The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) yesterday urged the government to prioritize pregnant women for inoculation with the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine.
A donation of 2.5 million Moderna doses arrived in Taiwan from the US at about 4:30pm yesterday.
While expressing gratitude to the US for extending a hand of friendship, the KMT said in a statement that President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) administration should give pregnant women across the nation priority access to the Moderna vaccine.
Photo: CNA
When a separate batch of 240,000 Moderna doses arrived on Friday, local governments, including Taichung and Kinmen, proposed giving priority to pregnant women, the KMT said, adding that Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中), who heads the Central Epidemic Command Center, had at the time said that once there were enough vaccine doses, vaccinations would be expanded to pregnant women.
“Now that 2.5 million doses of the Moderna vaccine are about to arrive in Taiwan, [the KMT] hopes that the Ministry of Health and Welfare will no longer use a shortage of doses as an excuse,” the KMT said.
“To protect the health of mothers and infants is to protect the future of Taiwan,” it added.
In response to reports of elderly people dying after getting AstraZeneca shots, the KMT said that although the cause of death in those cases must be clarified, people should be able to choose the vaccine they get.
The US and Japan have extended a helping hand at a critical moment for Taiwan, demonstrating that the nation’s “pro-US” and “Japan-friendly” foreign policy, as well as efforts by Taiwanese to gain international recognition, have achieved significant results, the KMT said.
However, the nation has so far received just 4,856,600 vaccine doses, which is far less than the 28.2 million doses needed to achieve 60 percent coverage, it said.
Urging officials not to be complacent about the donations, the KMT said that the government’s vaccine procurement policy is key to helping Taiwan get through the pandemic.
Having an adequate vaccine supply is the “only solution,” KMT Chairman Johnny Chiang (江啟臣) wrote on Facebook, urging the government to have a plan for the donated doses and to avoid “chaos” by coordinating in advance with local governments and frontline workers.
Additional reporting by CNA
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