Contested police statements by doctor in fake COVID-19 jab case can be used by prosecution, court rules

The six statements by Dr Jipson Quah implicate his co-accused Iris Koh Hsiao Pei and identify patients who allegedly used saline instead of COVID-19 vaccines.

(From left) Dr Jipson Quah, Iris Koh Hsiao Pei and Thomas Chua Cheng Soon at the State Courts on Jul 28, 2025.
(Photos: CNA/Syamil Sapari)

Lydia Lam

28 Jul 2025 

SINGAPORE: A court ruled on Monday (Jul 28) that contested police statements by a doctor in a case of fake COVID-19 vaccines are admissible and can be used by the prosecution.

The six statements, made in January 2022 by Dr Jipson Quah, implicate his co-accused Iris Koh Hsiao Pei and identify patients who allegedly used saline instead of COVID-19 vaccines.

Dr Quah, 37, is on trial along with his clinic assistant, Thomas Chua Cheng Soon, 43, and Koh, 49, who founded Healing the Divide, a group that is known to be against COVID-19 vaccination.

Quah is contesting 17 charges of dishonestly making false representations to the Health Promotion Board that his patients had received the COVID-19 vaccines, when they had not.

He is accused of conspiring with his patients, Koh and Chua, in various permutations.

However, soon after the trial began, Dr Quah's lawyer Adrian Wee objected to the six contested police statements being used.

In the six contested statements, Dr Quah identified 15 to 17 patients who had taken saline shots instead of COVID-19 vaccines, in order to be reflected as vaccinated in the National Immunisation Registry.

He also claimed that Koh was the "complete mastermind" and that most of the patients were directed to him by Koh.

Dr Quah alleged that the statements were given under two inducements while he was remanded for investigations.

First, that he could be granted bail if he helped the police identify the names of patients who received fake vaccinations.

Second, that he could be given bail if he helped the police to implicate his co-accused Koh in his statements.

This issue was looked at in an ancillary hearing – a separate hearing to decide on this specific issue – over several days.

On Monday, District Judge Paul Quan agreed with the prosecution that the statements were admissible and that no threat, inducement or promise was made by the police officers to Dr Quah.

Judge Quan said the statements were given voluntarily, and that Dr Quah had continued to implicate Koh even after being bailed out, "indeed doubling down".

The main trial will resume in the afternoon, with one of the investigation officers recalled to the stand.

Dr Quah is represented by Mr Adrian Wee, while Mr Wee Pan Lee defends Koh. Chua is currently unrepresented but said he is in talks to get a lawyer on board.

Source: CNA/ll(mi)

Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress

[From Sunday Times Jan 10, 2010]

Ex-Libris

Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives Michael Specter Penguin Press (2009)

A science and public-health writer for the New Yorker, Michael Specter tackles the disturbing trend of the 'denial of scientific advancement' among some Americans: perceiving science as harmful and turning to natural remedies as alternatives.

Excerpt

There's a lot to be said for buying locally grown produce: it can help sustain community farmers and focus attention on the quality of the environment. It tastes better, too.
But is organic food healthier for you than food that contains genetically engineered ingredients or that has been harvested by robot-guided combines instead of human hands? Is it more likely to sustain the planet or the majority of its inhabitants? And are organic fertilisers and pesticides clearly a more virtuous and earth-friendly choice for the consumer than those made of synthetic chemicals?
There are no short answers to those questions (at least none that are true). But there has certainly never been a study that would suggest the answer to any of them is a simple yes. There is no evidence, for example, that a single person has died or become seriously ill as a result of the accumulated residue of pesticides in their food.
The same cannot be said of the toxins contained in 'natural' food - as any number of salmonella outbreaks or raw milk poisonings in the United States continually demonstrate. In 2009, after salmonella and listeria contamination sent dozens of people to hospitals in six states, the Food and Drug Administration even warned Americans to avoid raw alfalfa sprouts - perhaps the signature food of a healthy, organic lifestyle.

