After talking about Sue Grey’s threat to sue the government last week, I found out that Sue was planning to give a talk on the steps of parliament the next day. So during my lunch break last Thursday 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.

One of the questions I had last week was around who exactly Sue’s clients were. She didn’t mention it in her video, or her open letter. But thankfully one of her clients, Mark Thompson, was there to introduce Sue (opens new window). Mark told the (small) 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 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 (opens new window) of the Medicines Act, which is the section being used at the moment for the Pfizer vaccine approval (opens new window) 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 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 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 political party.