 Yeah, I am in the cabinet office. This is the executive unit. Okay, cool. So I'd like to talk to you about the success of Taiwan in handling the pandemic. And I have to ask you first, the festival photos I've seen from Taiwan. I've seen like a crowd of people, people didn't even wear masks. Are these real? Yeah, these are real. These are not 2019 documentary footages. These are real people. And if you see them outdoors, they're not required to wear masks as long as they keep roughly one meter or two Shiba Inu distance from each other. But we do have our mask ready. So when it gets too dense or if it's on public transportation, then we do put them on. I like to describe you my normal day right now. If possible, I work from home. Many countries in Europe are experiencing a second lockdown. You are obliged to wear masks in Switzerland, restaurants, etc. are closed right now. Team sport isn't possible. Lots of people are worrying they cannot spend Christmas with their loved ones. How does life look like in Taiwan right now? So we don't have a local transmission case in the past. I lose the count 230 days or something. And so we're post COVID for a very long time. So in addition to the mask availability and keeping some social distance, I think the main change is those thermometers. Like when I get into the cabinet building and into the legislature, there's still a thermometer measuring my temperature. But otherwise, life is normal. I mean, we just a few weeks ago have a pride parade with actually the inaugural transgender parade in Taiwan. The interesting part is, of course, the pride part, LGBTQ part. And it's a really large one, really successful. And mask has become a fashion item. I'm using a normal one, but I do have with me like rainbow, pink, other colors as well. That's awesome. So lots of people say Taiwan's an island, of course, and got lots of pandemic experience. If you'd like, probably like that one with stars 18 years ago. Is this your advantage today? Yes. Yeah, we are basically using the playbook that we collectively designed right after stars 1.0, as I call it, that basically we ask ourselves, we did so badly during stars 1.0, the municipal government saying completely different things from the national government, an unannounced, indeterminate lockdown of the Hoping Hospital, people rushing to buy N95 masks so the medical workers don't have them in enough supply. I can go on, but it was not the best of the days. And so after that, the constitutional court said that this unannounced lockdown in an indefinite amount is fairly constitutional. It would have been unconstitutional if we know that something like this would happen. So they charged the legislature to write a new design of the Act for Communicable Diseases Prevention for the Central Epidemic Command Center for all the sort of measures that you're seeing now and keeping it running in yearly drills. So everybody, above 30 years old, remember how traumatic it was. And when Dr. Lee went down from Wuhan in the whist of blowing, social media posts say SARS has happened again. I mean, everybody just alarm bells around. So yeah, I think this is more of a societal inoculation than anything. When have you heard of the new coronavirus? And when did you start preparing for it? Well, we started preparing for it since 2004. But to answer your question. To actually answer your question, I don't think many people understood how bad SARS 2.0 would be compared to SARS 1.0. We all eventually discovered it. But for me personally, I mentioned that SARS has happened again. Something like that has happened again. January denies a few days before the presidential election with some delegation journalist, I think, from Denmark. That's my personal, and I learned about it because of the bulletin posted by the Center of Communication Table Diseases, and they learned about it, I think, around December 31st. And there's health inspections for all the flights coming from Wuhan to Taiwan on the first day of January. Taiwan already sent an email to VHO on December 31st. That's right. But we didn't hear anything. So we started those health inspections the very next day. So what would you say? I mean, you already mentioned like measuring the fever every day and stuff like that. What would you say is the recipe for your success? How did you manage to control the virus, especially you as a... Yeah, very early on we understood that if three quarters of people wear the mask for the entire day and wash their hands properly, that alone three-quarter of people doing so will reduce the R-value to be under one. And the main problem of that was how to figure out a message that will... Sorry about that, go viral on social media and so on, to convince people to remind each other to wear a mask and wash their hands. And we eventually settled on a Q-spoke stuff that says, wear a mask to prevent yourself from your own unwashed hands. And that's a very good message. Have you ever had problems with people believing in conspiracy theories and who don't want to wear masks? Yeah, of course, yes. But as I mentioned, if the message was wear a mask to protect vulnerable people, wear a mask to show respect to your elderly or whatever. Any other message that talks about collectivism or altruism or about other things, that will run into this conspiracy theory, adversary or messaging. But on the other hand, if you say wear a mask to protect yourself against your own unwashed hands, you can't really counter that argument because it's just a self-reminder, more than anything. And that links mask use to hand sanitation. So I can't imagine the conspiracy theory says, no, when you wear a mask, you touch your face more. That doesn't work, right? So which is why it's an effective message. I see. Taiwan quickly became a real role model. We