TR EMERITUS

Maria May said. Mr Tan I am not sure if you agree but we look to you for affirmation. The current discrimination against the unvaccinated is divisive and cruel. The failure to convince the rest of Singaporeans must surely be the failure of our authorities inability to educate the public, the authorities flip-flop policies (unmask to mask, pandemic to endemic, social distancing restrictions with changing limits, etc). Perhaps there is a good reason why unvaccinated is waiting for the authorities to finalized their policies. In addition, the china vaccines are not available in sufficient quantity and there is a dateline before severe draconian discrimination against the unvaccinated. TKL reply: My view is that those with good reason to stay unvaccinated should be allowed. This has to be decided by a qualified doctor. The others, who does not have a doctor's certificate, should be required to be vaccinated. If they choose not to do so, they should be discriminated. However, I do not agree with the restriction imposed on the unvaccinated from entering malls and restaurants. In my view, this is counter productive. I would, however, require the unvaccinated (by choice) to pay half of the cost of treatment for covid, if they are hospitalized, but not the full cost. I support the free choice of the vaccines approved by the World Health Organization.   Tan Kin Lian        Read More →

One of the funniest things about Singapore has been the fact that its biggest defenders are more often than not, people from elsewhere. One of the biggest cheerleaders of the Singapore government is the community of Westerners living in Singapore. Whenever I’m out with a group of Westerners and mention something less than perfect about Singapore’s system, they’ll remind me, “At least your government promotes intelligent people unlike the Australian/American/British government.” To be fair to my Western friends who have used this argument, they are actually right. Singapore is obsessed with everything clever. We pay our ministers a “competitive” salary so that they’ll be ministers instead of CEOs. We award generous scholarships so that our brightest minds go to the world’s best universities. We provide generous packages so that the best and brightest come to Singapore. Our school system is famously challenging because we are obsessed with producing the best and brightest and our late Prime Minister, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew infamously tried to create a smarter nation by trying to get the “educated” to breed but discouraging the same for the “uneducated.” Our obsession with being clever isn’t just limited to education and “attracting talent.” We’re also willing to spend on the hardware side. If it involves the latest technologies, we’re more than willing to shell out. By way of an anecdote, when I was going to school in the UK in the 1990s, Singapore looked like “home movie paradise” because we had moved to laser disk while the UK and still using the VHS. Singapore’s government spends plenty of research and development (R&D). If you look at any random government budget, you’ll notice that the one thing that the government is willing to spend on is R&D as this article from the Business Times states: [LINK] Given the government’s dominance of things in Singapore, it goes without saying that the private sector takes its lead from the government. Enterprises in Singapore are given plenty of encouragement to spend money on making things more efficient and the increase in R&D spending us not just government related as the following report from the Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI) explains: [LINK] Whilst all this money being spent on promoting “cleverness” is encouraging in so many aspects, I actually have to question if we are actually becoming clever or are we becoming so clever that we’re actually becoming stupid. What do I mean? It’s like this, we are a society that is obsessed with being clever. If there’s anything worse than being poor in Singapore, it is to be “stupid.” The concept of “Forest Gump” would never be allowed to exist in Singapore. The problem with being obsessed is that we ignore certain realities. The truth is, not everyone can be very clever. However, in a society that is obsessed with being clever, everybody is under pressure to show that they’re clever, even when they’re not. As such, when people need to show that they are clever, they’ll end up making things more complicated than they need to be. I take one of the most basic functions of my day job in the insolvency business – namely the job of delivering letters to banks. In the early stages of any given liquidation, we need to ensure that the company’s bank accounts get frozen to prevent anyone from siphoning off the funds. We have rarely know which bank accounts the liquidated company maintained and so more often than not, we have to write to all the banks. It goes without saying that we also don’t know who the relationship manager for company happens to be and so our letters are often marked to the attention of either the account servicing department or the legal department. The