Health officials expect to finish the final testing for Taiwan’s first batch of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine on Wednesday next week, the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) said yesterday, adding that the benefits of the vaccine outweigh the reported risks.
The center has completed six of seven types of tests to clear the initial shipment of 117,000 AstraZeneca vaccines, and only the tests for verifying that the shots are bacteria-free remain, said Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Deputy Director-General Chuang Jen-hsiang (莊人祥), who is the CECC’s spokesman.
Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), who heads the center, would soon announce an official rollout date for vaccinations, Chuang added.
Photo: AFP
Chuang cited a CECC survey as saying that frontline workers were willing to take the shots, which suggests that concerns about vaccination reluctance are unfounded.
Should people’s hesitancy to take the jab become an issue, Chen and Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) would lead by example by being vaccinated with it, he added.
According to the CECC’s vaccination priority list, the doses would first be given to medical and nonmedical personnel in hospitals, clinics and quarantine centers, and then to a more widespread group of epidemic prevention workers.
Commenting on the decision of European nations, including Denmark, Iceland and Norway, to postpone their rollout of the AstraZeneca vaccine after reports of blood clots among recipients, CDC Deputy Director-General Philip Lo (羅一鈞), deputy head of the CECC’s medical response division, cited the European Medicines Agency as saying that the benefits of AstraZeneca vaccines outweigh the potential risks of blood clots.
Caucasians are more likely to experience blood clots than Asians by a factor of five to 10, he added.
The next few days would be “an important observational period for clarifying the correlation” between blood clots and the vaccine, he said.
If the scientific community establishes a link between the AstraZeneca vaccine and blood clots, the CECC would refine health qualifications for taking the vaccine, but no sooner, he said.
Taiwan received its first batch of COVID-19 vaccines on Wednesday last week.
Taiwan has signed contracts to purchase a total of 10 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, 5.05 million doses of the Moderna jab and 4.76 million doses of vaccines through the COVAX allocation program.
Meanwhile, Taiwan yesterday reported six new imported cases of COVID-19 — three from the Philippines and one each from France, the UK and the US.
The cases all involve foreign nationals who arrived in Taiwan for work, Chuang said.
The viral load was low in all six cases, he added.
To date, Taiwan has recorded 984 cases of COVID-19, of which 868 have been classified as imported. Of the total, 942 patients have recovered, 10 have died and 32 are in hospital, CECC data showed.
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