Hong Kong Government Loses Court Bid To Invalidate 20,000 Vaccine Exemptions

A challenge that mounted earlier this month in Hong Kong to invalidate Covid vaccine exemptions issued by certain doctors has lost in court.

In late September, Hong Kong sought to invalidate certain Covid exemptions issues by doctors who were suspected of malpractice.

Big brother really seems to be scraping the bottom of the barrel at this point. As if enough people hadn’t already been forced into getting the jab, Hong Kong police “arrested six doctors last month for allegedly issuing vaccination exemption letters without conducting proper consultations,” SCMP wrote last week. 

From there, the government made a legal challenge to 20,000 vaccination exemption certificates linked to doctors over suspected malpractice in the country’s High Court. But the court then ruled that the government has no power to invalidate the exemptions and a temporary ban on a plan to revoke the exemptions will now likely become permanent. 

The country’s health secretary couldn’t identify the source of his authority, Mr Justice Russell Coleman ruled: “A government minister gets his or her legal powers from legislation – and not from an announcement made in a press release.”

“It does not seem to me to be correct to leap from the desirability of enabling the secretary to ‘do something’ when some [medical exemption certificates] are called into question to the conclusion that [the law] must be read as conferring such a power,” his ruling continued. 

“The question does not identify a choice between being ‘pro-government’ or ‘anti-government’; it identifies a distinction between what is lawful and what is unlawful,” the ruling continued. 

Litigant Kwok Cheuk-kin was granted an application to restrain authorities from invalidating the certificates. According to reporting by SCMP, he then called the ruling a “miserable loss” for the government and a “disgrace” to city leader John Lee Ka-chiu.

Executive councillor and barrister Ronny Tong Ka-wah said that the government was considering an appeal. “Amending the laws is not moving the goalposts. The goalposts are in the wrong position so, of course, we have to put them in the right place,” he said. 

“The citizens of Hong Kong are the biggest winners of the present judicial challenge,” Kwok concluded. You can read the full SCMP writeup here.