What Jereth Kok said on social media that caused him to lose his medical career - The Other Cheek: Independent Christian News Australia

Dr Jereth Kok’s suspension as a doctor by the Medical Board of Australia was upheld last week by the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT). 85 of Kok’s social media posts and one Eternity article are in the the pool of material that the Board found to be professional misconduct – and formed basis for upholding the Medical Board’s decision which was based on 42 of them.

This website has access to all 85 examples. In this story we attempt a representative sample. The screenshots are from Facebook unless otherwise noted. This sample attempts to represent all the subjects that the VCAT list contains, and the balance of “tone” in the postings. Where Kok or others make critical comments about people or issues, we are reporting that he or others made those comments or allegations, and not endorsing them as truthful or appropriate. In fact as we explain below many of them are inaccurate. We report them simply as allegations that Kok made about these subjects.

For example the first allegation – that vaccines were “derived from the desecration of a murdered human being” implying for many that vaccines in some way are made from aborted babies is wrong or misleading at best – a line of cells used for growing some vaccines was derived from aborted foetuses (link to scientific paper). One particular Covid vaccine candidate that used fetal cell lines did not make it to Australia.

Similarly with the comment about Islam, there are warlike Muslims as there have been Christians bent on war in history. Other comments, such as the Babylon Bee example to be acceptable need to be read as satire, but these comments have been widely taken on face value, at least by the Medical board and VCAT. The Other Cheek has censored one post on homosexuality that is reproduced here in part as it to our eyes seems to promote hatred of gay people. A post referencing a linked piece by Lyle Shelton about transgender people and children has a scaremongering headline which is generally untrue of most transgender people in that it might suggest widespread pedophilia, which is untrue. The actual article, from memory, did not say that, it was an ambiguous headline that Shelton should not have used.

Some posts are simple abuse – for example calling some doctors “butchers,” “crooks,” and “baby killers” – these are easily seen as language a learned profession like medicine could resonably want to police.

There are others such as a post endorsing the Ezekiel declaration on Covid lockdowns, which are harder to see why they amounted to professional misconduct for simply disagreeing with majority opinion. Eternity reported that most Christians were on the other side of that discussion, and Kok objected to that with an overblown response.

Several posts on transgender take a gender critical approach, where there is a debate within medicine and the wider community. It may be that the difficult subject of ‘tone’ was in question there, ether that or the question of capture of the Medical Board by one particular point of view is raised.

Some of the sample posts will offend – please consider this before scrolling down.