Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Johnny Chiang (江啟臣) on Tuesday acknowledged the generosity of Japan and the US for donating COVID-19 vaccines, but added that this could in no way be considered a political achievement of President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) or the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
He said the donations were due to the government’s “policy mistakes” and the loss of more than 500 lives, so that “friendly nations saw the breach in Taiwan’s [COVID-19] situation and sent the vaccines quickly.”
Tsai’s popularity ratings have plunged since the start of the outbreak, helped by the KMT resorting to the creation of a vaccine panic and politicizing the situation, but Chiang’s comments betray a certain amount of frustration that his party’s attempts to score political points from the outbreak have not been as successful as he would have hoped.
Falling daily confirmed cases of COVID-19 and the vaccine donations offer glimmers of hope to a fearful public, and might lessen the political impact of the outbreak on the government’s popularity.
However, it is Chiang’s flawed logic and disingenuous words that need exploring.
Whether Chiang likes it or not, the KMT is not running the nation, the DPP is, and some credit must go to the government, and officials such as Representative to Japan Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) and Representative to the US Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴), for securing the vaccine donations.
Instead, Chiang attributed the generosity to friendly relations, while ignoring his own party’s claims that the Tsai administration has been a little too friendly to the US and Japan.
The KMT has been trying to stymie the government’s policy of opening up to US pork imports and imports of Japanese products from areas near the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant to improve ties between the nations.
It was the Tsai government that donated medical equipment to the US, Japan, the EU and other nations during the first wave of the pandemic, when they had severe shortfalls. Perhaps this had something to do with the accumulated goodwill that led to the vaccine donations.
Chiang has also criticized the government for waiting for donations of vaccines to arrive, instead of purchasing vaccines by itself.
Perhaps he has not heard of the legal wrangle between the UK and the EU over delivery of AstraZeneca vaccines earlier this year, or China’s interventions to prevent Taiwan from signing a contract with BioNTech?
The government has ordered 10 million AstraZeneca shots and so far only received 117,000; it has ordered 4.76 million shots from the COVAX program and only received 600,000; it has ordered just over 5 million shots from Moderna and received 390,000.
That is just under 20 million shots ordered and 1.1 million received, far less than the 3.74 million shots donated by Japan and the US, with a promise of another 20,000 from Lithuania.
The loss of 599 lives to COVID-19 is a terrible thing, but if Chiang wants Taiwanese to believe that this is the reason foreign governments are donating vaccines, when the virus is raging throughout the world and is causing colossal numbers of deaths, including within their own nations, and when Taiwan is considered a wealthy nation, he is either pretending to be ignorant or actually is.
Chiang should concede that the main reason for the vaccine donations was geopolitical — the US, Japan and the EU are looking at the political divisions in Taiwan that China can leverage to weaken its military, intelligence and psychological defenses. Which brings the discussion back to Chiang and the KMT.
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