Is the doctors’ letter fair opinion? Or a dangerous view that should be kept out of the public square?

(Disclosure: both my parents are medical specialists; my wife has a graduate diploma in family medicine though she no longer practices.)

Over the past week an interesting informational contest has emerged in Singapore over the publication of an open letter by twelve doctors to parents in which they cast doubt on the value of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine—and broadly any vaccine that relies on messenger RNA technology—to children.

Their letter has been meet with ridicule by the establishment, including calls by Calvin Cheng, a former nominated member of parliament and conservative commentator, for their medical licenses to be revoked (as part of his broader critique of the knowledge and expertise of family physicians).

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A video podcast with the Ministry of Funny

Are you considering politics? (Min 50:05)
What led to your political awakening? (14:20)
Why do you write and why The Economist Group? (10:40)

These are some of the many questions I fielded during this fun two-hour conversation with Haresh and Terence from the Ministry Of Funny. You can now watch it on YouTube.

I’m sure you don’t want to spend two hours looking at my oversized jaw, but we’ve just finished doing up the show notes for this episode (see below) for easy time stamps to the different sections.

Any feedback on this format much appreciated. Am hoping to do more stuff with MOF.

It’s also available as an audio podcast, search Ministry of Funny wherever you get yours.

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Should the opposition be speaking out more against racism in Singapore?

This is what K Shanmugam, Singapore’s home affairs and law minister, called for this week in response to some quite awful anti-Indian incidents around town.

Yes, I agree with him. The opposition should. We all should. It is a daily battle.

However, we should also recognise the efforts made by the opposition over the years to distance themselves from racist and xenophobic strands. Here are two examples.

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The elites have run The Straits Times into the ground. What’s next?

Today we heard the news that Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) is spinning off its media unit, including The Straits Times and many other publications, into a non-profit entity. This follows years of consistently poor performance amid digital disruption and other changes to the media industry.

Wiser minds will engage in more thorough post-mortems—has anybody seen Ho Ching’s feed today?—but I wanted to spark a small conversation on the culture of elite governance in Singapore. 

“If not for the Jobs Support Scheme (JSS), the loss would have been a deeper S$39.5 million,” Lee Boon Yang, SPH’s chairman, said in reference to the media business’s first-ever lost of S$11.4m, for the financial year which ended Aug 31 2020. 

(Which includes management salaries. In case you missed it, since the JSS began in February 2020, the Singaporean taxpayer has helped pay even more for the upkeep of numerous millionaire elites.)

All this got me thinking. Why exactly is Lee Boon Yang the chairman of SPH?

Continue reading “The elites have run The Straits Times into the ground. What’s next?”