Letter to the Editor

Upon reading the ST news report “Couple linked to anti-vaccine group investigated for instigating others to flood public hotlines”, I was taken back by the manner at which anti-vaxxers used their phones to disrupt the national COVID-19 emergency hotline.

No stunt can be arranged within a patchwork of strangers across ethnic, socioeconomic lines, each of them hardly knowing anyone else’s faces, over a messaging app with 7 days of planning. As fuzzy as the lines may have seemed around the very criminality of jamming the hotlines, it is hard to believe that the members in this Telegram group would ever consider that voicing their dissent this way outweighs the risk of getting sanctioned by the police. One has to wonder what encouraged them otherwise.

But whatever you believe, this is not an opportunity to alienate or shun unvaccinated people. With so much divisiveness happening around us, it’s important to recognise that the more they feel alienated or the more their concerns about vaccines go dismissed, the more we push them to seek refuge away in groups with similar vaccine beliefs. 

Vaccine hesitancy is a nuanced topic that needs nuanced understanding, not partisan fervour. Divisive behaviour would go against a line repeatedly echoed by our public officials when the pandemic first broke out in March last year. What was that line again? That we all are in this together.