American Enterprise Institute
Date: January 29, 2020
By: Michael Mazza, Visiting Fellow

The outbreak of a new illness caused by a coronavirus—one that threatens a global pandemic, although the World Health Organization (WHO) has yet to declare it a “global emergency”—is drawing attention to Taiwan’s continuing exclusion, at China’s insistence, from the WHO and other international organizations. When the WHO once again failed to issue Taipei an invitation to the annual World Health Assembly in May 2019, Taiwan’s Foreign Minister Joseph Wu described the decision as “morally wrong.” In a prescient appeal, he described a “pandemic or epidemic outbreak in countries nearby Taiwan, especially China and Japan, or Southeast Asia” as one of the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s biggest concerns, explaining that “we need the WHO’s guidance in dealing with this [potential] situation, and excluding Taiwan is going to put neighboring countries in great jeopardy as well.”

Clearly, memories of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which originated in China and spread throughout Asia and further afield in 2003, remain fresh in the minds of officials in Taiwan. During the SARS crisis, Taiwan quarantined approximately 150,000 people and 37 people died of the illness. Foreign Minister Wu told the Telegraph last May that the WHO waited six weeks before responding to Taiwan’s request for assistance. “It’s our belief that if the WHO had provided Taiwan with necessary help at an early stage, we could have prevented the situation from happening, we could have prevented the situation from getting that bad.”

Fast-forward eight months to January 2020 and, at the time of this writing, Taiwan has confirmed five cases of the coronavirus that has thus far infected at least 2,879 people, 81 of whom have died worldwide. Additional cases are probably going to be identified in days and weeks ahead. And although Taiwan is able to access WHO information indirectly through the United States and other friendly governments, such procedures can be inadequate when lives are at risk and time is of the essence. To put the matter into perspective, while SARS reportedly took three months to become easily transmissible between humans, the new coronavirus became transmissible in one month, according to one leading epidemiologist.   [FULL  STORY]