Two weeks to go until the hearing, as listed in the schedule, which has been updated today, and is finally showing that there is a venue for the hearing, as opposed to the locale TBD (to be determined), to which I formally objected in a letter to the Tribunal Registrar on November 11. The principal complaint in that letter, however, was that the tribunal is routinely dismissing requests for information about its proceedings with the lame excuse that if you are not a party to a complaint you have no right to know anything. So far, the Tribunal has sent me an automated response that my email was received, and my case manager, Sandy Tse, phoned me on Thursday, November 16, in spite of my stated preference for written communication. The objective of the phone call was principally to make lame excuses, which she obviously was not prepared to commit in writing, and assure me that my concerns were being addressed. At the same time, she requested that I commit to a number of possible dates before the hearing in order to set up a "case conference" requested by the Ministry's lawyers, to which I had earlier objected and had my objection arbitrarily overruled. The dates originally proposed have all passed, so the time left for a case conference is getting very limited.
Meantime, since the June update, I have received two weighty packages from the Ministry's lawyers (there are now two) amending and supplementing earlier submissions, and updating their witness list, which includes an expert with a 71 page resume. Unfortunately a good 75% of the paper stacks comprise redacted data, and of the rest, most are irrelevant, with less than 5% actually containing material that appears to relate to the issue of my complaint.
A couple of interesting developments that have caught our attention are:
1. Shingles vaccination is now covered by public health systems in Australia and Ontario, as well as Britain, France, and a number of other jurisdistions.
2. A new vaccine from GSK is proving to be even more effective than the current standard, and may provide some healthy competition for Zostavax.