even donated masks to the European Union when they were desperately in need. Angry the World Health Organization doesn't really recognize your success? Well, I think the main thing is about, I feel, sad that we had ministerial access earlier on. We could have saved people. I mean, Dr. Lee Wen Liang literally saved the Taiwanese people with a blowing in Wuhan. But his message didn't get to the people in Wuhan. His message was harmonized, quote unquote, harmonized in the beginning of the epidemic. And because of that, people in Wuhan still held very large gatherings, even when Dr. Lee Wen Liang already sounded the alarm. So he saved Taiwanese people but not necessarily people in Wuhan. And so had we had ministerial access, we could have saved other people. So you think the world would have been better prepared if you be a member of the World Health Organization? Well, you see the World Health Organization works with the contact points that are scientific contact points. And we do have access to those. But having scientific access is not the same as having ministerial access, unless your scientific authority, your country's author of epidemiology textbook happens to be your political authority like your vice president, which is the Taiwan case, right? When our epidemiology authority wants to convince the vice president, it just looks into the mirror. But unless you have such a configuration, we having access to the scientific community, the scientists in other countries, it does not mean that these are translated into ministerial actions. And so ministerial access is really important, and Taiwan has been excluded from those. You are the digital minister and digital minister with all the portfolio, which I haven't heard before really. So how can I imagine your role in that? So in the Taiwan Cabinet, there's nine ministers without portfolio, or as I prefer to call it, horizontal ministers. Without portfolio means that there is no ministry reporting to us. Rather, we work across ministries. So in my office, there's around a dozen or so ministries that have sent secondments to my office while retaining their original position, like Director General Section Chief within their own ministries. They form a kind of horizontal team that works on open government, on social innovation, and on youth engagement. And social innovation and open government in particular are key in countering the pandemic with no lockdown and infodemic with no takedown. So the idea of the horizontal leadership is that I don't order the ministries to do anything, but I make sure, for example, that the Ministry of Economic Affairs, when they're producing such masks, have a really good communication channel with the Ministry of Health and Welfare, which is in charge of working with the pharmacy to distribute those masks, or the ministries of science and technology, the National Development Council and so on, who all have their own open data analytics computing center and so on, and they can all work together with the civic technologists to ensure the real-time dashboards and participatory accountability, so that when you're queuing in a pharmacy, for example, you can check your phone and see the person queuing before you swipes their national health card and purchased, like, nine medical masks. We're increasing that to 10 per two weeks in the rationing scheme. You're handing out the masks for free or for, like, a really small fee, right? Yeah. Yeah. Currently, we are charging it, I think, per mask. It's 0.15 euros, which is not a large amount, but we're changing that to 11 cents euros, 0.11 euros per medical mask around the turn of the year now. So, yeah, it's very affordable. Even people who are of the lowest income strata can easily afford it, and it's fair. There's no stockpiling possible because you have to present your national health card. Did you have to compromise on anything regarding the measures in Taiwan for data privacy? No, because we don't collect any new data that we were not already collecting before the pandemic. We don't use the pandemic as an excuse to collect new data, period. Which data are you collecting all the time? For example, your cell phone provider, Telcos, already have the signal strength of your phone to the cell phone towers. So, using that signal strength, which they need to collect because they need to provide roaming service. So, using that data alone, your Telcos can know to a very coarse degree, like 50 meters at most radius where your phone is. And we use that to send SMS automatically for flood evacuation or for earthquake prevention, advance warnings, and things like that. And so the same system has been then repurposed to enforce the digital quarantine for people who choose stay at home quarantine instead of hotel quarantine. Their phone is then put into the digital quarantine so that if they break out of the quarantine radius or the phone runs out of battery, the Telcos will automatically send SMS not only to them, but to their local medical officers. So, isn't this quarantine not more or less like prison than in Taiwan? No, we call it digital fence. And this is highly accepted? Well, 91% of people approve of it. And we thank the 9% who convinced parliamentarians to hold an interpolation, a public hearing session. Because you see, we've never declared a state of emergency. So everything we do needs to be pre-approved by the parliament because our constitutional mode is continental, the same as the German mode. So anything that we in the administration do need to be interpreted in a way that is according to the law. And so the parliamentarians did this public hearing, the Department of Cybersecurity, which works as the information team in the Central Epidemic Command Center, explain exactly how the system works, how the Telcos process