One of Taiwan’s opposition parties is pushing for the government’s month-old vaccine procurement task force to become a fully-fledged committee. The party leading the move, the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), says that would make the government’s vaccine strategy more transparent.
As of Monday, Taiwan has received 726,600 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine and 150,000 doses from Moderna. That’s only a small fraction of the nearly 30 million doses that Taiwan has signed contracts for. As the country faces its worst outbreak of COVID-19 so far, pressure has increased on the government to boost vaccine supply.
TPP lawmaker Chiu Chen-yuan said Monday that the health ministry’s vaccine policy has not been transparent enough. He says that his party will put forward a motion to create a vaccine procurement committee. The committee would have to report on its work to the legislature. Chiu says this would allow lawmakers to oversee the government efforts to obtain vaccines.
Chiu is also calling on the government to explain plans for the stage-three trials of vaccines made in Taiwan. That comes after the government signed contracts with two Taiwanese manufacturers to buy five million doses each of their COVID-19 vaccines. The two companies say they will apply in June for emergency use authorization. Authorities say they expect the two vaccines to go into mass production by the end of July.