Taipei Chief Prosecutor Chen Ta-wei (
"With Center for Disease Control (CDC) officials' advice, we decided to do so because their quarantine period is completed," Chen said yesterday. "Their testimonies will be crucial in deciding whether the hospital should be blamed for the outbreak of SARS last month."
To investigate and decide who should take responsibility for the outbreak, Chen said prosecutors have interviewed more than 20 doctors, nurses, patients and officials in the past two weeks.
Those interviewed include Shin Kong Wu Ho-su Memorial Hospital Deputy Superintendent Huang Fang-yen (黃芳彥), former CDC director-general Chen Tzay-jinn (陳再晉), former Taipei City Bureau of Health director Yeh Chin-chuan (葉金川), current CDC Director-General Su Yi-jen (蘇益仁) and Hoping Hospital's Emergency Room Director Chang Yu-tai (張裕泰).
"Interviews with related personnel are completed. Now, we need to hear what [Wu and Lin] will say," Chen Ta-wei said.
According to Chen, former health director Yeh advised prosecutors to look up the patients' records because they would contain more useful information to help the prosecutors find out whether the Hoping Hospital had been honest and open in its reports to the Department of Health and Taipei's Bureau of Health
Prosecutors asked for access to the patients' files and CDC officials entered the Hoping Hospital on Tuesday to collect the records for March, April and May.
According to the prosecutors' office, prosecutors will expose these files to direct sunlight for more than 24 hours before handling them to make sure that the documents do not carry any SARS virus.
The Council of Agriculture yesterday signed a Taiwan-Australia Agricultural Cooperation Implementation clause to open a new export market for the nation’s pineapple crop. The clause is an addition to existing cooperation measures, it said. China on Friday last week abruptly announced that it would suspend pineapple imports from Taiwan starting on Monday, on grounds that it had on multiple occasions discovered “harmful organisms” in shipments of the fruit. The public and private sectors have since joined hands to purchase the local fruit to help the nation’s pineapple farmers. Canberra has requested that all pineapples for export to Australia have their crown buds removed,
A Tainan taxi driver is the Taiwanese with the longest name, after he last month changed it so that it now contains 25 characters, the Anping District Household Registration Office said. The 47-year-old man, formerly known as Huang Hsin-hsiang (黃鑫翔), applied for the name change on Feb. 26, in the hope that it would bring him good luck. His new name starts with Huang Da-lan (黃大嵐) and adds another 22 characters, meaning “Huang Da-lan is the blessed darling and sweetheart of the god of joy, god of wealth, god of misfortune, god of Earth and all the gods,” it said. With
Shanghai Fosun Pharmaceutical Group might have lost its right to distribute the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for COVID-19 and the ability to fulfill a contract in Taiwan, civic groups Taiwan Citizen Front and the Economic Democracy Union said yesterday. In a radio interview on Feb. 17, Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), head of the Central Epidemic Command Center, said that last year, Taiwan was close to signing a contract to buy doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, but that the deal was halted at the last moment, with some speculating that Chinese interference was to blame. On Monday last week, the center
POSSIBLE SIDE EFFECTS: As China attempted to promote its national image through humanitarian aid, its targets include New Southbound Policy countries, an expert said China’s “vaccine diplomacy,” which has become central to its foreign policy this year, might hamper Taiwan’s efforts to build relations with developing countries, an expert said. “China, as one of the few countries other than the United Kingdom and the United States to have produced a COVID-19 vaccine, will certainly use that as a diplomatic tool,” said Kung Shan-son (龔祥生), an assistant research fellow at the government-funded Institute for National Defense and Security Research. Beijing’s major goals in its “vaccine diplomacy” are to promote its national image through humanitarian aid and to solidify its relations with countries that are included in its