Vaccines -

The abolition of doctor and patients’ rights since 2008

Published on August 12, 2026August 15, 2026 by EF TeamLeave a comment

Dr. Mark Hobart revisits the erosion of conscience rights for doctors and their patients as it has unfolded across Australia in recent decades. This post is based on recent talks and articles from Dr. Hobart.

In this piece I wish to explain and describe the progression of government control over medical practitioners that has occurred over the last 20 years, starting with:

the Victorian Abortion Law Reform Act in 2008
the Victorian Equal Opportunity Act in 2010 (particularly with regards to the illegality of being able to discriminate according to gender identity and sex which is essential in the practice of medicine to avoid life-threatening disasters
the “no jab no pay/play” vaccination of children in 2016,
the legalisation of euthanasia in Victoria in 2017,
the Covid injection mandates in 2021,
and lastly the removal of conscientious objection to euthanasia by doctors in the amendments to the Victorian VAD law in December 2025.

I contend that these are all examples of conscription of medical services by the state governments and, because they must be paid for by Medicare which is an Australian government agency, are in contravention of section 51xxiii(A) of the Australian Constitution, which prohibits “any form” of conscription of medical services.

The term “services” in this context means the private contract between the doctor and the patient for a medical service to occur, for which you need both parties, and for the contract to be valid you need informed consent and no coercion of either party.

Abortion

In October 2008, Victoria passed the Abortion Law Reform Act¹ which stated that the doctors
must refer to a “non-objecting practitioner” when a patient presented to them requesting an
abortion if the doctor had a conscientious objection to the abortion. The doctor was not to
proceed with any further discussion or advice regarding the abortion. This law spread to all
the other states over the next few years.

In late November 2011 a woman presented to me who was 19 ½ weeks pregnant, accompanied by her husband. They requested an abortion because the baby was a girl and they did not want a girl because they already had one. I refused to refer her, explaining that it was dangerous for her health, and eventually I had to explain to her that it was also against my religious beliefs, when she replied that she was not concerned about the health risks.

On 17 May 2013, the medical board commenced an own motion investigation into my actions because I had failed to refer to a non-objecting practitioner and demonstrated a disregard for patient rights. On 30 January 2014, I was cautioned because I had stated in the media that I knowingly acted in contravention of section 8 of the abortion laws reform act, that is the section which prohibits conscientious objection.

Doctors unable to discriminate regarding gender or sex

According to the Victorian Equal Opportunity Act 2010², attributes protected by law are:

age, race, and disability
gender identity, sex, and sexual orientation
marital, parental, or carer status
religion, political belief, and industrial activity

Of course it is necessary for doctors to discriminate on the basis of gender and sex and do so with every patient; not to do so would be very dangerous because men and women are anatomically and genetically different. However, this legislation has permitted hormonal and gross surgical mutilation, leading in many cases to misery and death.³

In July 2015, I was reported to the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission by a patient whom I had not seen previously, because I did not prescribe female hormones as the patient requested. The patient appeared male, and they said they were undergoing treatment to transition into a woman, and they said they were “legally a woman”.

Their usual doctor was not available at the time. It was a new patient. The patient had located me using the internet. I refused to prescribe the medication and explained to the patient that in my opinion it is dangerous to prescribe for a genetic male female hormones.

The complaint was looked at by the Human Rights Commission and conciliation of this complaint was attempted which was unsuccessful. The commission decided to close the matter pursuant to section 115 of the act. They said that conciliation of this complaint had been attempted but was unsuccessful, and that they had decided to close the matter pursuant to section 115(2)(a) of the Equal Opportunity Act which directs to 116(e):

“having regard to all the circumstances, the Commission considers it is not appropriate to provide or to continue to provide dispute resolution.”

So I think I dodged a bullet there!

Other doctors have not been so lucky: for example, Dr Jillian Spencer, the psychiatrist who lost her job at the Brisbane Children’s Hospital for three years because she didn’t follow the policy directions of the hospital with regards to puberty blockers in children. Recently, she has won her case against the hospital, and hopefully she’ll be reinstated.

No jab, no pay/play

In 2016, the Victorian government brought in “no jab, no play” laws which meant parents were required to have their children vaccinated with the recommended childhood vaccines or they would be penalised by withholding of the tax rebate, which could amount to up to $800 per fortnight, so that they could not afford to put their children into childcare or kindergarten.

