COVID-19 variant tracking and vaccinations would continue, as the disease is still spreading in Taiwan, even though the WHO declared that it was no longer a public health emergency of international concern, local health officials said yesterday.
After the WHO’s International Health Regulations Emergency Committee met on Thursday, it recommended that the global health body declare an end to the public health emergency of international concern, which it accepted, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a news conference on Friday.
“It is therefore with great hope that I declare COVID-19 over as a global health emergency,” Tedros said. “However, that does not mean COVID-19 is over as a global health threat.”
Photo: Reuters
Deputy Minister of Health and Welfare Victor Wang (王必勝) — who headed the Central Epidemic Command Center before it was disbanded on Monday — agreed, saying that “the virus has not disappeared and remains in our communities.”
“Vulnerable groups” — including elderly people, those with underlying health conditions and those who are unvaccinated — should get at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine per year, and people who have contracted the disease who are eligible for oral anti-viral drugs should see a doctor for a prescription, he wrote on Facebook.
Centers for Disease Control Deputy Director-General Philip Lo (羅一鈞) said the US government ended its national and public health emergency declarations and the Japanese government plans to downgrade COVID-19 and end border measures this month.
However, the WHO’s declaration only means that COVID-19 prevention should be normalized and does not mean that infections would end, so variant tracking and vaccinations would continue.
Tedros said the disease is here to stay and was still changing, as “thousands of people around the world are fighting for their lives in intensive care units, and millions more continue to live with the debilitating effects of post-COVID-19 condition.”
“Last week, COVID-19 claimed a life every three minutes — and that’s just the deaths we know about,” he said.
Since the WHO learned about clustered cases of pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan, China, 1,221 days ago, almost 7 million deaths have been reported, but the organization believes that toll is at least 20 million, he said.
For more than a year, the disease has been on a downward trend, allowing most countries to return to life as it was before the COVID-19 pandemic, he said.
“It is time for countries to transition from emergency mode to managing COVID-19 alongside other infectious diseases,” he said.
Taiwan has received more than US$70 million in royalties as of the end of last year from developing the F-16V jet as countries worldwide purchase or upgrade to this popular model, government and military officials said on Saturday. Taiwan funded the development of the F-16V jet and ended up the sole investor as other countries withdrew from the program. Now the F-16V is increasingly popular and countries must pay Taiwan a percentage in royalties when they purchase new F-16V aircraft or upgrade older F-16 models. The next five years are expected to be the peak for these royalties, with Taiwan potentially earning
STAY IN YOUR LANE: As the US and Israel attack Iran, the ministry has warned China not to overstep by including Taiwanese citizens in its evacuation orders The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) yesterday rebuked a statement by China’s embassy in Israel that it would evacuate Taiwanese holders of Chinese travel documents from Israel amid the latter’s escalating conflict with Iran. Tensions have risen across the Middle East in the wake of US and Israeli airstrikes on Iran beginning Saturday. China subsequently issued an evacuation notice for its citizens. In a news release, the Chinese embassy in Israel said holders of “Taiwan compatriot permits (台胞證)” issued to Taiwanese nationals by Chinese authorities for travel to China — could register for evacuation to Egypt. In Taipei, the ministry yesterday said Taiwan
Taiwan is awaiting official notification from the US regarding the status of the Agreement on Reciprocal Trade (ART) after the US Supreme Court ruled US President Donald Trump's global tariffs unconstitutional. Speaking to reporters before a legislative hearing today, Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) said that Taiwan's negotiation team remains focused on ensuring that the bilateral trade deal remains intact despite the legal challenge to Trump's tariff policy. "The US has pledged to notify its trade partners once the subsequent administrative and legal processes are finalized, and that certainly includes Taiwan," Cho said when asked about opposition parties’ doubts that the ART was
If China chose to invade Taiwan tomorrow, it would only have to sever three undersea fiber-optic cable clusters to cause a data blackout, Jason Hsu (許毓仁), a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislator, told a US security panel yesterday. In a Taiwan contingency, cable disruption would be one of the earliest preinvasion actions and the signal that escalation had begun, he said, adding that Taiwan’s current cable repair capabilities are insufficient. The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC) yesterday held a hearing on US-China Competition Under the Sea, with Hsu speaking on
RSS