https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/stroke-heart-attack-broke-melbourne-gp-...‘Stroke, heart attack, broke’: Melbourne GP who refused to give Covid jabs is on his knees
A Melbourne doctor who refused to give Covid-19 vaccinations to patients
is a shell of his former self and has had to do the unthinkable.
August 10, 2025
“Seven authorised officers came to the surgery that day and I wouldn’t have done this now but I let them in. They didn’t have a warrant or anything and they ordered me to give them the patient files.
“I said I wouldn’t do that and they told me they weren’t leaving without them ‘even if it takes all night’.
“They were intimidating, going through all my files. They were there for a couple of hours. I received an email from AHPRA (the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency) the next morning at 8.30am saying I was suspended.”
The decision means 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.”
Mark Hobart is still reckoning with the pandemic’s legacy.
The Melbourne GP who was caught up in a public fight between medicine and morality is counting the cost of what’s been taken from him.
He first lost his patients. Then his clinic shuttered. His licence was suspended next and his bank accounts slowly emptied.
The heart attack came in May of 2023. The stroke came around Christmas a year later.
Now, after a five-year struggle to restore his old life, he is coming to grips with the fact that it’s gone.
Dr Hobart, whose career in medicine was abruptly ripped away from him for refusing to administer Covid-19 vaccines during Melbourne’s lockdowns, has recently been subjected to further indignity.
The 67-year-old has been forced to apply for jobs in fields he is neither qualified or capable.
“I applied for a job as a warehouse operator but I got knocked back, that was a blow to my ego,” he said.
But the biggest blow is being forced to sell his Sunshine North clinic, run out of the family home where his mother and father both practiced medicine since the 1950s.
“I’ve got to the stage now where I’ve run out of money, I’ve run out of options,” he told news.com.au.
“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. A graduate of Melbourne University, he spent time at some of the city’s best hospitals including St Vincent’s, the Royal Children’s Hospital and the Royal Women’s Hospital.
He was always going to return home to 68 McIntyre Road in Sunshine North to follow in his parents’ footsteps. He has fond memories of being raised there and attending the local state school at Sunshine.
“That’s where I grew up,” he says. “I lived there until I was about nine or 10 years old.”
The building is now empty. The phone doesn’t ring. The waiting room doesn’t have patients.
A sign on the front window is a reminder of the storm that turned his life upside down.
“The Victorian Government has banned patients from entering this surgery because Dr Hobart refused to surrender your private and confidential patient files,” it reads.
But Dr Hobart says that’s only part of the story.
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Anti vax doctor has life ruined by Govt. (Read 699 times)
