Singapore government’s White Paper should be made public

On Monday, Mr Singh noted that the White Paper was not an original document.

He said it tried to synthesise and make sense of the breadth of perspectives gathered, weave them together with the known facts and facts, and offer as balanced and objective an account of the government's COVID 19 response.

While the White Paper acknowledged some shortcomings in the government's response, Singaporeans do not know what was excluded from the original reports and reviews leading to the final report by the Prime Minister's Office, said Mr Singh.

He told the House that Mr. Peter Ho had a more comprehensive after-action review report to the government.

Can the report be made public to Parliament, so that MPs and Singaporeans can better understand the breadth of perspectives gathered, the known facts and facts, and draw their own conclusions? He suggested that any confidential information that could harm national security be redacted from the report.

The publication of the original report would be consistent with the spirit of the motion, which aims to affirm the government's effort to learn from the experiences of the last three years, Mr Singh said.

Mr Perera agreed with Mr Singh's call to publish the original report for better transparency and a more informed public debate on what should be the lessons learnt. He told Parliament that the COVID 19 White Paper appeared to be a public communication document and stood in stark contrast to a paper published in 2010 by academics on Singapore's response to the H1 N 1 virus.

It was no doubt that was an academic paper rather than a government white paper, but that paper seems at the very least more detailed and, if I may, more clinical in how it marshals facts and uses them to build conclusions, Mr Perera said.

That paper was authored by independent academics who drew on interviews with MOH Ministry of Health and other officials, but did not represent the views of MOH. It has a fuller methodological note.