The Girouard Sting

No doubt this week you will have seen the “sting” executed by Paddy Gower from Newshub.

If you haven't, Newshub journalist Paddy Gower organised an undercover investigation which revealed an American doctor who runs a weight loss clinic with her husband (also American) is handing out medical certificates as exemptions to the COVID vaccine.

The two doctors run The Girouard Centre, based in Kaiapoi, just north of Christchurch. You might want to look at their website, but it's now essentially shut down (being a password protected Wordpress login). Of course, the Wayback Machine allows us to see previous snapshots of the site and go exploring.

It would seem that the Girouards have run weight-loss clinics in the US, and that these are still in operation.

The key points from the investigation are that the doctor - Dr Jonie Girouard - is a GP registered with the New Zealand Medical Council. They are investigating her, but she's also being investigated by the NZ Police. There are number of relevant points here - they're running a business where they're actively encouraging people to remove their masks in an enclosed space. They're both unvaccinated, so shouldn't be operating their business and exposing people to risk. Then there's the potentially fraudulent aspects of charging to provide a certificate they know will be virtually useless, to providing a very dubious "medical examination" in the form of a blood pressure test.

While the string centered on Dr Jonie Girouard, one would probably rightly assume that her husband is on board with her approach. It appears that he has participated in anti-vax messaging here in NZ. While he's not registered with the Medical Council so can't legally practise medicine in NZ, he still gives advice on weight loss at their clinic, and is reportedly unvaccinated also.

They'll likely get shut down, and I hope that they actually suffer some consequences from the irresponsible actions they've taken. (And deporting them back to the US would be a good move too!)