Extracted by Chong Thong Yang from the National Library Board.
The book is available at NLB's public libraries. Call No.: English 306.45 SPE
------

Organic food just means that there are no inorganic (and thus artificial) fertilisers and pesticdes used to grow the food. Without pesticides to protect the fruit, pests may invade the fruit, so that organic fruit juice may just contain the ground up remains of an insect or other pests. But guess what? Those things are organic! So no false advertising there when they tell you the juice is 100% organic. Me, I'd prefer my juice to be 100% fruit.

'Anti-vax' movement fuels rise in measles, vaccine-preventable diseases in South-east Asia

A girl receives anti-measles vaccination drops at a health centre in
Tondo, Manila, on Sept 3, 2014. REUTERS

29 March, 2019

HONG KONG — Vaccination rates for measles have dipped across South-east Asia, falling below the 95 per cent mark which experts say is needed to fully protect a community from the infectious disease.


At the same time, cases of measles have spiked in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines in recent years — part of a worldwide 50 per cent increase seen last year, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).

“We don’t mail Elvis a Social Security check, no matter how many people think he is alive.”

[A Commentary on populism, conspiracy irrationalism, and anti-intellectualism. Sure it is mostly in the US, but it is not alien elsewhere in the world.


At about 2:46 into the video: "...we aspired to intelligence, we didn't belittle it, it didn't make us feel inferior... we didn't scare so easy..."

Fear makes us stupid. Fear makes us willing to believe comfortable lies, lies that tell you it is not your fault, it is the fault of the world, and the evil in the world trying to take from you what is rightfully yours.

Our parents or grandparents did not believe that. And some of them lived through times when there was evil trying to take their lives, their families, their happiness. 

Only in the comfort of your armchair can you imagine the conspiracy arrayed against your happiness, your petty interests.]

Vitamins, Supplements and Alternative Medicine.

[Two articles on Vitamins and Supplements. The point of the first story is not new: Vitamins and supplements do not work: 

The dietary supplement industry raked in over $32 billion in 2012, most of which profited from junk science, or at best, unproven claims.

That they are ineffective has been known for sometime. But there is a creeping realisation that they can actually be harmful.
 
The second notes that 1/3 of children are on alternative medicine. That may not work. And may instead be harmful.

It’s bad enough if you’re just wasting money; it’s much worse if you’re putting their health in danger.

Should you be giving your child unproven and possibly dangerous supplements or alternative medicines?]

The GMO debate: 5 things to stop arguing

By Tamar Haspel

Columnist, Food

October 27, 2014
[Note date]

Break out the party hats! Unearthed is one year old — and it has been one interesting, gratifying year. To celebrate, I’m revisiting the issue that kicked off this column a year ago: genetically modified organisms (GMOs). You might not think much of my idea of celebration, but I’m guessing you’d agree that the public debate about GMOs isn’t playing out in a constructive way. Both sides have dug trenches, and they’re lobbing grenades over the wall while nothing much changes. It’s the World War I of food issues, and something’s gotta give.

I’m going to suggest five somethings. Each is an argument, from one side or the other, that I think should be retired. If we all agreed to stop lobbing these particular grenades, we could move on to more substantive issues and perhaps generate a little goodwill in the bargain.

Avoiding GMOs isn’t just anti-science. It’s immoral.

It’s not that the legitimate scientific community doesn’t understand the seriousness of the problem or the distortions of the naysayers. But too many keep what they know to themselves or, when they engage, observe the Marquis of Queensbury rules in what is essentially a street brawl. One can understand their reticence, facing an aggressive, often self-interested anti-GMO lobby that is indifferent to the facts and quick with ad hominem attacks.

If you’re an academic, you can tell yourself that, sooner or later, the science will prevail. If you’re from the world of commerce, you justify your silence (or complicity) by saying that you aren’t in business to argue with customers. If you’re a regulatory bureaucrat, you worry that you will be drawn and quartered for any mistake, whereas no one is ever held accountable for the miracle that never makes it to the marketplace.

