Centers for Disease Control (CDC) Director-General Steve Kuo (郭旭崧) said yesterday that the nation must cherish and cultivate its own vaccine-producing industry.
“We have the ability to do so,” Kuo told a public hearing about the A(H1N1) influenza vaccine at the legislature.
Mentioning a trip to the US in 2002, Kuo said domestic capability was needed because vaccines become difficult to procure during epidemics.
“The US official told me that flu vaccines would not be sold or exported to foreign countries during an outbreak of the flu, unless there are enough doses for its own population,” Kuo said. “That means you cannot buy those vaccines even if you have the money.”
The director-general was attending the hearing, organized by the Taiwan Competitiveness Forum (台灣競爭力論壇), to discuss the swine flu vaccine, which has become an issue of major public concern after local media reported the vaccine caused a number of deaths and serious side effects.
“It is a valuable thing that Adimmune Corp, as a local manufacturer, is capable of producing vaccines, but it is very sad that the vaccines were branded unsafe for political reasons,” Kuo said.
Lu Chun-yi (呂俊毅), a physician from National Taiwan University Hospital’s Department of Pediatrics, said that he did not see any problems with the vaccine based on tests the producers conducted, but that doesn’t mean the vaccine was 100 percent safe.
However, the scale of testing was not big enough to ensure nothing would go wrong when the vaccine was administered to millions of people, he said.
Health authorities have tried to encourage people in Taiwan to be vaccinated against the A(H1N1) virus, but, until now, only 24 percent of the population has done so because of doubts about the vaccine’s safety.
Meanwhile, the CDC Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (VICP) yesterday announced the conclusion of 11 investigations into complaints of vaccine side-effects, ruling that eight of them were unrelated to A(H1N1) vaccines with NT$110,000 in compensation handed out to claimants with side effects.
The VICP said that a total of 218 alleged vaccine-related injury claims have been received, with 39 cases completed, including the abovementioned 11. Among those 39 cases, only one death has been confirmed as being related to the vaccine.
A total of NT$880,000 has been issued as compensation, including the NT$110,000 mentioned above.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY JIMMY CHUANG
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