these data within the Telcos. They don't hand it to some other advertisers or some other private sector companies, how after the 14-day quarantine, the lock is rotated. I mean, the Telcos already rotate the lock anyway. So you will not get unwanted precision advertisement because of that. And also at the end of the day, this is really just about very narrow but very time-limited restriction of movement. And you can choose the hotel quarantine if you don't want the digital fence. And so after they explained this, the approval rate raised to 94%. Of course, we still thank the 6% for keeping us honest, accountable. Did Western leaders, especially from Switzerland, get in touch with you to learn from your example? Many medical officers, but I don't know whether they hold public office or not. There's a lot of collaboration epicenter to epicenter-wise in the public health sector. In particular, a few days before the World Health Assembly, we held our own kind of pre-assembly assembly. And I don't mean the recent one, the one that was during the height of the initial pandemic. And we made sure that we share with the 14 countries and economies, the Taiwan model. So I don't have personally a contact from a high school in Switzerland, but I'm aware that many researchers and academics and journalists are in active conversations with our CECC team. When you see what's happening in Europe from Taiwan, how do you see the European approach compared to your approach? Well, I mean, we've been there, right? We know how it felt like in the stars in 2003 and it was devastating. We didn't want to go back there, which is why we developed the Taiwan model. And so that is why we're contributing to international efforts by sharing first how we contained the initial outbreak in SARS-2.0, but also, more importantly, to make sure that we provide not only the PPEs, but also the know-how of making such PPEs. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is very actively working with international counterparts to provide a blueprint that could build those automated plants that can churn out not only medical masks, but also surgical N95 and so on masks around two million a day on a almost entirely automated plant. And the importance of the medical grade is because it's very thin and lightweight, and it's far easier to wear all day as compared to other materials. Do you think Europe is too fixated on data privacy to handle a pandemic? I mean, it's really important to work to make sure that the data privacy and cybersecurity parameters are not encroached in the name of the pandemic. Like this, we fully support and which is why we don't collect new data in the name of the pandemic, which is why for contact tracing, for example, we rely mostly on traditional interviews and even for the nightlife district like hostess bars and host bars, we make sure that even though they have to provide a not to contact them or email, those could be through email or phone numbers. And those are kept on the record on the business side, which are shredded after four weeks, and they never have to copy that to the government. And so this is a decentralized way to maintain a possibility to contact in the case of outbreak without centralizing information, without over collecting things. And we do that out of, of course, the privacy first idea. And so I sympathize with those ideas. But I always need to emphasize it also that we can actually with current generation of technology instead of a forced dilemma between data usability on one side and privacy on the other. There are a lot of privacy enhancing technologies that can take care of both. But the problem is if you have those enrolled like our earthquake warnings and things like that, before the pandemic, then people already understand the privacy and cybersecurity parameters. So when we use that in novel innovative ways during the pandemic, or the National Health Card does another really good example that covers 99.99% of citizens and residents. And so these are IC cards and these, of course, have their privacy and cybersecurity concerns. So we have a law that said it can only be used for public service purposes. So people understood that already. And so because of that during the pandemic, when we use it in novel ways, but don't collect new data, people are okay with that. But having that norm set before the pandemic, very important. So would this be your advice for how Europe should prepare for the next pandemic? Exactly. We need all to prepare for SARS 3.0 or, I don't know, 2.1 preview or whatever. Right? Because the virus is currently hosted by a lot of people and which gives it a real possibility for mutation. And when it mutates in a kind of flu-like, seasonal flu-like way, many of our existing measures will have to be reconsidered and the vaccines may or may not catch up. And so a conversation when the vaccination for SARS 2.0 is hopefully generally available in the next half year or so. I think that's the really good opportunity as kind of a window of a conversation, much like our conversation after SARS 1.0 for the society to settle on the privacy and cybersecurity parameters. I've heard you have to tighten up some of the measures again. Which measures are you tightening up again and is this really necessary? Yeah, there is this winter and autumn idea, right, if that's what you're talking about. So what we're saying is that in clinics, public transportation, schools, exhibitions, religious ceremonies, public sector institutions, the nightclubs stuff, I'm probably missing one. But anyway, in one of those places it is then required to wear a mask. And if you don't wear a mask, then people will gently notice you to do so. And those places, some of them, most of them I think provide masks for you to use if you happen to forget