During Hsu Tse-Chiu’s term as Minister of the Department of Health, he led Shin Yaw-Tang, Huang Weng-Foung, Hsu Kuo-Hsiung, Hsu Hsu-Mei, Hsu Shu-Tao, and other epidemic prevention officials to preemptively prepare a health safety net and Health-for-All policy. They pushed for the prevention of hepatitis in Taiwan and achieved total vaccine coverage of citizens under 35. It is also because of their forward thinking that Taiwan was able to nurture many exceptional talents in liver research and publish many international papers. Thanks to everyone’s efforts, Taiwan has become the first country in the world to be completely hepatitis B vaccinated.

Mr. Li, Kwoh-Ting was a Taiwanese politician and economist who once served as the former minister of economics and finance. During his office, he pushed for many financial reforms and is considered Taiwan’s “godfather of technology.” In 1982, he lobbied to revise the National Science and Technology Development Plan to place greater emphasis on energy, automation, materials, information, biotechnology, photonics, food science, and hepatitis prevention. Together, these major projects make up the eight major technologies of the plan. This policy in turn spurred the country to throw itself into hepatitis prevention efforts. From requiring the newborns of asymptomatic women to be vaccinated in 1984, up to where all newborns were required to be vaccinated for hepatitis B in 1986, Taiwan heralded its heyday of viral hepatitis research. It was also at this time that Taiwan decreased its percentage of newborn hepatitis B carriers to less than 1% from the former 15%. Be it clinical or basic research, Taiwan boasted results that made it one of the most important centers of international hepatitis research and became a role model for hepatitis B prevention.