Day: July 12, 2021

Taiwanese tech giants Foxconn and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company announced Monday they will each donate five million coronavirus vaccine doses to the government in a deal with a China-based distributor.

Taipei has been struggling to secure enough vaccines for its population, and its precarious political status has been a major stumbling block.

As Taipei and Beijing accused each other of hampering vaccine deals, Foxconn and TSMC stepped in with a face-saving solution — buying the Pfizer-BioNTech doses from a Chinese distributor and donating them to Taiwan.

“Me and my team feel the public anxiety and expectations on the vaccines and we are relieved to give the public an answer that relevant contracts have been signed,” Foxconn founder Terry Gou said in a post on his Facebook page.

“Beijing authorities have not offered any guidance or interfered with the vaccine acquisition process,” he said, adding that the vaccines will be shipped directly by German firm BioNTech.

Foxconn and TSMC, the world’s largest contract electronics and chip makers respectively, said they will spend $175 million each on the vaccines.

Beijing’s authoritarian leadership views democratic self-ruled Taiwan as part of China’s territory and has vowed to one day seize the island, by force if needed.

China tries to keep Taiwan internationally isolated, including blocking it from the World Health Organization.

Taipei has been trying to secure Pfizer-BioNTech direct from Germany, but Shanghai-based Fosun Pharma has the distribution rights for China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan.

Attempts to sign a direct deal made little headway, something Taiwan blamed on Beijing.

In return, Beijing has accused Taiwan of refusing to deal with Fosun Pharma and politicizing its vaccine search.

Fosun issued a statement late Sunday saying it had signed a deal with the Taiwanese firms to sell 10 million shots, to be donated to “disease control institutions in the Taiwan region.”

In an interview with China’s Global Times — a state-run tabloid — Fosun Chairman and CEO Wu Yifang accused Taipei of “rule-breaking in the whole process.” No further elaboration was provided.

Taiwan had only received 726,000 vaccine doses before the United States and Japan recently donated 2.5 million and 2.37 million doses, respectively.

So far, just 14 percent of its 23.5 million people have been vaccinated, according to the health ministry.

Health Minister Chen Shih-chung previously revealed that Taiwan and BioNTech were about to finalize a deal in January when the company suggested the words “our country” had to be taken out of a Taiwanese press statement.

Chen said authorities agreed to replace it with “Taiwan,” but the deal remained stalled.

The Chinese government reacts angrily at any attempts to recognize Taiwan as an independent nation.

Source: Voice of America

India’s daily tally of new COVID cases fell below 40,000 on Sunday. The health ministry reported Monday that there were 37,154 new cases in the previous 24-hour period.

In South Korea, the country reported 1,100 new cases Sunday. The rising caseload comes as South Korea is imposing new restrictions in Seoul and neighboring regions to curb the spread of infections.

Meanwhile in Uganda, Chris Baryomunsi, a government minister said his country has the money to buy vaccines but is having trouble purchasing them from Western countries.

“This is a challenge of access and equity,” Baryomunsi, who is also an epidemiologist, told the Guardian newspaper. “We have the money, but we simply can’t get the vaccine . . . we have to rely on the western world and the western world has focused on its population. The impression is that people there don’t care about Africans.”

Last week, the World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus spoke at the University of Nottingham about the global health disparities the pandemic has exposed. “At the global level, the pandemic has revealed a profound gap, a deficit of solidarity and sharing: the sharing of critical data, sharing of epidemiological information, sharing of resources, technology and tools that every nation needs to keep its people safe.”

The WHO chief said, “We have to learn the lessons of COVID-19. Because it is unprecedented. This pandemic has thrived amid the inequalities and inequities in our societies and exploited the gaps in our health systems. It has exacerbated the disparities between and within countries. As we speak, rich countries are vaccinating their populations while much of the rest of the world is left to watch and wait. And we see the inequity, the injustice. More than 70 percent of all vaccines have been administered in just ten countries.”

As much of the world struggles to vaccinate their populations, Pfizer, the biopharmaceutical company that makes one of the vaccines, says it is time to consider a booster shot to protect against the more contagious variants of the coronavirus. But U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Federal Drug Administration said Friday they don’t believe Americans need another shot yet.

Pfizer said that some of its representatives would meet with officials at the FDA on Monday. The company had said recently that booster shots would be needed within the next 12 months.

Dr. Anthony Fauci acknowledged that booster shots may be needed but said Sunday that it was too soon for the government to recommend another shot. Roughly half of the U.S. population has been fully vaccinated.

The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center reported more than 186 million global COVID infections early Monday and more than 4 million global deaths. The U.S. has the most cases with 33.9 million, followed by India with 30.9 million.

Johns Hopkins reported 3.4 billion vaccines have been administered worldwide.

Source: Voice of America