Controversy over domestic drugmaker Medigen’s COVID-19 vaccine could have been avoided had the company published data on its phase 2 clinical trials in international journals, National Taiwan University (NTU) College of Public Health vice dean Tony Chen (陳秀熙) said yesterday.
The government on Sunday granted emergency use authorization (EUA) to the Medigen jab after an expert panel said that antibody levels in the blood of phase 2 trial participants met local standards.
However, critics said that the experts’ reasoning was not convincing because not all trial data had been publicized and that Taiwan is the only country to conditionally approve a vaccine that has not yet passed phase 3 clinical trials.
Medigen on Tuesday said it had received approval to conduct phase 3 trials on 1,000 people in Paraguay.
Chen yesterday said that the Paraguay trials’ methodology and safety precautions would be well within international standards, but whether the vaccine could provide sufficient protection, especially against highly infectious variants of SARS-CoV-2, could only be determined with additional trials.
Chen said that he believes the expert panels’ assessment on which the EUA is based, but that the company lacks sufficient credibility based on publication in scientific journals.
“Trial data of the COVID-19 vaccines that are in use worldwide — AstraZeneca, Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, Johnsons & Johnson and Novavax, among others — have been published in credible international journals,” Chen said, adding that this, not the transparency of the approval process in various countries, gives them credibility.
Even China last year publicized the phase 2 trial results of the Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine, he said.
The publication of trial data is a critical step that the Medigen vaccine must take, Chen said, adding that verification by the international medical community would be crucial to calm the worries of Taiwanese.
Taoyuan Mayor Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦) and Tainan Mayor Huang Wei-che (黃偉哲), both of the Democratic Progressive Party, have said that they would be willing to receive the Medigen vaccine as their second shot, while New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has said that the jab’s efficacy should first be determined by the scientific community, not by politics.
Transparency is key to winning public support, Hou said, adding that public support is key to whether the Medigen jab would become widely accepted.
Additional reporting by Lai Hsiao-tung
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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
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