Wealthy parents could afford to do this, but families where both parents had to work to pay the mortgage and put food on their table could not. I think most reasonable people would define this as coercion.

There is no avenue for the parents to refuse these vaccinations for the children because they are worried about their safety or adverse effects on the health of their child or the fact that some of these vaccines are manufactured from aborted foetal tissue.

Any doctor who advises against these vaccinations is highly likely to be suspended from practice and factor home. Doctors who advised against the vaccinations are highly likely to be suspended from practice and face cancellation of their licence. Dr John Piesse was suspended in 2017 for this and is still suspended.

Euthanasia

In 2017, Victoria legalised euthanasia⁴, calling it “voluntary assisted dying.” In most cases, this involved a doctor giving the patient a bottle of a very strong sedative, phenobarbital, which could be drunk later at a time of the patients choosing and which would, in most cases cause the patient’s death.

It is not called voluntary assisted suicide, possibly because assisted suicide is still a crime in Victoria punishable by five years imprisonment. Although suicide is not illegal, assisting or encouraging another person to commit suicide remains a criminal offence in Victoria.

Section 6B(2) of the Crimes Act 1958⁵ makes it an indictable offence to:

incite another person to commit suicide if the other person does so or attempts to do so.
aid or abet another person to commit suicide if the other person does so or attempts to do so.
be a party to a suicide pact.

The maximum penalty for these offences is five years’ imprisonment. As stated previously, the Victorian government amended the euthanasia law in December 2025, making conscientious objection to euthanasia illegal and stating that the doctor “must” give the patient information regarding euthanasia if the patient presents enquiring about euthanasia:

Conscientious objection of registered health practitioners.

(1) In section 7 (a) of the Principal Act, for “to” substitute “subject to subsection (2), to”.
(2) At the end of section 7 of the Principal Act insert—
”If a registered health practitioner who has a conscientious objection to voluntary assisted dying refuses to provide information about voluntary assisted dying to a person requesting information about or access to voluntary assisted dying, the practitioner must—
(a) advise the person that another registered health practitioner or a health service provider may be able to assist the person in relation to information about or access to voluntary assisted dying; and
(b) give the person the information approved by the Secretary.”⁶

Now we have Voluntary Assisted Dying, which should be called voluntary assisted suicide, but because assisted suicide is a crime listed in the crime act with a penalty of five years in jail it can’t be called that. It really can’t be called voluntary assisted death either because it’s up to the patient to take the medication which is supposed to kill them (usually phenobarbital which sometimes fails to kill the patient) at their own discretion so the the doctor doesn’t need to wait and make sure that the patient is dead.

Also, the doctor writing the death certificate must not write that the patient has died from the ingestion of the lethal dose of medication but write the terminal condition leading to the patient feeling that life is not worth living any more: for example, cancer, heart failure, multiple sclerosis or motor neurone disease (which Neil Daniher, a prominent Ausgralian footballer, had been suffering from for many years).

It is impossible to give an accurate estimation of how long these people will be expected to survive with any of these conditions. The legislation at present states that death is to be expected within 12 months.

According to this legislation, if a patient comes to you as a doctor requesting “assisted dying” and wants information as to how to do it, (i.e. they want to know how to kill themselves) instead of asking them why, and whether you feel it is a genuine possibility they would do this, and instead of calling the CAT team or the police surgeon to stop them, or certifying them yourself (as you could formerly do), you must give the advice on how to kill themselves including information approved by the government secretary.

I hope she’s a good secretary.

Imagine a patient coming to see a doctor requesting advice regarding euthanasia, and instead of the doctor asking them why they want to die and arranging urgent psychiatric evaluation, he or she must give them advice on how to do it. It really is beyond belief but here we are.

It is needless to say that if doctors criticise this legislation, they are putting themselves at risk of suspension in the same way as I was cautioned when I criticised the abortion legislation in 2013. Indeed, this happened to me.

On 26 February 2020 I was reported to the Health Complaints Commissioner by Dr Cameron McLaren, an oncologist at Peter McCallum hospital who promoted euthanasia and facilitated euthanasia for his patients and was featured prominently in “The Age” and “The Australian” newspapers on December 26 2019 and February 21 2020 respectively.

