Claims by China’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) that it shared a lot of technical information to help Taiwan fight COVID-19 are false, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said late on Friday.
TAO spokesman Ma Xiaoguang (馬曉光) earlier said that China allowed Taiwan to attend the World Health Assembly (WHA) as an observer under the name “Chinese Taipei” from 2009 to 2016 as a special arrangement under the “one China” principle.
Taiwan did not receive an invitation to attend the WHA — the annual meeting of the WHO’s decisionmaking body — for the seventh year in a row. It starts in Geneva, Switzerland, today.
Photo: AFP
As the Democratic Progressive Party insists on a separatist stance of Taiwanese independence and refuses to accept the “1992 consensus” to realize the “one China” principle, the political foundation for Taiwan to attend the WHA no longer exists, Ma said.
The so-called “1992 consensus,” a term that former Mainland Affairs Council chairman Su Chi (蘇起) in 2006 admitted making up in 2000, refers to a tacit understanding between the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Chinese government that both sides of the Strait acknowledge there is “one China,” with each side having its own interpretation of what “China” means.
“Taiwan compatriots are our flesh and blood. No one cares about their health and well-being more than us,” Ma said.
After the COVID-19 pandemic began, China invited Taiwanese public health experts to visit Wuhan and shared dozens of technical documents, including the genome sequence of SARS-CoV-2 that China shared with the WHO and the means to obtain related data, he said.
During the pandemic, China reported COVID-19 case information to Taiwan more than 500 times and 24 groups of Taiwanese healthcare specialists attended technical events of the WHO in the past year, so “Taiwan’s engagement in the WHO’s technical fields and their communication channels have been very smooth, and fully effective in receiving disease prevention information and support,” he said
The CDC in a news release rejected Ma’s statements.
Based on the Cross-strait Cooperation Agreement on Medicine and Public Health Affairs, on Jan. 6, 2020, the CDC asked to send experts to investigate the situation in Wuhan, it said.
A Chinese contact on Jan. 11, 2020, agreed that the CDC could send two experts to Wuhan on Jan. 13 and 14 that year, it said.
However, Taiwan’s experts were accompanied by Chinese officials throughout the visit and only received limited data from an oral presentation, the CDC said.
However, the experts believed that the virus could be transmitted from person to person, so the CDC listed COVID-19 as a category 5 notifiable communicable disease on Jan. 15, it said.
The first SARS-CoV-2 genome sequence it obtained was downloaded from the US National Center for Biotechnology Information on Jan. 11, 2020, and nucleic acid amplification testing methods were developed from it, enabling Taiwan to detect the first imported case on Jan. 21, 2020, the CDC said.
During the pandemic, the Chinese government provided 12 technical COVID-19 related documents and answered 464 messages in response to requests from Taiwan, which were mostly data it published on government Web sites, it said.
The WHO has held thousands of meetings from 2009 and 2023, and Taiwan applied to attend 237, but was only accepted to 88, the CDC said.
The TAO’s claims are not true, it said.
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