Only 32% of Taiwan's healthcare workers willing to get AstraZeneca vaccine

台灣只有32％的醫護人員願意接種阿斯利康疫苗

CECC head claims percentage willing to receive AstraZeneca shot 'quite high'


TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — As inoculations of the AstraZeneca vaccine are being suspended in some European countries over a potentially deadly side effect, less than one-third of Taiwanese healthcare professionals are willing to be the first recipients of the jab in Taiwan.

On Tuesday (March 16), the Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) released the results of a survey of medical care workers on their willingness to get the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine. Of those surveyed, 90 percent, or about 183,000, have responded thus far.

Among those respondents, only 32.7 percent, or 59,984, indicated that they would be willing to get the vaccine. Of those, 43 percent are frontline healthcare workers and 28 percent are second-line workers.

When speaking to the media prior to a session of the Legislative Yuan on Tuesday, Health Minister and CECC head Chen Shih-chung (陳時中) said the government still believes the vaccine is safe and that the timeframe for delivery has not been affected. He said the decision on whether to administer the vaccines will likely be made this week.

He stressed that information is still being gathered on the vaccine. The Ministry of Health and Welfare plans to complete its safety inspection on Wednesday (March 17), after which it will hold a meeting of experts within two days to review the vaccine itself and the overall international situation.

When asked to comment on the apparently low percentage of medical professionals opting to take the vaccine, Chen said "This ratio can be considered quite high," reported Liberty Times. Earlier this month, Taiwan received 117,000 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine, the first to arrive in the country.

The AstraZeneca vaccine was first administered in the U.K. on Jan. 4 and gradually gained approval in other countries that month. However, its rollout in South Africa was suspended in February, as it appeared to be less effective against the coronavirus variant first discovered in that country.

In March, several European countries, including Austria, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, and Slovenia, began suspending the vaccine following reports of recipients suffering blood clots. Norway's medicine agency reported four cases of "serious blood clotting in adults," with one person in Austria suffering a blood clot-caused pulmonary embolism and one death from a blood clot reported in Denmark.

On Sunday (March 14), AstraZeneca announced on its website that after reviewing data on more than 17 million recipients of the vaccine in Europe, it had found "no evidence of an increased risk of pulmonary embolism, deep vein thrombosis (DVT) or thrombocytopenia, in any defined age group, gender, batch or in any particular country." It acknowledged that 15 events of DVT and 22 cases of pulmonary embolism had been reported but claimed these numbers are "much lower than would be expected to occur naturally in a general population of this size and is similar across other licensed COVID-19 vaccines."