A Sydney GP has declared “war” and shared unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about a “witch-hunt” against her involving fake complaints after her medical license was suspended for her actions during the Covid-19 pandemic.
My-Le Trinh, 60, worked as a general practitioner out of a Baulkham Hills clinic in Sydney’s north for 22 years after arriving in Australia as a child refugee from the horrors of war in Cambodia and completing her medical degree at Sydney University.
Her medical career unravelled spectacularly in 2021 when the pandemic reached Australia and she began handing out vaccine exemptions and administering the anti-parasitic drug Ivermectin.
A pair of complaints — one from Westmead Hospital and the other from a member of the public — followed and an investigation found Dr Trinh kept “handwritten scribble” for extensive medications prescribed to patients.
In one case, a 51-year-old woman who came to her for treatment relating to Covid-19 was “ultimately admitted to hospital with drug-induced psychosis due to a very high steroid dosage”.
Dr Trinh, who herself was not vaccinated against Covid-19 because of her religious beliefs, took her fight to the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal this week but they found she had engaged in unsatisfactory professional conduct and professional misconduct.
In court documents seen by news.com.au, a long list of concerns were outlined about the former GP’s behaviour and beliefs, including:
SHE “had not looked at Australian practice resources for Covid-19 management”;
SHE “maintained that Ivermectin is a valid treatment for Covid-19 despite it being unproven for use in the Australian context;
SHE “did not regard (those she prescribed Ivermectin to) as actual patients”; and,
SHE said she “asked patients to call her when they got sick”, when asked how she knew what dosage to prescribe.
News.com.au has reached out to Dr Trinh for comment but did not hear back prior to publishing.
Dr Trinh did however respond to the tribunal’s findings online this week with several posts on social media.
“I am declaring legal war on the HCCC and the Tribunal. Let the battle begin,” she wrote.
“I maintain my innocence and will be appealing the Tribunal’s decision to the Supreme Court Court of Appeal. This fight is far from over. I will pursue every lawful avenue available in my pursuit of justice.”
She also shared a conspiracy theory that the “so-called complainants are not genuine complainants” and that “the true complainant is, in fact, the HCCC (Health Care Complaints Commission)”.
When a member of the public responded to Dr Trinh’s post, saying the complaints were “absolutely disgusting”, Dr Trinh wrote: “It’s evil to the core” and “our health system is being compromised by big pharma”.
On Facebook and X, where she has a large following from anti-vax circles, she wrote that she “paid a private investigator to trace the email address” for one of the complainants “and it appears to be registered to a person who is on a board of trustees to a major teaching hospital”.
She said the hospital was responsible for vaccinations to “nursing homes and the homeless people” during what she described as the “plandemic” — a label used by conspiracy theorists to suggest that Covid-19 was a planned, human-made virus orchestrated by governments and public health officials for financial and political gain.
“With 27 years of experience as a GP, I have never had a complaint made against me,” Dr Trinh wrote this week.
“I co-own the practice for 10 years before selling it on, but I have continued to work in the practice. In total, I have worked there for 22 years.
“Additionally, I have devoted over 12 years to volunteering in impoverished areas of Cambodia, offering medical care to those in need. Two complaints were made against me on the same day, within hours of each other through the same AHPRA portal system.”
The first complaint is published in full in court documents. It reads about Dr Trinh as follows:
“This physician is promoting and writing prescriptions for ivermectin for community groups online for inappropriate clinical use of ivermectin and doxycycline and azithromycin.
“We called the medical centre to confirm and they confirmed the doctor is anti-vaccine and promotes other alternative unaccepted methods of treating/preventing covid.
“We have attached a friend’s prescription for ivermectin, said friend does not suffer from worms, its principal use as prescribed by the doctor is for preventing covid.
“We know of at least three cases where the doctor has done that and we have evidence of such.”
The second complaint, lodged on behalf of the toxicology service at Westmead Hospital, reads: “The patient has been an inpatient at Westmead Hospital since 18/09/2021. The patient has recently Covid-19 infection and she was prescribed multiple medications on 26/08/2021 (including Prednisone and possibly ivermectin) by general practitioner Dr M Trinh at Railway Street Medical Centre in Baulkham Hills.
