The first shipment of BioNTech vaccine doses with customized labels for the Taiwanese market has arrived in Taiwan. The last shipment of BioNTech vaccine doses did not have such customized labels because that batch had originally been destined for another country
Health Minister Chen Shih-chung said on Thursday morning that this latest shipment of 550,000 doses is not labeled with the simplified characters used in China.
Chen says that these BioNTech vaccine doses still have to undergo ten days of inspections before the health ministry can administer them to schoolchildren.
Chen also says there's a good chance that another shipment of AstraZeneca vaccine doses will be arriving Thursday afternoon.
There have been predictions that around 60% of the population will have received at least one COVID jab shortly after National Day on October 10. Though some hope this means Taiwan will lower its COVID alert to the lowest level on its alert scale, Chen says that this is unlikely to happen soon. He said he wants to wait until a higher percentage of the population is fully vaccinated.
These BioNTech shipments are part of a donation of 15 million doses from tech giants TSMC and Foxconn, and Buddhist humanitarian group the Tzu Chi Foundation. The CEO of Foxconn, Terry Gou posted on Facebook Thursday morning, saying that another BioNTech shipment of over 60,0000 doses is expected to arrive in Taiwan on Friday. The next shipment, arriving on October 4, should bring the total number of BioNTech vaccine doses Taiwan has received to over 1.4 million.