The Cabinet’s four-page budget report on a COVID-19 relief program is “crude,” the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) said yesterday, adding that a national vaccine task force should be created to ensure Taiwan’s access to new vaccines.
The TPP caucus received an Executive Yuan report dated Monday that describes the government’s plans for COVID-19 relief, TPP Legislator Chiu Chen-yuan (邱臣遠) told a news conference in Taipei, adding that the report was compiled at the party’s request during legislative reviews in May.
Citing the report, Chiu said that the Ministry of Economic Affairs’ NT$420 billion (US$14.75 billion) budget includes NT$1.7 million in personnel costs, NT$15.3 million in operational expenses and NT$170 million in subsidies.
Photo: Chien Jung-fong, Taipei Times
However, the report was just four pages long, and did not explain the purpose of the expenditures or itemize individual expenses, he said.
The pandemic is showing no sign of improvement in other countries and instead appears to have become part of the normal state of affairs, he said.
Should current trends persist, the pandemic would increase the strain on financial institutions, while the government’s measures to stabilize banks and aid debtors cannot go on indefinitely, Chiu said.
The government should exercise fiscal discipline and monitor banks’ liquidity levels to avoid a surge in bad debt, he said.
TPP caucus whip Lai Hsiang-ling (賴香伶) said that the party supported the relief program after making clear its expectation that the government would present a full account of it.
“However, our caucus has received an implementation report of a scant few pages,” Lai said. “I wonder if the optimism [the report] espouses is an accurate representation of reality.”
Businesses continue to lay off employees, despite subsidies, she said, adding that the Ministry of Labor should consider policies that would directly help workers through the Lunar New Year.
TPP Legislator Tsai Pi-ru (蔡壁如) said that the pandemic is expected to worsen over winter, but Taiwan’s relatively successful management of the virus means that the nation might be prioritized lower than Western nations in vaccine distribution programs.
Taiwan has not developed its own COVID-19 vaccine to date, Tsai said.
The government should create a national vaccine task force to boost support for domestic pharmaceutical firms involved in vaccine research, in addition to striving for foreign vaccines, she said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching