SINGAPORE — The Ministry of Health (MOH) has refuted a statement made by The Online Citizen’s (TOC's) editor Terry Xu, saying his suggestion that there was a cover-up of a Hepatitis C outbreak before the 2015 General Election is false.

The MOH’s rebuttal comes a day after the Ministry of Communications and Information and the Ministry of Law called out TOC articles as well as a Facebook post made by Mr Xu on Oct 4, saying they contained falsehoods about the Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (Pofma).

Under the new laws, which kicked in on Oct 2, ministers can issue restriction orders against online falsehoods. People who have been issued such orders can appeal against the decision by writing to the Government, and the minister who issued the order has two days to respond.

In his Facebook post, Mr Xu had written: “The Singapore General Election is typically just nine days long from the point of nomination day to polling day. 

“So effectively, if someone whistleblows during an election or just prior, to something the nature of the Hep C cover-up prior to the GE2015, the ruling party can throw a takedown or correction order on the story or statement by the whistleblower, only for the story to be proven correct after the election is won without the voters knowing what actually happened.”

He was referring to lapses at the Singapore General Hospital (SGH) in 2015, which had contributed to a spate of Hepatitis C infections in its wards. The outbreak affected 25 patients, eight of whom died, and a post-mortem found that the virus infection was directly responsible for or contributed to seven deaths.

An investigation was conducted into the lapses that same year.

In a Facebook post on Monday, which was later posted on Government fact-checking site Factually, MOH said: “Terry Xu’s/The Online Citizen’s statement that there was a ‘Hep C cover-up prior to the GE2015’ is false.”

MOH added that an Independent Review Committee conducted an objective and critical review of the incident and found no evidence of deliberate delays by SGH or MOH in escalating the Hepatitis C outbreak, “let alone a cover-up”.

“Public healthcare professionals and MOH officers carry out their duties professionally with patients’ best interests in mind. The timeline of key events was disclosed by MOH. Questions on the incident were raised in Parliament, to which the Minister for Health provided full responses,” the ministry said.

The independent committee had concluded that there were lapses at SGH and MOH which led to a delay in reporting the Hepatitis C cases. It found, for example, that MOH did not respond in a timely way because it lacked a division to deal with such an unusual outbreak. 

The committee said there was no evidence that the delay had been deliberate.

Responding to MOH’s Facebook post on Monday, TOC said on its website and Facebook page that MOH was “wrong” to label Mr Xu’s comment as a falsehood and accused MOH of taking Mr Xu’s words out of context.

“TOC asserted that the context of the cover-up is about the disclosure of the occurrence of the outbreak — not on the management of the outbreak itself,” it wrote.

TOC then reiterated its point that a whistleblower within the system could have made public the unnaturally large numbers of infections at SGH before the General Election, and this revelation “made by this hypothetical whistleblower could have been marked as a falsehood under Pofma, and the information would have been proven correct only after the election”.

“Therefore, it is wrong for MOH to state that Terry's comment on a possible cover-up to the nature of the Hep C incident is false,” it added.

TODAY has contacted MOH for comment.