He also wrote an article in the “Australian Doctor” magazine on February 26 2020 on which doctors were invited to comment. He was asked “What are the reasons behind the patients coming to you?” He replied,

“for the vast majority, it is not due to the physical suffering they face. Dealing with pain, with physical suffering, is something that palliative care does manage exceptionally well… They might be very comfortable, even peaceful, but through voluntary assisted dying we can provide closure in ways that assist the grieving process for the patient and the family. It’s an existential problem – not just about pain management.”

I made a comment simply stating that Adolf Hitler suspended his euthanasia program on August 18, 1941 after public protests, which I quoted from the “History Channel.” The complaint was forwarded to AHPRA but no further action was taken.

COVID mandates

From the AHPRA (Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency) position statement on COVID-19 vaccination:

“Any promotion of anti-vaccination statements or health advice which contradicts the best available scientific evidence or seeks to actively undermine the national immunisation campaign (including via social media) is not supported by National Boards and may be in breach of the codes of conduct and subject to investigation and possible regulatory action.” ⁷

In November 2021, I was suspended from medical practice by the medical board, being charged with professional misconduct. The main reason was that I had issued temporary COVID injection exemptions to my patients because I could not comply with the position statement.

By that time, it was widely known that the COVID injections caused death from myocarditis and pericarditis, and this was reported in the mainstream medical literature. It was also widely known that the vaccines did not prevent transmission of the virus, and that they caused myocarditis. Indeed, Dr Nick Coatsworth, Commonwealth deputy chief medical officer at the time of COVID, in an interview on “A Current Affair” in March 2025 has since admitted this and said that the covid mandates were “unethical”. (see 7.20 – 8.10)

This was also published in a poster by the NSW ambulance authority in August 2021. (see below).

In November 2021 I was suspended by AHPRA because I gave temporary medical certificates usually of three months duration to my patients who were being forced to have the COVID injection otherwise they would lose their jobs and or have an injection which was dangerous to their health and or also conflict with their religious beliefs because the injections were made from aborted human foetal parts.

When I had the opportunity to ask, about 50% of them had suicidal ideation about this, so I had no hesitation in giving them a certificate saying that they should not have the injection. I am still suspended now almost five years later waiting for the decision of my last trial which finished on the 16 June. The medical board is attempting to prove that I am guilty of professional misconduct and a danger to the Australian public.

I am one of four doctors who have been suspended for this in Victoria because we all stood up for this violation of one of the most basic of human rights the right to be fully informed of your medical treatment and the right to refuse this treatment if you don’t want it.

Dr Luke McLindon, Catholic, a specialist obstetrician and gynaecologist specialising in fertility treatment at the Catholic Mater Hospital in Brisbane, in an affidavit to the Supreme court QLD found that 73% of his patients that were vaccinated within 6 weeks of conception against COVID had miscarriages compared with 13% of the patients that had not been vaccinated immediately prior to or just after conception. He was sacked by the hospital in June 2022 and has been unable to work in medicine since. He told me that the Mater hospital was the only public Catholic hospital in Australia, offering tubal surgery restore fertility; these are no longer offered and patients are now told “there’s only IVF”, as cost is a significant barrier.

Several other doctors throughout Australia have been suspended for comments they made about COVID in social media or in the mainstream media, or they were sacked from their jobs because they refused to have the COVID injections.

Implications for Catholic doctors

These laws are contrary to fundamental Catholic teaching regarding the right to life, and to live according to the truths of the Catholic faith. Even if you are not Catholic, these laws are against the natural law. The Hippocratic oath from 500 BC contained fundamentals precepts: first do not harm, do not prescribe or administer a poison, do not procure an abortion and there must be confidentiality between the physician and patient; the term “patient” derives from the Latin patientem: “suffering”.

Catholic doctors and doctors who follow the natural law cannot assist patients to kill themselves. We should not stand by and not give a good counter argument to a woman who wants to abort their child and certainly not be complicit in abortion. We should not comply with giving a medical treatment the patient is forced into accepting because they believe it is dangerous or against their beliefs, or that we think may be dangerous for them and but recommended it to the patient because the government says it is so. On the other hand if we do not do these doctors are not able to practice medicine in our society.

What can be done?

As I said at the outset I contend these are all examples of conscription of medical services by the state governments and, because they must be paid for by Medicare, which is an Australian government agency, is in contravention to section 51xxiii(A) of the Australian continent Constitution, which prohibits “any form” of conscription of medical services.

