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Cafe Locked Out

AusDoc [1/2] 16 December 2024

A GP registrar suspended after shouting at an AMA conference that COVID-19 vaccines were killing patients is free to return to medical practice following a self-represented court challenge.

Dr William Bay was suspended under emergency powers just weeks after he interrupted the 2022 AMA National Conference in Sydney during a presentation by then-Chief Medical Officer Professor Paul Kelly.

He called on attendees to “join with the people of Australia and stop forcing these vaccines on people who are getting killed by them” and accused Professor Kelly of “gaslighting” doctors.

The Medical Board of Australia suspended Dr Bay in August 2022 on the basis that he posed a serious risk to patients because his comments could undermine public health efforts.

The suspension followed five complaints about Dr Bay, including one from the AHPRA state manager for Queensland in relation to Dr Bay leading a protest against outside AHPRA’s empty office on a Saturday.

The one complaint about Dr Bay’s AMA conference tirade came from Associate Professor Julian Rait, then the AMA Chair and now the AMA vice-president.

Dr Bay applied to the Supreme Court of Queensland for a review of the board’s decisions to suspend him under emergency powers and to refer him to a tribunal.

After a two-year wait for a hearing, on Friday Justice Thomas Bradley threw out both the emergency suspension and the tribunal referral, after the board conceded it had denied Dr Bay procedural fairness. On the hearing’s final day, the board admitted that Dr Bay had not been shown the actual complaint about his conduct at the AMA conference or given a chance to respond to it.

Medical board chair Dr Anne Tonkin brought the complaint directly to the meeting on whether to suspend Dr Bay under emergency powers, the court heard. The board also admitted that the decision was affected by a “reasonable apprehension of bias” because Dr Tonkin, who chaired the emergency suspension hearing, was on stage at the AMA conference during Dr Bay’s tirade.

She had also talked with Professor Rait about making a complaint. In another legal error, Justice Bradley said that the board had wrongly accepted the complaints as mandatory reporting notifications even though “none could be properly characterised” as such. In its initial show cause letter to Dr Bay, the board also failed to identify what part of the code of conduct Dr Bay was accused of breaching, the court found.

“It might be difficult to characterise the conduct of the board and AHPRA as anything less than profoundly unsatisfactory,” said Justice Bradley. “AHPRA acted speedily to bring the first four notifications to the attention of the board, and [Dr] Tonkin appears to have taken the fifth notification directly to the board committee meeting she was also chairing.

“The expedition with which AHPRA and the board dealt with the notifications and the apparent interest of the board chair in the fifth notification seem likely to have distracted both bodies from a proper consideration of the purpose and limit of their functions and powers.”

The board argued that the decision to suspend Dr Bay was made “in the context of an extraordinary period of history”. However, the judge said no public health measures “authorised the board to abrogate the right of persons, such as Dr Bay, to a hearing before an apparently unbiased tribunal”.

The judge stressed that his decision should not be seen as the court entering the debate about COVID-19 vaccination or public health directives.

“The court is concerned only with whether the decision or the conduct was free from an error that goes to the decision-maker’s authority to make the decision,” he said. Dr Bay unsuccessfully attempted to argue that the entire legal basis for AHPRA was unconstitutional, with AHPRA ordered to pay the legal costs of the Queensland Government lawyers who had to respond to this part of this case.

A spokesperson for AHPRA and the board said the regulators acknowledge the court’s decision “and will examine it in detail before considering any further course of action”. In a video posted on Facebook after the decision, Dr Bay said he could now “prescribe ivermectin, and most importantly — this is what AHPRA is most afraid of — I can criticise the vaccines freely and as a registered medical practitioner”. He was then interviewed on Sky News program Outsiders, where he said COVID-19 vaccines caused “turbo cancers” and other “deaths and injuries that could not be revealed by your local GP or your cardiologist or your surgeon, because we were prohibited by the medical regulator from speaking the truth”.