Singapore — In a Facebook post on Nov 12, Progress Singapore Party (PSP) Non-constituency Member of Parliament (NCMP) Leong Mun Wai made an appeal for the government to end “Vaccination Discrimination” as well as for “Personal Autonomy” to be respected.
Mr Leong already shared in a post last month that while he is not against vaccinations, he is “strongly against ‘segregation’ based on one’s vaccination status,” adding that the “progressive discrimination meted out by the Singapore authorities is getting more and more out of hand, in spite of the groundswell of opposition”.
In his latest post, NCMP called the vaccine “a great weapon” against Covid but wrote that the implementation of vaccination policies should not divide society.
He wrote that the VDS (Vaccination Differentiation Safe management measures) policy “is a glaring act of discrimination against a segment of our population” which “cannot and must not be tolerated because the individual’s freedom of choice should be sacrosanct in a democratic society and is a basic principle of medical ethics.”
Furthermore, Mr Leong seemed to blame the Government for Singapore’s current situation, and underlined again how the VDS has created “division among the people.”
Mr Leong clarified that his arguments are not based on “opposition to all vaccines” but that Singaporeans had not been given sufficient choice as to which vaccine they preferred for themselves and their children.
He also argued against the rationale behind the VDS—to protect the unvaccinated from Covid as well as the vaccinated when those who forego vaccines get infected, writing that these reasons are inapplicable to “the estimated 230,000 unvaccinated persons between ages 13 and 59,” whom he designated the “D-Group” linking a study in The Lancet published earlier this month to prove his point.
“We also already know that the D-Group does not normally get seriously ill even if infected. According to the daily MOH reports, more than 98% of them have mild or no symptoms. Hence, the D-Group is not a threat to the public healthcare system and their low infectivity, even if unvaccinated, provides little justification for the VDS policy to be imposed on them.”
Moreover, he claimed that members of this D-Group asked him if the VDS was implemented for public health reasons or because of the Government’s pursuit of a 100 per cent vaccination rate.
However, the policy that Mr Leong called “the most draconian of all… is the MOM Advisory issued on 23 October which allows the employer to terminate an unvaccinated employee as a last resort because only fully vaccinated employees are allowed to return to the workplace from 1 January 2022.”
He called it “unthinkable and illogical to ruin a person’s livelihood on the grounds of him or her being unvaccinated.”
“It is now clear that VDS is an indirect exercise of state power to coerce people into obedience and deny freedom of choice despite the Government having officially stated from the outset that vaccination should be a matter of personal choice,” added the NCMP, calling for a review of “the various VDS measures on the D-Group and other unvaccinated persons.” /TISG
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