A legal challenge to Victoria’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate launched by a teacher and her husband has been dramatically expanded to include more than 100 plaintiffs from a broad range of occupations, including one who works for vaccine manufacturer CSL.
Revised documents filed in the Supreme Court of Victoria accuse Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton and other senior health bureaucrats of breaching the state’s Human Rights Charter when they imposed vaccine mandates across several industries, including health, education and construction.
The case runs counter to public health advice across the nation, which insist vaccination rates above 80 per cent are the best way to prevent serious illness from COVID-19. Trials of vaccines in adults, each with tens of thousands of participants, showed they were both safe and effective and tended, depending on the product and study, to provide between 80 and 95 per cent protection against serious disease.
Previous legal challenges to public health orders across the nation have been largely unsuccessful, other than a temporary injunction granted to a group of Queensland police officers who refused the vaccine.
Another case also went before the courts on Friday, with the Nurses’ Professional Association of Queensland lodging action against Monash Health in the Federal Court to prevent the organisation from sacking nurses who refuse to get the jab.
But unlike NSW, where a similar bid to overturn vaccine mandates was unsuccessful last week, Victoria’s Human Rights Charter Act enshrines civil, political and cultural rights and to an extent protects them from being curtailed by government.