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.
Taipei and New Taipei City government officials are aiming to have the first phase of the Wanhua-Jungho-Shulin Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) line completed and opened by 2027, following the arrival of the first train set yesterday. The 22km-long Light Green Line would connect four densely populated districts in Taipei and New Taipei City: Wanhua (萬華), Jhonghe (中和), Tucheng (土城) and Shulin (樹林). The first phase of the project would connect Wanhua and Jhonghe districts, with Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall and Chukuang (莒光) being the terminal stations. The two municipalities jointly hosted a ceremony for the first train to be used
MILITARY AID: Taiwan has received a first batch of US long-range tactical missiles ahead of schedule, with a second shipment expected to be delivered by 2026 The US’ early delivery of long-range tactical ballistic missiles to Taiwan last month carries political and strategic significance, a military source said yesterday. According to the Ministry of National Defense’s budget report, the batch of military hardware from the US, including 11 sets of M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) and 64 MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile Systems, had been scheduled to be delivered to Taiwan between the end of this year and the beginning of next year. However, the first batch arrived last month, earlier than scheduled, with the second batch —18 sets of HIMARS, 20 MGM-140 missiles and 864 M30
Representative to the US Alexander Yui delivered a letter from the government to US president-elect Donald Trump during a meeting with a former Trump administration official, CNN reported yesterday. Yui on Thursday met with former US national security adviser Robert O’Brien over a private lunch in Salt Lake City, Utah, with US Representative Chris Stewart, the Web site of the US cable news channel reported, citing three sources familiar with the matter. “During that lunch the letter was passed along, and then shared with Trump, two of the sources said,” CNN said. O’Brien declined to comment on the lunch, as did the Taipei
A woman who allegedly attacked a high-school student with a utility knife, injuring his face, on a Taipei metro train late on Friday has been transferred to prosecutors, police said yesterday. The incident occurred near MRT Xinpu Station at about 10:17pm on a Bannan Line train headed toward Dingpu, New Taipei City police said. Before police arrived at the station to arrest the suspect, a woman surnamed Wang (王) who is in her early 40s, she had already been subdued by four male passengers, one of whom was an off-duty Taipei police officer, police said. The student, 17, who sustained a cut about
RSS