The Moderna vaccine was the preferred brand among respondents old enough to get inoculated against COVID-19, a poll by the pan-green Taiwan Public Opinion Foundation found.
The poll asked respondents which vaccine brand — Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech, AstraZeneca or Medigen — they would prefer if they could freely choose among them.
Taiwan has so far not obtained doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
Allowed to select two or more vaccine brands, 69.8 percent of respondents chose the Moderna vaccine, 42.8 percent chose the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, 30.2 chose the AstraZeneca vaccine and 17 percent chose the Medigen vaccine.
Asked to select only one vaccine brand, 40.9 percent of respondents chose the Moderna vaccine, 23.8 percent chose the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, 11.3 percent chose the Medigen vaccine and 9.5 percent chose the AstraZeneca vaccine.
Asked to name a second choice, 33.9 percent of respondents chose the Moderna vaccine, while 24.3 percent selected the AstraZeneca vaccine, 22.3 percent selected the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and 6.7 percent selected the Medigen vaccine, while 10.3 percent did not name a second choice.
Combining the results for first and second choice showed that 69.9 percent of respondents preferred Moderna, 42.8 percent preferred Pzifer-BioNTech, 30.2 percent preferred AstraZeneca and 17 percent preferred Medigen.
President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) being inoculated with the Medigen vaccine was approved by 49.3 percent of respondents, while 29.7 percent disapproved.
Tsai received the Medigen vaccine on Monday, the first day that the domestically developed vaccine was available to the public.
The survey “clearly shows that Taiwanese prefer foreign-made vaccines,” foundation chairman Michael You (游盈隆) said.
Although nearly half of those surveyed supported the president’s show of confidence in the local vaccine, only 20.3 percent of respondents who approved said that they “strongly approved,” he said.
“This suggests that Taiwanese are generally indifferent toward Tsai’s actions and that there is an absolute lack of social consensus on the issue,” he said.
The poll, conducted from Monday to Wednesday last week, collected 1,078 valid responses from people aged 20 or older. It has a confidence interval of 95 percent and a margin of error of 2.98 percentage points.
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