one. And if they provide you with the mask and still refuse to wear it, then yes, I think you can be fined according to the new measure, I think up to €443. Whether that's necessary or not is a CECC question. I'm not an epidemiologist expert, but I think people are generally sympathetic with this measure. From your point of view, when you're looking back at the past 10 months, would you say the pandemic has been better or worse than you expected? SARS 2.0 is definitely worse than SARS 1.0. The asymptomatic transmission thing caught us by surprise. That's of course it caught everybody by surprise. And which actually is why mask and hand washing is even more important in SARS 2.0 than SARS 1.0. Because basically anyone, if they touch their own face, even if they have not interacted with anyone with any symptoms, is potentially vulnerable. So in that particular regard, SARS 2.0 is definitely worse than we initially expected when we hear about, oh, SARS has happened again in Wuhan in January. Did you finally get an invitation for the next VHO meeting? I don't think so. I'd like to talk to you about the next steps in the pandemic. So Europe is quite excited, and I think the US are as well, about the vaccines which are coming. Have you already developed vaccines yourself or have you bought some of the Europe ones? Yeah, we have developed our vaccines, and we're now seeking to get 20K volunteers in potential trials for the domestic vaccines. But we have also entered a COVAX arrangement, which you're probably already familiar about. But of course, COVAX, it has a formula that basically prioritizes places with higher pandemic rates. And so I understand by that formula, we may be the last one, or maybe just second to Antarctica. I'm sorry? Because you are doing so well. Exactly, exactly. Maybe next to Antarctica to perform so well. But still, I think we already have budgeted a lot of money, I think 400 million US dollars for the purchase of 1.5 million doses. And so that will protect our frontline medical workers and most vulnerable groups of people. And in any case, everybody else has physical vaccines. We already talked about the people who don't like to wear masks and who are against masks. Do you also have troubles with the anti-vaccine movement in Taiwan? I would say that because we built this as physical vaccine, and the acceptance rate is now 95%, if I'm not mistaken. So like way past those three-quarter mark for reducing the R-value to one-to-one. And so I would say judging by the recent seasonal flu vaccination, people are quite eager to get vaccinated against seasonal flu much more so than previous year. And so even though there may be people who are less enthusiastic about getting the biological vaccine, there are such people as long as these people are okay with washing their hands and the physical vaccine, I think we'll be doing okay. Great. My last question is quite a personal one. And please let me know if I'm violating any boundaries or something like that. I don't have boundaries. You can see my eyeglass. There's no boundaries. No borders. Sounds fine. Studies have shown, and I've written about that, that many leaders are better in handling the pandemic. To which extent does it play a role that Taiwan has a female head of state and that you are defining yourself as one? Finally. Well, I would say that the communication style is more empathetic. That really helps. Our minister, Chen Shizhong, has a way of just relating to any even the most outrageous questions and proposals with a degree of humor and humility. And so, for example, when a young boy called early April, mid-April, about when we're rationing our mask, you don't get to pick the color in. It just so happened that he got a rationed mask in pink. And so he caught saying, I don't want to go to school. All my classmates wear blue, and I'm the only boy that wear pink. My classmates will laugh at me. The very next day are daily CCC press conference. Minister Chen and all the medical officers, regardless of their gender, wore pink medical masks. And Minister Chen even said that Pink Panther was a childhood hero. So the young boy become not only the most hip boy in the class because he has the hero's mask color, but also the hero's hero's mask color. And so a lot of browns then just color their brand pink overnight. So pink for a while become the most fashionable color in Taiwan. So I would say this is a sign of a truly listening at scale, transcultural way of communication. And anyone can be a little bit more transgender by putting on pink medical masks. That's a very, very sweet story. So what do you think, what are your next steps in handling the pandemic? Are there still any obstacles or anything you need to do within the next months? What the vaccination, because the vaccine options that we currently have, each have their different logistic requirements because of temperature and so on that you're probably already familiar about. So we'll probably have to again use the national SD card to arrange a orderly logistic arrangement when it comes to protecting the vulnerable groups and the people that truly need to be vaccinated first. And that will be a logistic challenge, hopefully less so now that the storage technologies are improving. But we are preparing for those. Thank you very, very much, Audrey. That was the last question from my side. Is there anything we need to talk about? I think that's pretty much it. And so if I have a final message still, wear a mask to protect against your own unwashed hands from touching your own face. Thanks. I will wash hands immediately after the interview. Okay, cool. Thank you for your great questions. Thank you very, very much, Audrey. Yeah, I'll upload a video if it's okay to you after you publish. Yeah, great. Awesome. Thank you. Cheers. Bye.