Sue-ing the government

After chatting with Graeme Hill on Magic Talk recently about Sue Grey, co-leader of the conspiracy minded Outdoors Party, and her threat to sue the government, I found out that Sue was planning to give a talk on the steps of parliament the next day. So, during my lunch break, I wandered up to the Beehive to see more about why Sue thinks the government's rollout of the COVID vaccine needs to be stopped.

Thankfully when I arrived the crowd was not very big, maybe 50 strong. It's possible that there weren't many people available to attend because of other protests outside of MIQ facilities in both Christchurch and Hamilton. I noted that there appeared to be more school children eating lunch in the gardens of parliament than protesters.

I had been wondering about who exactly Sue's clients were. She didn't mention it in her open letter to Jacinda Ardern informing her of the plan to take legal action, or the accompanying video. But thankfully one of her clients, Mark Thompson, was there to introduce Sue. Mark told the crowd that the COVID vaccine is not actually a vaccine, but rather a medical device that's being injected into people - presumably this is an allusion to the conspiracy theory that the vaccine is a front for Bill Gates' plan to secretly injecting a microchip into each of us.

Sue's main argument against the vaccine is a little more nuanced than Mark's, and is that Section 23 of the Medicines Act, which is the section apparently being used at the moment for the Pfizer vaccine approval and rollout, states:

“the Minister may... give his provisional consent to the... use of a new medicine where he is of the opinion that it is desirable that the medicine be... used on a restricted basis for the treatment of a limited number of patients.”

Sue plans to argue in court that, because New Zealand is planning to purchase enough vaccines to vaccinate everyone in NZ, this is not a “limited number of patients”. It seems that her assumption here is that the government intends to administer all 10 million doses of the vaccine under this provisional consent - and I'm not sure this is a safe assumption for her to make.

Either way, it sounds like it's going to be a while before Sue gets to sit in front of a judge. She complained that they're all on holiday, and that it might be a while before she even gets given a court date, which she expects to be in September. I'll be watching this one with interest, as I can't help but shake the feeling that this is nothing more than posturing designed to attract conspiracy theorists to The Outdoors Party, especially now that so many of them are looking for a home in the wake of the collapse of Billy TK's Public Party and his political ambitions.