Coronavirus Vaccine in Taiwan - May/June 2021

Recognition, not purchase, is a different issue.

Companies are already starting to ask for proof of covid vaccination. How would Taipei respond when someone received the Sinovac vaccine? Or the rest of the world if Taiwan releases a vaccine to the world?

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Cross the bridge later

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Probably not going to be accepted. And this will probably be true in many countries, even though it’s WHO (Wuhan Health Organization) approved.

Probably not going to be accepted unless/until the local vaccines are WHO approved.

This is why vaccine tourism to the US makes sense. All of the vaccines in the US will be accepted worldwide. Even China can’t hold out.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/china-vaccine-passport-visas-covid/2021/04/20/8a6422d0-a14e-11eb-8a6d-f1b55f463112_story.html

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What’s the vaccine takeup being like, anyone know?

They had an announcement that a vaccine site would be open near me today for the old codgers, but I’ve just got a feeling that not many showed.

When I cycled past the school didn’t exaclty look to be thriving.

what % of taiwanese are willing to take the domestic vaccine?

around 25% per state media

How do you guys feel about Taiwan pushing a vaccine that has so little data? I personally feel phase 2 is not enough to determine the efficacy of the vaccine and I feel they are using Immunobridging to just shortcut the entire process to just get it out there asap.

They are also using Novavax as some example of why the taiwanese vaccine will work just fine. I get they both use a protein spike, but the majority of protein spike vaccines have been proven to like 50-70% effective.

Some articles were posted earlier (sorry it was a long post mixed with some other comments):

In the local forums, we call this the nationwide transmutation circle.

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In this approach, an immune response biomarker(s) elicited by the vaccine in a pediatric age group is compared to the same immune response biomarker(s) elicited by the same vaccine in a relevant adult age group, with formal statistical hypothesis testing to demonstrate that the measured immune response in the pediatric age group is non-inferior to that in adults.

In the US they’re considering using immunobridging to evaluate if an already proven (Phase III completed and EUA approved) vaccine elicits the same level of immune response in a different age group.

This is very different than what’s being discussed in TW because in TW, the vaccines won’t have gone through Phase III trials to prove real-world efficacy in any group of people in the first place.

Well Novavax is not yet approved for use in any country. And to say that a vaccine will work just because another vaccine that uses the same general technology works seems to be pushing the bounds of medical ethics.

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A question about how vaccination influences one’s capacity to serve as a host for the virus. From my, admittedly limited, understanding, the primary benefit of vaccination is reduced chance of “catching” or suffering ill effects from the virus. However, it’s unclear (to me) whether or not a vaccinated individual could still transmit the virus and infect others, if proper precautions were not taken (e.g., wearing masks).

I ask this in response to @Icon’s attempts to caution the elderly to get vaccinated and @Shaun008’s mention of healthcare workers advising the elderly.

The context: my elderly landlord/landlady chatted with me recently and were sad their sons couldn’t visit them (thankfully they work from home, but live in the north). However, I was shocked to hear that the daughter’s visit every week. Both daughters are nurses in hospital settings, but claimed that they could safely visit their parents because they received their first AZ shot.

It’s not really my business, but I advised my landlady that it would be better to wait until she and her husband were vaccinated, since transmission may still be possible, particularly from people working in hospital settings. Of course, the assurances of their nurse daughters greatly outweighed my paranoid concerns.

tl;dr: Is it safe for hospital nurses, with only the first AZ shot to be interacting weekly with their 75+ year-old elderly parents (without masks, obviously).

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They’re still investigating whether the vaccines provide any level of sterilizing immunity. From what I’ve read, it looks like the mRNA vaccines might be superior in this regard.

One study found that a single dose of AZ cuts transmission by two thirds, which is not bad. For the vaccinated individual, the first dose provides decent protection (after 10-14 days) for at least 90 days.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)00528-6/fulltext

Notably, in exploratory analyses, vaccine efficacy after a single standard dose was 76·0% (59·3–85·9) from day 22 to day 90, and antibody levels were maintained during this period with minimal waning.

Based on these numbers, I don’t think it would be “safe” for a person with a single dose of AZ who works in a high-risk environment to visit unvaccinated vulnerable family members. Their protection as individuals is nowhere near 100%, and even if a single dose reduces transmission by two thirds, that still leaves a non-negligible risk of transmission.

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Thank you! I believe this is a reasonable takeaway from the limited findings we have so far. Intuitively, at least, it makes sense to maintain social distancing at least until all parties are fully vaccinated. However, I tend to err on the side of caution.

Where my parents live, it seems, people prefer to emphasize their “rights” while avoiding basic social “responsibilities.” This does seem, however, to be less of a cultural phenomenon and more of a natural outcome of “fatigue” resulting from extended social restrictions or “complacency” stemming from a status quo of limited local transmissions. I fear Taiwan is beginning to show a bit of both in recent weeks.

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Filial piety here seems to be overriding safety.

If she gets infected, I think it’s almost certain the elderly parents will get it.

It’s hard to override these cultural habits though. . . .

Guy

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Wait…
say what!?!?

90 days? 3 months and AZ wears off?!

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I believe that’s just scientists being careful in a way that, yes, can certainly increase anxiety in the reader. Probably the study stopped after 90 days, so they can’t speak to what happens after that.

The efficacy starts to decline, which is why a second booster shot is needed. This is common. Seasonal flu shots are only peak effective for a few months as well.

We will probably be getting annual shots for COVID the rest of our lives.

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I agree that boosters will almost certain be part of the picture—at least until the various forms of COVID are eradicated.

Just to give some historical point of reference: with full international cooperation, it took 20 years to get small pox fully under control. Looking back to such historical precedents, this guy at Canada’s Centre for International Governance Innovation gives a great explanation about how he thinks COVID will likely end:

Guy

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Yeah, IIRC they haven’t looked beyond this period because it’s beyond the interval for both doses. They assume everyone who gets the first shot will get the second, so limited use in testing the efficacy of a single dose over longer periods of time.

There’s a lot of reason to believe that without the second booster dose the protection from the first dose will decline. Also, they’ve found that the efficacy against some of the variants is pretty low after just one dose, so that’s an issue too.

Yes, and these days we have much less international cooperation. It’s never fully going away. But researchers are innovating… I heard they’re already coming up with a vaccine patch (same delivery system as a nicotine patch) that you just slap on your skin. It’ll be available in a year and it might be a game changer for getting people protected on a massive scale.

But COVID is here to stay. Let’s hope it gets less lethal like Spanish Flu, and doesn’t mutate into something even worse.

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