Tech giants to donate Covid vaccines to Taiwan

TAIPEI: Taiwanese tech giants Foxconn and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company announced Monday they will each donate five million coronavirus vaccine doses to the government in a deal with a China-based distributor.

Taipei has been struggling to secure enough vaccines for its population, and its precarious political status has been a major stumbling block.

As Taipei and Beijing accused each other of hampering vaccine deals, Foxconn and TSMC stepped in with a face-saving solution — buying the PfizerBioNTech doses from a Chinese distributor and donating them to Taiwan.

“Me and my team feel the public anxiety and expectations on the vaccines and we are relieved to give the public an answer that relevant contracts have been signed,” Foxconn founder Terry Gou said in a post on his Facebook page.

“Beijing authorities have not offered any guidance or interfered with the vaccine acquisition process,” he said, adding that the vaccines will be shipped directly by German firm BioNTech.

Foxconn and TSMC, the world’s largest contract electronics and chip makers respectively, said they will spend US$175 million each on the vaccines.

Taipei has been trying to secure Pfizer-BioNTech direct from Germany but Shanghaibased Fosun Pharma has the distribution rights for China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan.

Attempts to sign a direct deal made little headway, something Taiwan blamed on Beijing.

In return, Beijing has accused Taiwan of refusing to deal with Fosun Pharma and politicising its vaccine search.