Singapore, July 1: A police report has been filed against a doctor here for allegedly making comments against Islam and Muslims on social media.
Dr Kho Kwang Po had recently co-authored an open letter calling for a halt to Singapore’s COVID-19 vaccination programme for young men.
The police report was filed against the doctor for his posts on Facebook, according to a news report by The Straits Times.
Investigations into the matter are underway.
According to the daily, Dr Kho said he was unaware of the police report and declined to comment when contacted.
Screenshots of several of Dr Kho’s alleged Facebook posts commenting on Muslims and Islam were circulated on several websites recently, it said.
In a post last year, he allegedly wrote that there was much violence associated with Muslims. In a post in 2019, he questioned why the religion needed protection from criticism.
Last Saturday, Dr Kho had posted an open letter on his Facebook page addressed to Professor Benjamin Ong, chairman of Singapore’s expert committee on Covid vaccination.
Initially signed by four other doctors, the letter noted that a 13-year-old boy in the US had died days after he got his second dose of a Covid vaccine.
The letter said the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had just begun investigations into his death from heart failure after vaccination with an mRNA vaccine.
The doctors said Singapore should stop vaccinating young people until the US CDC and organisations elsewhere have produced more robust and convincing data on the case.
Responding to the letter, the Ministry of Health (MOH) said reports about the child’s death in the US did not state heart failure as a cause, as alleged in the open letter, and that the matter was still under investigation by the US authorities.
Associated Professor David Lye, a senior infectious diseases specialist from the National Centre for Infectious Diseases, also said that the doctors behind the open letter were misleading and misinforming the public.
Prof Lye also noted that three of the doctors were involved in an earlier letter published by 12 doctors calling for children to be given traditional Covid vaccines, such as the Sinovac one, instead of mRNA ones from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, which are part of Singapore’s national programme.
They claimed that it was not known what side effects from these vaccines might surface 10 to 20 years down the road. This view was also debunked by Prof Lye and the expert committee, said The Straits Times report. (PTI)
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