Taiwan Tati Cultural and Educational Foundation

Mask kerfuffle reveals demons

Taipei Times Editorial

There have been a host of incidents involving Taiwanese celebrities making comments that have been perceived as attempts to ingratiate themselves with the Chinese market, but never has an incident sparked outrage as much as the one last week surrounding singer Christine Fan (范瑋琪). She used a barrage of derogatory epithets to describe Premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) after the government banned exports of surgical masks for a month amid fears of a local 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) outbreak.

Viral Outbreak: US pans UN over Taiwan’s exclusion amid virus fight

Taipei Times

A petition calling on the US to help Taiwan be included in the WHO that was initiated on Thursday yesterday reached the 100,000-signature threshold, requiring an official response.
Photo: US White House Web site

The US Department of State and several prominent US politicians have criticized international organizations for excluding Taiwan amid a global effort to curb the spread of a new coronavirus.

Viral Outbreak: US senators call for WHO observer status

Taipei Times

The WHO logo is pictured in Geneva, Switzerland, on Thursday.
Photo: Reuters

US Senator Cory Gardner and six other Republican senators on Friday urged WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus to grant Taiwan “observer” status in the global agency’s fight against the spread of 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV).

Fighting the demon within

Taipei Times Editorial

The Chinese government learned a lot from SARS: That was the message that Beijing and the WHO have been trying to hammer home for the past few weeks, even as the WHO on Thursday declared the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) outbreak a global health emergency.

Instead, as we saw with SARS in 2002 to 2003, the contaminated milk scandal of 2008, avian flu outbreaks and the outbreak of African swine fever in August 2018, to name but a few crises, the instinctive response of local governments and Beijing has been denial, obfuscation and the harassment or arrest of whistle-blowers, followed by downplaying the problem, and repeated pronouncements that everything is under control and will soon be over.

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