing an alarming lack of urgency in dramatically strengthening its defenses.
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
Every day since Oct. 7 last year, the world has watched an unprecedented wave of violence rain down on Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories — more than 200 days of constant suffering and death in Gaza with just a seven-day pause. Many of us in the American expatriate community in Taiwan have been watching this tragedy unfold in horror. We know we are implicated with every US-made “dumb” bomb dropped on a civilian target and by the diplomatic cover our government gives to the Israeli government, which has only gotten more extreme with such impunity. Meantime, multicultural coalitions of US
I still remember the first time I heard about the possibility of an invasion by China. I was six years old. I thought war was coming and hid in my bed, scared. After 18 years, the invasion news tastes like a sandwich I eat every morning. As a Gen Z Taiwanese student who has witnessed China’s harassment for more than 20 years, I want to share my opinion on China. Every generation goes through different events. I have seen not only the norms of China’s constant presence, but also the Sunflower movement, wars and people fighting over peace or equality,