The spread of the local COVID-19 outbreak is slowing down. It took Taiwan only about two months to go from several hundred confirmed cases per day down to low double-digit figures.
This should be compared with the thousands and even tens of thousands of cases that occur per day in some other countries.
Credit for this success should go to the efforts of both the public for complying with epidemic prevention protocols and the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC).
It is quite a feat for Taiwan to curtail the spread of COVID-19 at the same time as being on guard against China’s “united front” effort. Despite this success, political forces are playing along with China’s cognitive warfare, directing fierce attacks at the Ministry of Health and Welfare and the ruling party, which are working hard to prevent the spread of the pandemic. These forces are even spreading rumors. This is unacceptable.
The pan-blue camp has used its ability to set the agenda in the nation’s news media while ignoring the seriousness of the global pandemic and the tight supply of vaccines. It also used its seats in the Legislative Yuan to insist on the purchase of 40 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines.
That Vietnam has only received 90,000 of the 30 million doses it has purchased due to the tight supply was in itself reason to suspect that the bill’s passage would have led to the introduction of Chinese vaccines, which are lower in efficacy than Western COVID-19 vaccines.
When the proposal was defeated, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) criticized the Democratic Progressive Party even harder for not purchasing vaccines, saying this was an attempt to protect the development of domestic vaccines and other issues.
However, recent media reports have cited correspondence between AstraZeneca and Thailand’s minister of public health showing that Taiwan started purchasing vaccines at an early stage, and in fact signed a contract as early as October last year.
It was only because of the changes in the pandemic that the vaccine supply became tight and delivery of the vaccine was delayed.
Surely, the KMT and the TPP should apologize for their rumormongering.
The opposition parties have gone from advocating last year that masks should be sent to China to demanding that Chinese vaccines should be brought in, as well as ridiculing the government, calling Taiwan a “vaccine beggar” while quietly running off to get vaccinated themselves and stirring up a ruckus by claiming that the government would not buy vaccines.
At a time when the local COVID-19 situation was worsening, these political forces not only responded to China, they did so with the intent of scoring political points rather than earnestly trying to prevent the outbreak.
Members of the public must not dance to their tune, and they must be careful when evaluating the plethora of news reports that appear on the Internet.
Compared with other countries where thousands upon thousands of cases are confirmed every day, Taiwan’s pandemic prevention performance has been remarkable.
All Taiwanese should be more thankful and spend less time getting involved in squabbling. If everyone continues to work together to prevent another outbreak, we should be able to overcome these types of difficulties.
Pan Kuan was a participant in the Sunflower movement.
Translated by Perry Svensson
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