Premier Chen Chien-jen (陳建仁) yesterday said the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is spreading “fake news” about COVID-19 vaccines, as the party has been critical of the government’s handling of the pandemic ahead of the elections on Saturday next week.
Chen made the remarks during an interview with a political talk show on Yahoo TV, which aired shortly after some KMT lawmakers demanded a special legislative session to probe the development of Medigen Vaccine Biologics Corp’s COVID-19 vaccines.
Regarding alleged government misconduct in awarding the vaccine contract to Medigen, Chen said that Taipei opted to facilitate the development of a domestic vaccine as the best way to contain the pandemic domestically.
Photo: Chung Li-hua, Taipei Times
The Medigen COVID-19 vaccine was the only jab coming out of the program to pass animal and phase 1 clinical trials, besting other vaccines that were being developed by United Biomedical Inc and Adimmune Corp, he said.
Trial data, published in top-rated international scientific journals, showed the effectiveness of the Medigen vaccine, Chen said.
Taipei allowed Medigen to waive phase 3 clinical trials, as achieving the requisite sample size was not possible in Taiwan, which had a relatively low number of confirmed COVID-19 cases, he said.
The WHO accepted the abbreviated trials as necessary and later approved the Medigen COVID-19 vaccine’s patent following the publication of data from additional trials conducted in four countries overseas, he said.
The Medigen vaccine was as effective as to BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, and superior by a large margin to AstraZeneca in preventing deaths and serious symptoms, Chen said, citing a study published in the scientific journal Infectious Diseases.
“Clinical trials conducted across the globe showed that the Medigen vaccine is a good one,” he said.
Rumors claiming that documents about the development of the Medigen vaccines were classified for 30 years are “fake news,” Chen said.
The allegedly sealed documents were thoroughly examined by prosecutors, Control Yuan members and lawmakers in the course of investigations into about 60 allegations against the vaccine, all of which were disproved, he said.
Regarding some KMT lawmakers’ claims that more than 1,000 Medigen stockholders are Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) members, Chen said the company in question is publicly traded and does not keep any documentation about of its stockholders’ party affiliation.
Asked to comment on DPP presidential candidate Vice President William Lai’s (賴清德) support for publishing Medigen’s vaccine contract, Chen said the government is in the process of renegotiating the terms of nondisclosure agreements.
As a publicly traded corporation, Medigen cannot release the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) from its contractual obligations to the company, unless a majority of shareholders agree to the move, which the government must respect, he said.
Separately, CDC Deputy Director-General Philip Lo (羅一鈞) responded former KMT legislator Alex Tsai’s (蔡正元) claims that Medigen COVID-19 vaccines are unsafe.
Sharing a few Facebook posts over the past two days, Tsai said the alum particles used in the vaccine might lead to a risk of chronic neurotoxic damage and cerebral inflammation, citing an article published in Frontiers in Neuroscience.
In response, Lo said that aluminates have been used in vaccine development for more than 60 years and that there is no doubt about their safety.
“This is the ABCs of vaccinology that every medical school graduate has to know,” he said.
The CDC in a news release said that the WHO and the health authorities in the US, EU, China and Japan consider vaccines with alum-containing adjuvants to be safe.
Frontiers Media are not considered a reliable source by Taiwanese medical institutions due to a lack of rigorous peer reviews, it said.
Spreading false information about medicine is unethical and potentially illegal, the CDC said, adding that it urges Tsai to be mindful of his social responsibilities.
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