Day: July 13, 2021

TOKYO – Japan will make additional donations of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine to Taiwan and other Asian neighbors this week, Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi said Tuesday.

Japan will ship 1 million doses each to Indonesia, Taiwan and Vietnam on Thursday as part of bilateral deals with those governments, Motegi told reporters.

An additional 11 million doses donated through the COVAX sharing scheme will be sent this month to Bangladesh, Cambodia, Iran, Laos, Nepal and Sri Lanka, as well as various Pacific Island states, he said.

Taiwan’s Foreign Ministry expressed thanks for the gesture, particularly at a serious stage in Japan’s own coronavirus battle. Japan has donated about 3.4 million doses to Taiwan in a show of support for the Chinese-claimed island.

“The friendship between Taiwan and Japan is unwavering,” the Taiwan ministry said in a statement. “The Foreign Ministry once again thanks our partners in freedom and democracy for their warm assistance and strong support.”

In a statement, Vietnam said it would receive a million doses from Japan on Friday in Ho Chi Minh City, where it is fighting its largest outbreak yet after months of successful containment.

“It is encouraging that a number of richer countries have made generous pledges and donations of vaccines to countries in Asia in recent weeks,” said Alexander Matheou of aid group the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC).

“We need to speed up the delivery of these lifesaving doses so that we can get them into people’s arms, giving us a genuine shot at containing this pandemic once and for all.”

Taiwan has complained that Chinese interference blocked its deal this year to secure vaccines from Germany’s BioNTech, charges Beijing has denied. Since then, vaccine donations have rolled into Taiwan.

Taiwan’s relatively small domestic COVID-19 outbreak has generally been brought under control, except for a few sporadic community infections.

Japan has pledged $1 billion and 30 million doses to COVAX. Motegi said on Tuesday the AstraZeneca doses made in Japan were approved by the World Health Organization on July 9 for use in COVAX.

Source: Voice of America

World leaders are expressing their support for the Cuban people after Sunday’s demonstrations across the island.

The foreign minister for the European Union, Josep Borrell, urged the Cuban government “to listen to these protests of discontent” during a press conference Monday in Brussels after meeting with EU foreign ministers.

Erika Guevara-Rosas, Americas director at Amnesty International, called Sunday’s protests “a historic day for Cuba” while expressing concern over reports of “internet blackouts, arbitrary arrests, excessive use of force — including police firing on demonstrators” as well as “a long list of missing persons.”

Guevara-Rosas called on Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel and his government to “address the social demands of its citizens, given the economic crisis, the shortages of food and medicine, the collapse of the health system — which is not responding to the current COVID-19 crisis — and the accumulation of historical demands for respect of the rights to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly.”

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador told reporters in Mexico City Monday that a “truly humanitarian gesture” would be for the United States to lift the five-decade economic embargo of Cuba.

“No country in the world should be fenced in, blockaded,” he said.

In the United States, the mayor of Miami, Florida, called on the Biden administration to lead an international effort to help Cubans, who are suffering under the island’s long-serving communist government, he said.

“The government of Cuba is an illegitimate government,” Mayor Francis Suarez told reporters Monday. “And the people of Cuba are starving. They’re in need of medicine. They’re in need of international help. And frankly, unless the Cuban military or the Cuban police turns on the Cuban government, the Cuban people will continue to be repressed without any hope of freedom in the future.”

Miami is home to a large community of Cuban exiles who fled their homeland after Fidel Castro seized power in the 1959 revolution.

Another Florida political figure, Republican U.S. Senator Marco Rubio, praised the demonstrations, characterizing the events as “historic, peaceful and organic protests that arose throughout Havana and other provinces in Cuba” in a letter to President Joe Biden. Senator Rubio urged the president to take a number of steps to help the Cuban people, including identifying those involved in “acts of violent repression inside Cuba” and banning them from entering the United States.

Democratic U.S Senator Bob Menendez, the chairman of the chamber’s Foreign Relations Committee, called for the “violence and repression” against the Cuban people to end.

“The world’s eyes are on Cuba tonight and the dictatorship must understand we will not tolerate the use of brute force to silence the aspirations of the Cuban people,” he said in a statement issued late Sunday.

Some information for this report came from the Associated Press, Agence France-Press and Reuters.

Source: Voice of America