Annual COVID-19 vaccinations are likely not necessary for most people, as the disease is expected to become more like the common cold, Lee Ping-ing (李秉穎), convener of the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, said yesterday.
The official made the comments in a radio interview focused on the expected development of the COVID-19 pandemic and followed remarks by a Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) official on Wednesday that the government was looking to downgrade COVID-19’s communicable disease classification by May or June.
Lee said that while newly reported COVID-19 cases recently rose above 30,000 per day, the “high-risk” period of the pandemic is over.
“What we should be paying attention to now is the number of severe infections and deaths,” Lee said.
However, COVID-19 is still more deadly than seasonal influenza, he added.
It is important that people who are vulnerable to the disease, such as the elderly, regularly get vaccine boosters, he said.
Lee said that COVID-19 would “come to resemble the common cold more than the flu.”
Influenza vaccines should be given regularly, as the virus mutates rapidly, making it more likely to evade the immune response of those infected, potentially causing severe illness or death, Lee said.
The potential for mutation of common cold viruses is limited, posing less of a health risk, Lee said, adding that vaccines are therefore not needed.
Common cold is typically caused by a rhinovirus, of which more than 100 are frequently detected, or one of four distinct coronaviruses, he said.
SARS-CoV-2 could become the fifth coronavirus that typically causes a common cold, he said.
COVID-19 vaccines would probably only be necessary for newborns, who are at a higher risk because they have never encountered the virus, and possibly elderly people with reduced immune function, Lee 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