Back in February, as the world was beating a path to Taiwan’s door for help to tackle a shortage of semiconductors, the health minister got into a scrap with China over COVID-19 vaccines.
Beijing, he suggested, had used political pressure to derail Taiwan’s plan to purchase 5 million doses directly from Germany’s BioNTech SE, rather than via a Chinese company which held the rights to develop and market the BioNTech-Pfizer Inc. vaccine across China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying retorted that Taipei "should stop hyping up political issues under the pretext of vaccine issues.”
Three months later, Taiwan is paying the price for a lack of vaccines, with a surge in virus cases that threatens to trigger a lockdown. Having successfully sidestepped the first COVID-19 wave, the government now faces a health emergency — only about 1% of its population is vaccinated so far — with the potential to disrupt the chip industry that dominates the local economy, and which is critical to an already-squeezed global supply.