This amendment to the Constitution was brought in by the Robert Menzies in 1946, in the context of the then recent Nuremberg medical trials which punished doctors who performed forced experimental medical treatment.

Although it may be sometime before we can use the Constitution to rectify the situation logically, it should be possible if there is sufficient public opinion to push things towards this end.

The main purpose of my talk is to raise public awareness of the current state of affairs so that people can form an understanding of how we got to the situation, which is completely untenable and unacceptable, and then take steps to change it.

Dr Mark Hobart, MBBS.
30 July 2026

Dr. Mark Hobart is an Australian GP in the state of Victoria, who was unjustly targeted for his stance against government overreach during the COVID pandemic. When it became known that he was writing exemptions from the mandatory, experimental mRNA vaccines, Dr. Hobart’s clinic, located in the Melbourne western suburb of Sunshine, was raided by the authorities and he subsequently was suspended from practising medicine.

ENDNOTES

To tear bodies apart on the altar of science

Published on June 2, 2026June 2, 2026 by EF TeamLeave a comment

This article was written by an American doctor who is pro-choice. Despite that flaw, he thoughtfully examines many of the immoral aspects of the use of aborted foetal tissue harvesting for use in medicine and science.

By David Bell at the Brownstone Institute

Ignorance is often desirable. It allows us to benefit from things our conscience might deny us. ‘Informed consent’ can be something we need to force upon ourselves.

Sacrificing others for the greater good

Science, we prefer to think, has removed us from the dark inhumanity of human sacrifice and the historic callousness that would kill and dismember a child as insurance against starvation. The Aztecs and Mayans dismembered living prisoners to appease gods and ensure crop fertility, which they believed essential to survival. The Egyptians and Norse killed servants of their deceased wealthy to improve the quality of their afterlife. Our futures now are secured on the laboratory bench rather than the stone altar. We have Science, and consider ourselves far better off because of it.

A few days ago, someone shared this short video, ‘It’s OK,’ about 4 minutes long and worth watching. It is made by a group opposing abortion called Choice42.

The abortion issue is complicated and evokes emotions and is discussed later. What matters here is that the video is well researched, objective, and explains how scientists are paid to cut and disembowel live humans on laboratory benches in the hope of improving the futures of those who pay them, and the rest of us.

As a society, we have developed well-organised, methodical ways to do this, and pride ourselves in their cleverness. The video is very moving – it is meant to be because pulling little humans apart without anaesthetic for the benefit of others is something that, when removed from its veil of scientific progress, can be hard to think about.

The use of aborted human fetuses and embryos brought us many of the vaccines we use today, including some promoted by the Roman Catholic Church and those used by many who oppose abortion itself. The cell cultures derived from the unborn babies represented in the video, and from similar cases, are used widely by people working in the biological sciences. They can be purchased online. Undoubtedly, many lives of people who lived after have been saved by the use of some of these cell lines, and people are therefore born today who would not be if the cells had not been harvested.

The researchers who regularly work with these cells come from a whole swath of different cultures, religious beliefs, and political perspectives. Mostly, they probably never seriously consider whom the cells in the petri dish descended from. If they do, they may dismiss the harvesting as too long ago to be relevant (though the practice continues) or somehow necessary (as the Aztecs did, needing to keep the world itself habitable). The video simply reminds us of certain truths, and of how willing we are, or how far we will go, to ignore them.

What is a human foetus?

Abortion is an emotive subject, but unfortunately also politicised, and this makes any discussion like this difficult. So, to be clear, this article is not about abortion, on which my views are nuanced. As a doctor, I have taken part in abortions, as prior family members took part in bombing people and machine-gunning them. I have used some of the products mentioned in the video here and have no high ground to stand on.

I have also worked in a country where several thousand women die of septic abortions every year, because they cannot access practices safe for them. We probably all know people who vehemently oppose abortion but support the death penalty, and people who hold opposite views on both.

Taking a life is a terrible thing, and sometimes circumstances can lead to choices between terrible things. Nearly all of us find ways around “Thou shall not kill.” But we need to understand what is happening.

The other thing to be clear on here is whether a developing fetus is a human (i.e. a person). The World Health Organization (WHO) considers them “pregnancy tissue” until delivery from the womb in its hopelessly incoherent Abortion Care Guidelines, and ”lives lost” if they happened to be born prematurely before being deliberately aborted. Such a position, that personhood is purely geographical (in or out the womb), is convenient but obviously bankrupt, telling us more about the WHO than the status of a foetus. The unborn foetus can hear, respond, feel pain, move, and is fully genetically human.

