SINGAPORE: Anti-vaccine activist Iris Koh, who is currently on trial together with a doctor and his former assistant for allegedly conspiring to lie to the Ministry of Health (MOH) concerning several individuals’ Covid vaccine shots in 2021, recently made changes to her social media posts after a direction from a judge.
On Tuesday (Mar 4), Deputy Public Prosecutor Kelvin Chong drew attention to Koh’s X and Facebook posts, flagging them as sub judice, a form of contempt of court that may influence court proceedings, The Straits Times (ST) reported.
Koh, general practitioner Jipson Quah, and his former clinic assistant Thomas Chua Cheng Soon are said to have conspired to certify that a number of individuals had received Sinopharm vaccinations when, in actuality, they had not. Quah was suspended by the Singapore Medical Council (SMC) for 18 months in 2022.
On Feb 26, Koh put up a post wherein she said Quah had secretly met with the head of the investigation at Central Police Division, Superintendent Tan Pit Seng. She wrote that the doctor alleged he was asked to “embellish his statements” against her to get bail.
The Deputy Public Prosecutor said this could amount to contempt of court because the trial is still going on and asked the court to direct Koh to desist from posting this type of comment. In another post, she alleged that the trial would show “how high-ranking government officials play a part” in the prosecution of the trio in relation to how issues related to COVID-19 vaccinations are managed in Singapore, ST added.
District Judge Quan told Koh’s lawyer, Wee Pan Lee, to see the posts DPP Chong had referred to and to advise Koh on the matter while the court adjourned for lunch. When the proceedings resumed, the lawyer told the court he and his client had discussed the posts and that Koh had “taken some steps”.
The judge later told Koh, “My advice to you, if I were to give any suggestion, is to try and stay clear from reporting anything unless you are very confident that what you are reporting is as accurate as possible.”
Quah has links to Healing the Divide, the anti-vaccination group that Koh founded shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic began. He said to have injected people with saline solution instead of the COVID-19 vaccine and also reportedly uploaded false vaccination statuses to the National Immunisation Registry of the MOH.
MOH had previously warned that Healing the Divide “adopts an anti-vaccination stance and claims to warn people about the dangers of vaccination.” The ministry added that the “Healing the Divide” YouTube channel “has a history of posting and sharing content that perpetuates falsehoods and misleading information about COVID-19 and vaccines.” /TISG
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