Parliament votes Tuesday — five minutes could put a question on the record

You signed this petition asking HSA to act on the Pfizer promotions, and to be transparent about it. This is where that question goes next — and one of the three case studies below is the lawsuit you signed for.

On Tuesday 8 September, Parliament takes the second reading of the Health Sciences Authority (Amendment) and Other Matters Bill. It moves the Biological Agents and Toxins Act — the law governing who may possess Singapore’s most dangerous pathogens — and the Human Biomedical Research Act, our law of consent, into the office of HSA’s Chief Executive. In 66 pages, the word “appeal” does not appear once.

Case study one — 2003: the warning, and the benchmark. SARS escaped a laboratory in Singapore and a doctoral student at NUS was infected. A review panel convened at the Ministry of Health’s request, with the World Health Organization, found the records so poor that basic questions could not be answered, and that Singapore had no legislated biosafety standards at all — the finding that produced the Biological Agents and Toxins Act 2005, the very Act this Bill moves. The panel set out what this work requires: complete records, a documented chain of custody, certification audited by accredited external auditors, and people able to raise concerns “without the threat of punishment”.

Case study two — January 2022: the standards, tested on a person. Ten and a half hours of an interview, off the record, in the criminal proceedings in which I am an accused person. Those proceedings are ongoing and no finding has been made. Nothing in the account asks you to decide my guilt or anyone else’s, and I make no allegation of wrongdoing against any person. What I write about is process: I have taken the 2003 panel’s four requirements and measured against them what prosecution witnesses said themselves, under oath, in open court. Records. Chain of custody. Independent scrutiny. Informed consent. The exchanges are set out in full so you can judge them yourself.

Case study three — 2024: the remedy, tested in court. This is the one you signed for. When my husband and I asked the High Court to make HSA act on the advertising rules, the court accepted that HSA is under no duty to enforce and no duty to prosecute, and that a citizen with a general concern that the law be observed is, in law, a busybody. Costs of $12,000 were ordered against us. So the standards exist, and there is no one a citizen can require to enforce them.

I am not asking Parliament to reject this Bill. I am asking Parliament to pause it until these questions have real, public answers on the record.

Read all three: healingthedivide.cc/warning

Write to your MP before Tuesday — five minutes, with a letter ready to copy: healingthedivide.cc/writetomp

An MP who receives a letter from a constituent can raise the point in the chamber. Once a question is asked in Parliament it is on the record permanently, whatever the vote. That is worth more than any number of signatures.

Thank you for signing, and for reading this far.
Iris Koh

5 years on, and still standing and still speaking. To support this work: healingthedivide.cc/report