By Mitch Daniels

December 27, 2017

The man who studies the spread of ignorance

How do people or companies with vested interests spread ignorance and obfuscate knowledge? Georgina Kenyon finds there is a term which defines this phenomenon.

By Georgina Kenyon 

6 January 2016


In 1979, a secret memo from the tobacco industry was revealed to the public. Called the Smoking and Health Proposal, and written a decade earlier by the Brown & Williamson tobacco company, it revealed many of the tactics employed by big tobacco to counter “anti-cigarette forces”.

In one of the paper’s most revealing sections, it looks at how to market cigarettes to the mass public: “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”

This revelation piqued the interest of Robert Proctor, a science historian from Stanford University, who started delving into the practices of tobacco firms and how they had spread confusion about whether smoking caused cancer.

Proctor had found that the cigarette industry did not want consumers to know the harms of its product, and it spent billions obscuring the facts of the health effects of smoking. This search led him to create a word for the study of deliberate propagation of ignorance: agnotology.

Organic Food, GM Food, and their potential to feed the World

[Three articles. First a bold claim that Organic Farming can feed 10 billion people. Spoiler: Everyone will have to be vegan or vegetarian. Presumably land used for rearing beef and other meat as well as land used to grow animal feed will be converted to farms for human food. 

Second a list of myths about organic farming.

And third, an update on the dangers of GM Food. Spoiler: 50 years of studies found no dangers.]

Bacillus thuringiensis - Organic farming tool, or GMO food toxin?

Two articles.

The first is a pro-Organic food article from GMWatch which explains why it is ok to use Bacillus thuringiensis or Bt in Organic farming, but it becomes an abomination in GM foods.

The second is a rebuttal to the first, and explains that GM Watch (and the pro-organic/Anti-GM/Anti-science lobby) has no case.]


Bt in organic farming and GM crops - the difference


One of the favourite arguments of the pro-GM lobby in support of Bt-toxin GM crops is that the Bt toxin has been safely used for decades by organic farmers.

Many thanks to Susan Pusztai for the following information which precisely delineates the very considerable differences between the use of Bt in organic farming and the use of the Bt toxin as a transgene in GM crops.

This should be read in conjunction with Arpad Pusztai's recent comments, posted to the ngin list, on the gut lesions which have been found in several animal feeding studies on GM crops.
---

Mosquito v mosquito in fight against Zika virus

Nina Fedoroff and John Block

April 8 2016

Genetically modified mosquitoes are in the news for good reason: They may be our best hope for controlling the mosquito-borne Zika virus.

The United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued a preliminary finding of no significant environmental impact and is seeking public comment on a plan to test them in a field trial in the Florida Keys.

So you might think this will resolve the Zika crisis, which has caught the world's attention because of an unexpected spike in microcephaly in babies born to women infected during pregnancy and in the incidence of the paralytic Guillain-Barre syndrome in Zika-infected adults.

You would be wrong. People are apprehensive about the release of these mosquitoes simply because they are genetically modified.

And the company that produces them must traverse a time-consuming federal regulatory process before they can be released in the United States.

This is unfortunate, because biological insect control can eradicate pests over large areas. This is what these genetically modified mosquitoes are intended to do to Zika-carrying mosquitoes.

US environmental groups sue to overturn approval of Singapore-created GMO salmon approval

31 Mar 2016

CHICAGO (REUTERS) - US health regulators are facing a lawsuit from a coalition of environmental organisations seeking to overturn the government's landmark approval of a type of genetically engineered salmon to be farmed for human consumption.

The Centre for Food Safety, Food and Water Watch, Friends of the Earth and other groups allege in the lawsuit, filed on Wednesday (March 30), that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) failed to consider all of the environmental risks of the fish, made by Massachusetts-based AquaBounty Technologies.

Government officials also cleared the product without having the proper authority to regulate genetically engineered animals produced for food, according to the complaint.

The FDA approved the salmon in November after a 20-year review in the first such approval for an animal whose DNA has been scientifically modified. An agency policy analyst said at the time that officials had wanted "to get everything right" and offer many opportunities for public comment because the approval was the first of its kind.