Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) yesterday said that he would ask government officials to assess the possibility of holding an online conference with international disease prevention experts to pass on the nation’s methods for containing COVID-19.
Su made the remark when asked by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Charles Chen (陳以信) whether Taiwan — which last month participated remotely in a WHO forum on critical research and the development of vaccines, therapeutics and diagnostics — could convene an online conference on ways to contain the novel coronavirus.
As Taiwan has been the most successful nation in limiting the spread of the virus, the government could help other nations by inviting international disease prevention experts to participate in the conference, Chen said.
Photo: Wang Yi-sung, Taipei Times
The nation should capitalize on the opportunity with its first-rate disease prevention experts, such as Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中) and Minister Without Portfolio Audrey Tang (唐鳳), who excels at holding online conferences, he said.
The nation should “show the world its loss for excluding [Taiwan] from the WHO,” he added.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs last week asked Chen Shih-chung to educate Taiwan’s foreign representatives on the nation’s disease prevention efforts in the hope of sharing such information with other nations, but the move would likely not be effective, as diplomats are not disease prevention specialists, Charles Chen said.
Convening an online conference on containing the virus would give the nation a perfect opportunity to raise its international profile and make its greatest contribution yet to global public health, he said.
Asked whether he was willing to test the proposal, Su said: “Yes.”
Charles Chen also requested that Mainland Affairs Council Minister Chen Ming-tong (陳明通) identify who was in charge of negotiations for a second set of charter flights that evacuated 361 Taiwanese from Wuhan, China.
Chen Ming-tong declined to comment on the details of the negotiations out of concern that it could affect talks on further efforts to bring back Taiwanese stranded in Wuhan.
The council would take lawmakers’ questions after all negotiations have ended, he said.
Su said that the negotiations were not conducted between the governments on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait, but by “relevant parties” acting on the governments’ instructions.
“We hoped to bring back our people, and we did, after many twists and turns… We hope to bring back many more people, so we will not reveal too much” about the negotiations, he said.
When told by Charles Chen that many people were “disheartened” after it took the government more than a month to arrange the second set of evacuation flights, Su said: “That is the result of ‘the other side’ insisting on this and that, which gave us a lot of trouble.”
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