job of hand delivery is fairly easy in most cases. You go to the branch and present the letter and they distribute it to the relevant department through their internal systems. In the seven-years I’ve done this, banks like ICICI, Bank of China, HSBC, Bank of India, Maybank, BNPParisbas and OCBC have been helpful. If the branch can’t accept the letter, they’ll direct you to the mailroom, which will forward it to the relevant department. Unfortunately, the two banks that have become so clever that they’ve actually complicated things, are the two banks that should be the most efficient – namely United Overseas Bank (UOB) and DBS Bank. These are the local banks that have been most obsessed with overseas expansion and competing on the world stage and have hired the best possible talent from their global competitors (My ex-boss from Citibank runs UOB’s consumer banking division and the current CEO of DBS is a former Citi banker, as was his immediate predecessor). Both these banks have forgotten the basic purpose of a mailroom. When delivering a letter to UOB, I was rejected by the mailroom, who sent me up to one of the higher floors of UOB centre, which in itself is complicated as it has a complex system of lifts (different lifts go to different floors). When I reached the floor in question, I found that there was no one there and when I did find someone, their only reaction was “huh – they sent you here.” The experience with DBS was similar. Around two months ago, I merely had to go to the branch and they would accept whatever letter I needed to send. Then they said that they stopped accepting letters at the branch and directed me to the mailroom. There was only one problem. The mailroom would only accept letters that was marked to the attention of a specific person. They would not accept the fact that whilst I didn’t have a specific person, I had a department. So, given that this was the mailroom’s policy, our team contacted the business hotline, who advised us that it was perfectly acceptable. I tried also asked someone from the branch who I needed to attention the letter to, and was duly advised that I could attention it to a department. Mailroom refused to accept this and even went as far as to tell me that I needed to tell them which floor of the Marina Bay Financial Centre the department was located in. It took pointing out that my letter involved an order court for them to accept the letter. How is it such that the organisations that have the means of having the best possible system are unable to do it. Isn’t the basic function of a mailroom to distribute things? So, why do I need to find out where a certain department is in a building that I don’t work in for the people who are supposed to know. Why is it such that the branch, hotline and mailroom don’t seem to be able to be on the same page when it comes to receiving letters. These are organisations that we entrust our life savings to and yet they can’t accept letters? These are organisations runs by “the best and brightest” that money can buy. So, how did they make a simple exercise so complicated? Surely, they could save themselves a lot of money and time thus increasing operational efficiency if they remembered that the best solutions are often the most simple.   Tang Li *Although I’ve been based mainly in Singapore for nearly two decades, I’ve had the privilege of being able meet people who have crossed borders and cultures. I’ve befriended ministers and ambassadors and worked on projects involving a former head of state. Yet, at the same time, I’ve had the privilege of befriending migrant labourers and former convicts. All of them have a story to tell. All of them add to the fabric of life. I hope to express the stories that inspire us to create life as it should be.      Read More →

Drop Vaccination Discrimination, Please Respect Personal Autonomy! I have mentioned on 13 Oct that while I am not anti-vaccine, I am vehemently against vaccination discrimination. The vaccine is a great weapon against the Covid-19 virus but the implementation of vaccination policies should not divide our society. VDS is now a new acronym used as more measures are announced by the Government. VDS stands for “Vaccination Differentiation Safe management measures.” The VDS policy is a glaring act of discrimination against a segment of our population. This cannot and must not be tolerated because the individual’s freedom of choice should be sacrosanct in a democratic society and is a basic principle of medical ethics. We should never compromise on this free will other than in circumstances when the survival and security of our nation is at stake. The current situation was created by the Government and the discrimination against the unvaccinated has created division among the people. Many are not opposed to all vaccines but concerned about some of the newer vaccine technologies. Up until 18 June when the first Sinovac jab was given, there was only the choice of the mRNA vaccines and many were uncomfortable being injected with them. Sinovac was not included in the National Vaccination Programme until 23 October. The availability of Sinovac was