Fake Covid-19 vaccination case: Defence objects to 6 police statements being admitted as evidence

The defence lawyer for a general practitioner at the centre of a conspiracy involving fake Covid-19 vaccines objected to six police statements being admitted in court as evidence.

This is because the statements were recorded under circumstances where there was threat, inducement or promise, said Mr Adrian Wee on the second day of Jipson Quah’s trial on Dec 17.

This prompted the court to move into an ancillary hearing – or a trial within a trial – to determine the admissibility of these six statements before resuming the main trial.

Quah, 36, is fighting 17 charges that he had conspired between 2021 and 2022 to make false representations to the Health Promotion Board (HPB) about the vaccination status of 17 individuals.

He is facing a joint trial with his former clinic assistant Thomas Chua Cheng Soon, 43, and the founder of anti-vaccine group Healing the Divide, Iris Koh Hsiao Pei, 48.

The three had allegedly conspired to falsely inform HPB that patients had been given a Covid-19 vaccination when they had not.

Quah, who has been suspended from practice since March 2022, had purportedly given these patients saline shots and recorded them as having been vaccinated.

Koh and Chua are each contesting seven charges. The main trial and ancillary hearing are being heard before District Judge Paul Quan.

The six documents in dispute are Quah’s third to eighth police statements, recorded between Jan 22 and Jan 29, 2022, by investigation officer (IO) Ng Shiunn Jye from the Central Police Division.

According to Mr Wee, five of these statements were recorded after IO Ng told Quah that unless he gave the names of 15 patients mentioned in his statements to the Ministry of Health (MOH), he would not be released on bail.

At the time, Quah had just been charged in court and was given a further remand of seven days without bail.

Mr Wee said that before Quah recorded his eighth statement, he was taken to see Superintendent Tan Pit Seng, who was head of investigation at the same division.

Supt Tan told Quah that he had displayed “a degree of remorse insufficient to warrant him getting bail”, said Mr Wee.

The lawyer added: “In order to display remorse of a sufficient level to warrant him attaining bail, (Quah) was required to embellish in his subsequent statement the culpability of the co-accused Iris Koh.”

Quah was indeed released on bail after recording his eighth statement, said Mr Wee.

IO Ng took the stand on Dec 17 as Deputy Public Prosecutor Timotheus Koh took him through three of the six statements.

When asked if he had made any threat, inducement or promise to Quah in obtaining the statements, IO Ng replied “no”.

IO Ng said he checked if Quah was well enough and had any issue to raise before the statement recordings.

Quah was also allowed to call his wife using IO Ng’s mobile phone during the statement taking, said the officer.

For Quah’s fifth statement, IO Ng said the GP typed some of the answers himself as the officer’s typing was “too slow” and Quah said he might forget what he wanted to say. IO Ng said: “I was standing behind him while he typed out his answer. After he typed out his answer, I read the answer and then I paragraphed them so it’ll be easier for me to read.”

The ancillary hearing continues on Dec 18.

Earlier in the main trial, another police officer disagreed with the defence’s view that Quah did not give the answers in his first police statement recording on Jan 21, 2022.

During cross-examination, Mr Wee suggested that Quah’s police statements were instead based on a prior statement the GP gave to MOH and noted the “great degree of similarity” between the two statements.

Assistant Superintendent of Police Karl Elliott Lim Peng, who recorded Quah’s first two police statements, told the court on Dec 17 that he had never seen or referred to Quah’s statement to MOH.

The information in the statements came from Quah himself, and the signatures on the statements showed that he acknowledged that the answers were accurate, added ASP Lim.

The court heard on the first day of the trial on Dec 16 that ASP Lim and his colleagues went to MOH’s office between midnight and 6am on Jan 21, 2022, to take Quah and Chua to the Central Police Division for statement taking.

Mr Wee said ASP Lim chose to record Quah’s statement at 6.55am despite the GP’s fatigue that day “because you knew that (Quah) had confessed to the MOH, and you also wanted to record a similar confession before the opportunity slipped through your fingers”.

ASP Lim disagreed, saying: “I did not have sight of the MOH statement.”

Before recording Quah’s statement, ASP Lim said, Quah told him to refer to MOH’s statement as the answers to all his questions would be there, but he told Quah it would be better if he did not read it, to avoid bias.

Chua, who conducted his own cross-examination of ASP Lim as he did not have a lawyer, put it to the officer that due to Quah’s fatigue at the time, the police statements were not accurate or consistent.

The former clinic assistant also suggested that Quah told the police he had given a “mixed shot” of saline and Sinopharm to the patients, instead of saline shots. ASP Lim disagreed with both statements.

On the first day of trial, the court heard that patients paid up to $6,000 for the saline shots.

Quah said he charged patients $70 for the Sinopharm vaccine, and the same price for a saline shot. As for the extra sums that patients gave him, he told police he “interpreted it as a token of gratitude”.

If convicted of making false representations, Quah, Koh and Chua could be jailed for up to 20 years, fined, or both for each charge.

Source: Straits Times © SPH Media Limited. Permission required for reproduction.

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