Having spent months nursing a baby born at 28 weeks, I had no doubt of that child’s humanity. I have cradled premature babies born far earlier before they died. They move, struggle to breathe sometimes for hours, and I am unable to see how they were not human children, helpless though they were.

Outside of a eugenicist or fascist mindset, I also struggle to see how there can be a hierarchy of human worth. We are equal or we are not, and that is not dependent on an arbitrary time of existence or the arbitrariness of position within or without the womb. This does not mean humans cannot be killed (sadly, we have wars still and may sometimes also face other difficult choices), but those we kill are our equals.

Most of us also consider humans different in worth and essence from other animals. However, irrespective of one’s view on this, we do have strict rules on the use of animals in research. Institutional (Ethics) Review Boards (IRBs) are usually reluctant to allow the infliction of pain on animals. There was a loud outcry when the National Institutes of Health were shown to have been torturing beagles in the name of science. Hollywood movies using animals have a standard line in the credits reassuring us that “no animal was harmed.” We don’t, for whatever reason, afford the same care to developing members of our own species, and we don’t at present, label our medicines to indicate their derivation from such practices. That is a strange thing, and seems somewhat cowardly.

Inflicting pain on living beings

So, the point of the video, and this article, is not the rightness or wrongness of abortion. It is that we sacrifice others in horrific ways for our own good, or accept others (the high priests of our Science) doing it for us. We accept that it is worth cutting open a developing human without anaesthetic, disemboweling them, and using bits we cut out for experiments that may or may not prove useful to someone. The only really relevant factor is that someone was willing to pay for it to be done. So, we accept it.

This practice (for which you would be jailed in the United States for doing so to a cat) is considered so acceptable when done to our own that many jurisdictions actually mandate that people have vaccines developed from such practices injected into them. There is strong political pressure at present to block religious exemptions in the United States, preventing people from opting out of partaking in the results of such practices.

With some religious leaders insisting that the use of products derived from fetal mutilation is an act of love, refusal based on revulsion at the slicing and tearing of live humans becomes very much a personal matter that can elicit considerable retribution from society.

The choices we make

It is not necessary to do these experiments. This is true on two levels. Firstly, the human race was not dying out before we started doing this. Most health gains come from what we eat, how we live, and our environment (e.g. good sanitation). What we derive from foetal stem cells and organs is a small fractional gain on top of this. For some people it may be life or death, but for nearly all it is not. There is no such thing as “essential medical research,” just desirable research, and research that someone is paying to have done (which may or may not coincide).

Secondly, it is possible to get stem cells from adults, from bone marrow and other organs. It is harder, and they are less adaptable, so such cells may be less effective in developing the products we desire. But this is certainly a risk we can reasonably choose to take.

We can do well, as a society, without tearing aborted babies apart. We choose to do this for small incremental gain. We are horrified at what the Aztecs did, and think we are better, but objectively we are essentially the same. We sacrifice growing humans, with pain and lack of concern, in the hope of a common good for the rest of us. We make a choice, based on how we value others and value ourselves.

Facing what we do, or have become party to, should not always be a comfortable thing. The past is in the past, but fetal harvesting is still happening. For those who believe a person exists beyond their organic form, the past also continues to have relevance today. We can block from our minds what we do to others for our benefit, but if humanity is worth anything, then we should recognize the act of betrayal that involves.

At the very least, based on logic, rationality, and decency, we should be transparent. This should ensure truly informed consent, labelling medicines, for instance, as having been derived or not through procedures or experiments on unconsented humans. Then, clearly, we should respect those who say “no” and wish no part in the outcomes of what they may consider repugnant or immoral practices. Forcing others to follow our own choice in this matter through mandates would be unjustifiable under any enlightened system of human values.

By David Bell at the Brownstone Institute. By David Bell. This article first appeared at Brownstone Institute and is reproduced here under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

David Bell, Senior Scholar at Brownstone Institute, is a public health physician and biotech consultant in global health. David is a former medical officer and scientist at the World Health Organisation (WHO), Programme Head for malaria and febrile diseases at the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) in Geneva, Switzerland, and Director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund in Bellevue, WA, USA.