Singapore — Ms Iris Koh, the founder of the Healing the Divide group that has been in the news in recent weeks, has been posting video messages over social media after it was reported that she and her husband were under police investigation for allegedly encouraging people to “flood” public hotlines with feedback.
On Monday morning (Nov 29), Ms Koh posted a video on her Facebook account “to apologise for the ‘flooding’ comment” which she had made on Oct 11 after Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong announced differentiated restrictions between vaccinated and unvaccinated people.
“Asking people to flood the call centre for no genuine reason is definitely wrong,” she said.
However, she added that she gave out the call centre numbers to the people in the Telegram group as the ministries could answer the questions people had asked her.
She claimed that time had been “a very stressful” period for them and that they themselves had been “flooded with cries for help, suicidal notes, angry and unhappy citizens trying to find their way to deal with the aftermath of the announcement.”
Ms Koh also said she replaced the word “flooding” with “the more generic ‘call’” in her initial announcement.
She then appealed for the public to “be sympathetic” toward those who cannot and do not want to be vaccinated “for various reasons.”
“Healing the Divide” has been called out by MOH for spreading falsehoods about Covid-19 and Covid vaccines.
The police said in a Nov 25 media statement that the numbers that the couple were allegedly involved in instigating people to ‘flood’ include those that help the public with COVID-19.
Among them are MOH’s Quality Service/Feedback hotline, the Ministry of Social and Family Development’s (MSF) hotline, and the National CARE Hotline.
A police report was lodged on Oct 21 saying that over 2,000 people in a Telegram group were incited to “overwhelm public hotlines through sharing their feedback on the stricter COVID-19 measures for unvaccinated people in public places.”
The message reportedly said that “nationwide ground feedback on the new measures” was being sought by the authorities “and that the public should call in to the MOH hotline, the MSF hotline and the National CARE Hotline, and demand that their feedback gets pushed up to the respective call centre managers.”
Netizens were upset over the actions of Ms Koh, 45, and her husband, Mr Raymond Ng, 48, given that Singapore is still battling a public health crisis.
The Healing the Divide founder said she will be assisting the police in its investigation “by providing data” as well as showing them some of the “distressed messages” she received after the differentiated measures were announced.
“Please forgive me if I did not handle this matter properly,” she said, after which she called upon those sympathetic to the group’s cause of “building a united Singapore” to step forward and join them.
/TISG
https://theindependent.sg/netizens-slam-healing-the-divide-founder-after-reports-of-alleged-instigation-to-flood-public-hotlines-amid-pandemic/