Healing The Divide Founder Responded Harshly to MOH’s Statement That Specifically Spoke About Her

Last Sunday (7 Nov), the Ministry of Health (MOH) noted that a YouTube channel headed by a Ms Iris Koh had all its content removed by the platform.

According to the ministry, Ms Koh founded Healing the Divide, a group which “adopts an anti-vaccination stance and claims to warn people about the dangers of vaccination.”

It said the group has a history of posting and sharing content that perpetuates falsehoods and misleading information about COVID-19 and vaccines, and welcomed YouTube’s removal.

It turns out that Ms Koh had responded to MOH’s statement on the same day, and she’s not exactly pleased.

Healing The Divide Founder Responded Harshly to MOH’s Statement That Specifically Spoke About Her

In a statement on the Healing the Divide website, Ms Koh claimed that her community is not made up of anti-vaxxers but “intelligent vaxxers”.

“I mean who wants to be highlighted in the media every few weeks for being an Anti-Vaxxer? Let’s be clear. We are not here to oppose the government etc. We only want to protect ourselves, our children and our loved ones. Is this wrong?” she wrote.

She said that her group has many people who are vaccinated, and claims they joined because they “either suffered from injuries after taking the vaccines, or have loved ones who died after taking the vaccine.”

It’s unclear if it’s the supposed effects of the vaccines that the group is wary of or the vaccination-differentiated measures for employees, as she said: “…others are in our group because they are worried that they may also be fired if they do not take the booster shots, or their children cannot graduate if they are not vaccinated.”

She said that the people in her videos were raising their concerns about the potential job losses which could arise if they don’t get jabbed.

She claims that “many” in her group have already lost their jobs, which goes against the Nuremberg Code.

The Nuremberg Code is a set of ethical research principles that is developed after several inhumane experimentations on humans during WW2, and it has often been linked to the current pandemic.

She also addressed several questions to MOH, which, if answered, would convince her community to get the vaccine. In one of her questions, Ms Koh urged the ministry to point to the specific part of her recorded event where she spread misinformation.

Toward the end of her post, Ms Koh said her community “reserves the rights to take legal action for the potential defamatory remarks made in the MOH press release”.

VDS Exception for Those Who are Medically Ineligible For Vaccines under NVP

While it is true that employers will be able to terminate unvaccinated employees as a last resort if they can’t work from home or be redeployed to another role, there are exceptions for those who are medically ineligible for COVID-19 vaccines under our national vaccination programme.

In such a case, employers will have the following options:

  1. Allow the employees to work from home if they are able to do so; their absence from the workplace should not affect the assessment of their performance
  2. Redeploy the employees to suitable jobs which can be done from home if such jobs are available, with remuneration commensurate with the responsibilities of the alternative jobs

If these options are not possible, employers can exempt the employees from the workforce vaccination measures if they need to work on-site.

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Featured Image: Facebook (Iris Koh)