Singapore’s self-appointed anti-vaccine crusader is back to once again deny that she orchestrated an assault on public health services, this time involving children.
Iris Koh, who operates an anti-vaxx chat group, denied urging parents via Telegram to “overwhelm” staff at pediatric vaccination centers with questions. She filed a police complaint against the ministry a day after it filed one against her for attempting to disrupt operations and harassing staff.
“The above statements are untrue and I demand proof from MOH that this is what I did. I have since filed a police report against MOH’s false police report,” Koh wrote in a blog post.
The ministry yesterday announced it had reported Koh’s community to the police after it “exhorted” parents to disrupt operations on Dec. 27 when Singapore rolled out vaccinations for children under 12.
The message posted to her group that day encouraged parents to book their children for shots and use the time to ask questions without intending to get them vaccinated.
It’s the second time Koh has encouraged her followers to take action against public health services and then justified it as a response to the government refusing to take her conspiracy theories seriously.
She insists she only encouraged parents to book the appointments since their questions and concerns have repeatedly been ignored by the ministry. That those questions are informed by a raft of easily disproved and discredited conspiracy theories she promotes doesn’t seem to bother her.
“If MOH perceive ‘asking’ questions, which is the right and duty of every parent a ‘disruption to operations’, I suggest that MOH improve their operations to include the answering of questions inside their SOP! Unless we are supposed to just blindly obey?” she wrote.
She again denied that she is an anti-vaxxer and instead an “intelligent vaxxer” who asks intelligent questions, kind of like Trekkies who demand to be called Trekkers.
The ministry did not hesitate to mention the group’s troubled history sharing misleading information, urging the public yesterday to “exercise social responsibility and not be misled by the promptings of the group.”
Koh’s group was investigated in November for “instigating” members to flood public hotlines following the government’s decision to bar the unvaccinated from shopping malls.
It also filed a legally bereft harassment suit against Singapore Press Holdings for urging preferential treatment of the vaccinated, and tried to argue against the COVID-19 health measures they think violate human rights.
Meanwhile, COVID-19’s decline in Singapore has reversed in recent days, with the virus now regaining a foothold as the Omicron variant spreads.
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