President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and Vice President William Lai (賴清德) yesterday morning received COVID-19 vaccine booster shots, as the government races to increase the nation’s vaccination and booster rates amid a domestic outbreak fueled by the highly infectious Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2.
Tsai and Lai each received a shot of the domestically developed Medigen COVID-19 vaccine at National Taiwan University’s College of Medicine.
Tsai later described the process on Facebook as “smooth” and “painless,” urging people who received a second vaccine dose more than 12 weeks ago to get a booster as soon as possible.
Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times
The Central Epidemic Command Center said that anyone aged 18 or older who has received two shots of a Medigen, Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna COVID-19 vaccine can choose any of those vaccines or an AstraZeneca vaccine as a booster.
Only a half-dose of the Moderna vaccine would be administered as a booster, in keeping with the company’s recommendations, it said.
People who received two doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine should choose a different brand for better protection, it added.
Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times
Tsai urged people to continue observing the center’s guidelines, adding that many countries were experiencing a new wave of infections, as Taiwan also faces fresh COVID-19 challenges.
Tsai received her first Medigen dose on Aug. 23 last year, shortly after the Taiwanese pharmaceutical company was granted emergency use authorization for its COVID-19 vaccine by the Food and Drug Administration.
Lai was vaccinated a few days later, and both of them had their second dose on Sept. 30.
Tsai and Lai were said to have chosen the Medigen vaccine to bolster confidence in the domestically produced vaccine.
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
LIKE FAMILY: People now treat dogs and cats as family members. They receive the same medical treatments and tests as humans do, a veterinary association official said The number of pet dogs and cats in Taiwan has officially outnumbered the number of human newborns last year, data from the Ministry of Agriculture’s pet registration information system showed. As of last year, Taiwan had 94,544 registered pet dogs and 137,652 pet cats, the data showed. By contrast, 135,571 babies were born last year. Demand for medical care for pet animals has also risen. As of Feb. 29, there were 5,773 veterinarians in Taiwan, 3,993 of whom were for pet animals, statistics from the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Agency showed. In 2022, the nation had 3,077 pediatricians. As of last
XINJIANG: Officials are conducting a report into amending an existing law or to enact a special law to prohibit goods using forced labor Taiwan is mulling an amendment prohibiting the importation of goods using forced labor, similar to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) passed by the US Congress in 2021 that imposed limits on goods produced using forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. A government official who wished to remain anonymous said yesterday that as the US customs law explicitly prohibits the importation of goods made using forced labor, in 2021 it passed the specialized UFLPA to limit the importation of cotton and other goods from China’s Xinjiang Uyghur region. Taiwan does not have the legal basis to prohibit the importation of goods