limited and Sinopharm only arrived on 30 August but supplies soon also ran out. Much of the vaccine hesitancy among the elderly can be attributed to their preference for the inactivated virus vaccines. Similarly, there will likely be more support for vaccines if parents were allowed to choose the vaccines for their children. The Government gave two reasons to justify the VDS policy. First, it wants to “protect” the unvaccinated from Covid-19 infection especially the elderly who are more vulnerable and risk getting severely ill when infected, potentially burdening the hospitals further. Second, they want to protect the vaccinated from the unvaccinated. However, these two reasons are not applicable for the estimated 230,000 unvaccinated persons between ages 13 and 59, which we shall call the “D-Group”. A research paper just published in The Lancet on 1 November 2021 by a group of doctors from our National Centre of Infectious Diseases confirmed that the D-Group is not more infectious than the vaccinated in onward transmission of the Delta-variant. The rate of household transmission from vaccinated index cases was the same as that for unvaccinated. We also already know that the D-Group does not normally get seriously ill even if infected. According to the daily MOH reports, more than 98% of them have mild or no symptoms. Hence the D-Group is not a threat to the public healthcare system and their low infectivity, even if unvaccinated, provides little justification for the VDS policy to be imposed on them. The Government could come up with ways to oblige the D-Group to take additional precautions in the public. This group are well-informed people who have made a conscious decision with their valid reasons to stay unvaxed and they would have their own ways of lowering infection risk too. The Government recognizes that there are individuals who have cancer or other reasons which make vaccination a concern and are prepared to grant the VDS exemption to the medically ineligible for vax but not the D-Group who have their own concerns? Arising from this, the D-Group have asked me whether the VDS measures are truly because of medical considerations and stress on healthcare resources alone or simply to achieve a 100% vaccination rate as pushed by the Government. The first VDS measures were implemented in August. That was when the unvaccinated were not allowed to dine in restaurants but could dine in two’s in hawker centres and coffee shops and go to the malls. In October, the VDS progressed to disallow the unvaccinated from dining outside and visiting shopping malls. Next, it was announced that from 8 December, the unvaccinated will have to pay for their own Covid-19 treatment should they fall ill with COVID-19. The most draconian of all to me, however, is the MOM Advisory issued on 23 October which allows the employer to terminate an unvaccinated employee as a last resort because only fully vaccinated employees are allowed to return to the workplace from 1 January 2022. This is a drastic turnaround from the set of guidelines issued jointly by MOM, NTUC and SNEF (together the ‘Tripartite Partners’) on 2 July which included among other things a clear statement that employers are not allowed to terminate, or threaten to terminate, the service of an employee if he or she declines to be vaccinated. And this was at a time when the vaccine efficacy was believed to be higher than it currently is. It is unthinkable and illogical to ruin a person’s livelihood on the grounds of him or her being unvaccinated. How can such a punishment be proportionate to the ‘offence’ if any? It is now clear that VDS is an indirect exercise of state power to coerce people into obedience and deny freedom of choice despite the Government having officially stated from the outset that vaccination should be a matter of personal choice. Now I truly appreciate what Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the French philosopher, had meant when he said, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains (by the government and society).” As 2021 draws to a close, the VDS policy together with the continuing double-digit death count from Covid-19 infections have cast a pall over the approaching festive period. By comparison, we were resolute and undivided as a people at the end of 2020 when infections came under control with zero deaths; our country was being touted as the gold standard in Covid-19 management early in the pandemic. Ironically, the arrival of the vaccine in 2021 may have polarized our society more than it improved our nation’s health. The fault lies not in the vaccine but the policies regarding its use. Are the policies adopted in line with our national pledge of building a democratic society based on justice and equality? Is it not our duty to leave no Singaporean behind in all our policies? Hence while I would support the widespread rollout of vaccines for all who are eligible and want to be vaccinated especially the vulnerable, I would call for an immediate review of the various VDS measures on the D-Group and other unvaccinated persons. Singaporeans deserve better.   Leong Mun Wai      Read More →