July 23, 2024
SINGAPORE – The Ministry of Health (MOH) has once again issued a rebuttal against a repeat 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 – citing an article published in the BMJ Public Health journal on June 3, which it said had “shown similar concern about persistently high excess deaths in 47 Western countries”.
In an e-mail to the media on July 22, MOH said it was aware of the post that also cited a recent publication, titled “Excess mortality across countries in the Western World since the Covid-19 pandemic: Our World in Data estimates of January 2020 to December 2022”, in the same journal.
That published article suggested that the Covid-19 vaccination might be one of the main factors behind high excess mortality in Western countries.
Calling this misleading, MOH said the BMJ Public Health journal had issued a public statement on June 7 that the publication did not establish any direct causal link between Covid-19 vaccination and mortality.
MOH said the Princess Maxima Centre in the Netherlands, which is affiliated with three of the four authors of the paper, also issued a statement on June 11 to state that it would further investigate the scientific quality of the study.
An expression of concern was subsequently placed on the paper three days later and the BMJ integrity and editorial teams “are currently investigating issues raised regarding the quality and messaging of this paper”, the journal said.
BMJ Public Health is an international, open access and peer-reviewed journal, publishing work related to all aspects of public health, from global issues such as the impact of climate change on population health to studies conducted in specific locations.
MOH said it also noted that the PPP is now adopting “a more reflective tone and recognised the inconclusive nature of the publications it cites”, compared with its Facebook post on May 29, which claimed that Covid-19 vaccines caused high incidence of severe side effects and, according to MOH, “attempted to draw associations between high vaccination rates and excess deaths”.
Excess deaths refer to higher rates of death than would normally be the case.
MOH refuted those claims on June 3, saying that it “categorically rejects these egregious and false claims” by “these so-called experts”. It said that like with any other medication and vaccine, there are side effects to Covid-19 vaccination.
MOH said scientific evidence overwhelmingly shows that vaccination protects the elderly and medically vulnerable from severe disease and death from Covid-19 infection, and this far outweighs any risk of severe side effects.
There is also a fairly high risk of Covid-19 infection causing after effects such as myocarditis – inflammation of the heart tissue – and pericarditis, which is the swelling and irritation of the thin tissue surrounding the heart.
“As Covid-19 waves will continue to occur, we recommend that the elderly and medically vulnerable stay updated with their Covid-19 vaccination,” the MOH statement said.
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 sub-variants KP.1 and KP.2, has waned.
The falling number of infected patients admitted to hospitals and intensive care units in late May and early June is evidence of that.
In his post, Mr Ong wrote: “Fortunately, the number of hospitalised cases reached 370, and then started to taper off. The downward trend has persisted for four weeks now.”
The number of Covid-19 patients in hospital fell to 136 in the week starting June 16.
The estimated number of Covid-19 infections has also fallen for four straight weeks, from 24,800 in the week of May 19 to 25, to 8,760 from June 16 to 22. Infections peaked at 25,900 in the week of May 5 to 11.