Dear Friends,

The Multi-Ministry Task Force has implemented more discriminatory Covid-19 measures against unvaccinated Singaporeans.

The purpose of this, say our elite leaders, is to reduce transmission and prevent the unvaccinated from getting severely ill.

Go buy things at a shopping mall? No.

Eat at hawker centres? Tak boleh.

But join the long queues to buy Toto? Sure, go ahead. Huat ah!

The measures don’t seem to make sense – essential services cannot, but non-essential services that are just as much of a threat are okay?

What makes even less sense – why are thousands of foreign workers who do not have verified vaccination status allowed to enter Singapore?

Westlite Dormitory, which houses 2800 foreign workers, recently made headlines for the shameful conditions in which the workers were made to live in.

Following their outburst, the Manpower Ministry revealed that 45 percent of the workers were essentially not proven to have been vaccinated when they arrived in Singapore.

Their status was either pending verification, or they had yet to show that they had received an approved vaccine.

I quote the public statement by Mr Tung Yui Fai, leader of the MOM’s Assurance, Care and Engagement Group:

“Majority have not been vaccinated. We are working with the employer to encourage them to be vaccinated.”

Yet, these workers were allowed to live and work alongside other vaccinated workers, at the dormitory and in public work spaces open to both Singaporean and foreign workers.

You would think that after the Covid-19 outbreak in dormitories last year, the government would take extra care to prevent another similar outbreak from occurring?

The government’s haste to re-open the floodgates to cheap foreign labour conveniently coincided with the spike of cases in Singapore to thousands per day.

Let’s just call it a coincidence.

But remember this – just a handful of infected individuals who had interactions with the public at Jurong Fishery Port was enough to cause one of Singapore’s biggest Covid-19 clusters.

Shouldn’t stricter testing and verification be done before these thousands of foreign workers even set foot in Singapore, so that we can protect Singaporeans from unnecessarily contracting the virus?

Presently, unvaccinated Singaporeans are being stripped of more and more of their freedoms for their “protection”.

If the government is serious about protecting them, it should at the same time help them make informed decisions.

Such as, publishing locations where there are big infection clusters and not just places like eldercare centres and education centres.

By withholding this data, the government is denying these Singaporeans the chance to at least protect themselves by knowing which places they should avoid.

Already, hundreds in Singapore have died from Covid-19.

Thousands, vaccinated or not, have contracted the virus – and we do not know as yet what is the long-term impact of such an infection.

The SDA believes that the government, with its constant flip-flopping and tikam-tikam measures, is recklessly and unnecessarily endangering the health of Singaporeans.

It is time that the Ivory Tower scholars stop burying their head in the sand and go down to the ground to understand the plight of us Common Singaporeans.

Desmond Lim
Chairman
Singapore Democratic Alliance