Singapore’s Ministry of Health rejects People’s Power Party’s renewed call to suspend Covid-19 vaccination

SINGAPORE – The Ministry of Health (MOH) has again issued a rebuttal to a renewed call by the People’s Power Party (PPP) to suspend Covid-19 vaccination.

On June 17, the PPP reiterated its statement, first made on May 29 on its Facebook page, and referred to an article published on June 3 in the journal BMJ Public Health, which said it had “raised similar concerns about persistently high excess mortality in 47 Western countries.”

In an email to the media on July 22, the Ministry of Health said it was aware of the article, which also cited a recent publication in the same journal entitled “Excess mortality in Western world countries since the Covid-19 pandemic: Our world in data estimates from January 2020 to December 2022.”

The published article suggested that Covid-19 vaccination could be one of the main factors behind the high excess mortality in Western countries.

The Ministry of Health called this misleading and said the journal BMJ Public Health issued a public statement on June 7 saying the publication did not establish a direct causal link between Covid-19 vaccination and mortality.

The Dutch Princess Maxima Center, which is associated with three of the four authors of the study, also issued a statement on June 11 saying it would further investigate the scientific quality of the study, the Health Ministry said.

Three days later, a statement of reasons for the article was published and the BMJ’s integrity and editorial teams “are currently investigating the issues raised about the quality and message of this article,” the journal said.

BMJ Public Health is an international, open-access, peer-reviewed journal that publishes work on all aspects of public health, from global issues such as the impact of climate change on population health to studies conducted in specific locations.

The Health Ministry said it also noted that the PPP now “adopts a more thoughtful tone and acknowledges the inconclusiveness of the publications it cites” compared to its May 29 Facebook post, which claimed that Covid-19 vaccines caused a high number of serious side effects and, according to the Health Ministry, “attempts to draw associations between high vaccination rates and excess deaths.”

Excess mortality is defined as a higher death rate than would normally be the case.

The Health Ministry refuted these claims on June 3, saying it “categorically rejects these outrageous and false claims” made by these “so-called experts.” It said that like any other drug and vaccine, the Covid-19 vaccine also has side effects.

According to the Ministry of Health, there is overwhelming scientific evidence that vaccination protects elderly and medically vulnerable people from severe illness and death from Covid-19 infection and that this far outweighs any risk of serious side effects.

There is also a relatively high risk that infection with Covid-19 will cause after-effects such as myocarditis – inflammation of the heart tissue – and pericarditis – swelling and irritation of the thin tissue that surrounds the heart.

“As Covid-19 waves will continue to occur, we recommend that older and medically vulnerable people keep their Covid-19 vaccinations up to date,” the Ministry of Health said in a statement.

The last report on Covid-19 numbers was on June 25, when Health Minister Ong Ye Kung posted on his Facebook page that the Covid-19 wave driven by the KP.1 and KP.2 subvariants had subsided.

Evidence of this is the declining number of infected patients admitted to hospitals and intensive care units in late May and early June.

In his post, Mr Ong wrote: “Fortunately, the number of hospital cases reached 370 and then started to decline. The downward trend has continued for four weeks now.”

The number of hospital patients with Covid-19 fell to 136 in the week beginning June 16.

The estimated number of Covid-19 infections has also fallen for four weeks in a row, from 24,800 in the week of May 19-25 to 8,760 from June 16-22. Infections peaked at 25,900 in the week of May 5-11.