A pharmacist who believes doctors have been lying to patients about the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines has failed in her bid to return to practice after being suspended for spreading “dangerous nonsense”.

Maria Stogiannis runs an eponymously named pharmacy in Melbourne’s inner west and was banned under emergency powers on 1 March.

Two weeks later she applied to the Victorian Civil and Administration Tribunal (VCAT) for a stay on her suspension, pending a formal hearing, insisting the vaccines had killed millions, caused hundreds of millions of adverse events and were leading to an “unprecedented genocide”.

She also told the tribunal that the pharma company Pfizer had paid bribes to the US government to approve its mRNA vaccine, which she described as a ‘bioweapon’.