“The daughter states that patient was advised to take high doses of Prednisone as well as other medications by this doctor for treatment of Covid-19. The patient was admitted to Westmead Hospital on 18/09/2021 after presenting with abnormal behaviour. The working diagnosis is Steroid/polypharmacy-induced encephalopathy.”
The Medical Council of NSW suspended Dr Trinh from practising medicine in October of 2021.
The HCCC alleged, based on six complaints, that Dr Trinh had “placed a number of her patients at the risk of incurring harm”.
A summary of events, published as part of the tribunal’s findings this week, noted that Dr Trinh “seeks to incorrectly characterise these proceedings as a punitive ‘witch-hunt’ against her”.
The findings mentioned that the proceedings “attracted significant public attention such that on each hearing date, the public gallery was filledto capacity with observers overflowing into the corridor outside the hearing room”.
“The crowd included a cheer squad of Dr Trinh’s supporters, some of whom at various stages exhibited disruptive behaviours, including some unrestrained interjections.”
Dr Trinh gave evidence denying that she had engaged in unsatisfactory professional conduct or professional misconduct and criticised the complaints made against her as well as the “circumstances whereby AHPRA officials confiscated the prescription (for ivermectin) from a pharmacy”.
In relation to the Westmead Hospital complaint, Dr Trinh claimed the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) ban on the use of ivermectin was “politically motivated and part of a co-ordinated effort to discredit ivermectin in order to justify its banning”.
She also argued that the guidelines for managing the pandemic were fundamentally flawed. But the tribunal hit back at that statement.
“It is difficult to see how that statement could be seen to be reasonable given her admission that she had not fully readthose guidelines,” the tribunal members wrote.
They found she was an “unsatisfactory witness” who “on multiple occasions avoided providing direct answers to straightforward questions” and rejected her claim that she had a “language disadvantage”.
“In our view Dr Trinh’s credibility was undermined by her wildly unsubstantiated assertions that the Australian Government had lied about the efficacy of ivermectin for the treatment of Covid-19 in order to enable vaccines to be approved, describing the Government’s approach as politically motivated, as part of a co-ordinated effort which amounted to a crime against humanity, thereby invoking conspiracy theories that were unsupported by evidence,” the tribunal members wrote.
They found the “provision of vaccination exemption certificates without a proper or cogent underlying reason, especially to patients who were previously unknown to Dr Trinh, including simply on the basis of anxiety, represents unsatisfactory professional conductwhich should not be condoned”.
“Dr Trinh is found to have engaged in unsatisfactory professional conduct and professional misconduct,” they wrote.
On Facebook, Dr Trinh’s response was simple.
“The guilty verdict was expected. I wear it as a badge of honour,” she wrote.
News.com.au previously wrote about Melbourne GP Dr Mark Hobart, who was also suspended from practising medicine over his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The 68-year-old told news.com.au that he had been forced to sell the family’s Sunshine North clinic after an ongoing fight to return to medicine had been unsuccessful.
“I’ve got to the stage now where I’ve run out of money, I’ve run out of options,” he told said.
“I’m selling the practice. I’m selling the building. It’s been unoccupied for almost four years. I’m not going to get my license back. I’ve been through too much mental trauma.
“I’ve got enough to eat, I try to keep fit walking the dogs. But when you stop working after almost 40 years there is a big hole in your life. I’m OK, I’m just taking stock of what to do.”
Dr Hobart had been working out of the surgery in Melbourne’s north since 1985.
He suffered a heart attack in May of 2023 and a stroke around Christmas a year later.
In an exclusive interview with news.com.au, the grandfather-of-three revealed what happened in late 2021 when authorised officers under the direction of then-Premier Daniel Andrews and then-Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton stormed his clinic.
He said they seized dozens of patient files despite his assertion that they were “private and confidential”.
Dr Hobart cannot work in any area of medicine.
“I can’t work in administration, counselling, teaching, anything in health or they threaten to send me to jail. So it limits my capacity. Wife’s a bit stressed about it all. Kids too. I’ve been totally screwed around.”
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