Is China undermining Taiwan’s vaccine rollout?

Taiwan’s pandemic restrictions have been so successful that the country has had fewer than 1,000 cases with just nine deaths. Like other Asian countries, Taiwan achieved this feat through strict border closures and rigorous track and tracing. And yet Taiwan’s government knows that a Covid jab is the only way to avoid prolonged international isolation — without it, relaxing border controls could see the island nation consumed by a wave of infections that, so far, it has been able to avoid.

But getting hold of vaccines has been a difficult job. Taiwan is yet to secure enough doses for all of the citizens it wants to vaccinate. For the doses it has secured, a detailed time frame for their rollout is yet to be published. That job becomes more difficult still when navigating a sensitive relationship with your superpower neighbour.

Initially, Taiwan hoped to fill this deficit using doses from the Covax scheme, run in partnership with the World Health Organization of which, at