Parliament votes Tuesday — five minutes could put a question on the record
Dear Supporters,
You signed an open letter, written on 11 January 2022, asking employers to treat unvaccinated staff with compassion. You were there at the time, and you remember what it was like to raise a concern in that period.
I am writing because a Bill before Parliament on Tuesday turns on the thing that was missing then: whether an institution has to write down what it decides, and whether anyone can require it to answer.
On Tuesday 8 September, 3 Days from now, 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 for research on human beings, into the office of HSA’s Chief Executive. In 66 pages, the word “appeal” does not appear once.
I have written it up as three case studies.
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”. That fourth one is the reason I am writing to this list in particular.
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.
Case study three — 2024: the remedy, tested in court. 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.
The 2003 panel warned that where people fear punishment, problems go unreported until they are past solving. It wrote that about laboratory staff. I would ask Parliament whether the principle stops there — and what, in sixty-six pages, protects the technician who spots a breach, the doctor who questions an approval, the ordinary citizen who raises a concern, or the officer inside an institution who is told to stop and not told why.
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