Time
Date: March 18, 2020
By: Anders Rassmussen
Anders Fogh Rasmussen was the Prime Minister of Denmark from 2001 to 2009.
This has not happened by chance. Learning from the experiences of SARS in 2003, Taiwan was ready when the outbreak in Wuhan occurred. After the first notifications at the end of 2019, Taipei swiftly deployed a combination of measures to identify and contain the virus, including the use of big data to help contain potential cases.
The global health community could have learned from Taiwan’s experience. But in recent years its world-class health specialists have been shut out in the cold by Beijing’s geopolitical obsessions. In 2016, Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-Wen came to power with a mandate to assert her people’s autonomy. China did not take kindly to this democratic challenge to its “One China” policy and bullied the world’s multilateral institutions into dealing only with Beijing. As a result, Taipei was denied access to a number of international fora which it was previously able to attend as an observer. [FULL STORY]