It doesn’t stop there. The government’s determination to define truth and control what can or cannot be said has invaded our universities. I’ve been there. I was a professor of psychiatry and director of the Medical Ethics Program at the University of California, Irvine . . . until I questioned the official Covid narrative. When I published an article questioning the risk-benefit balance — and thus the ethics — of mandating Covid shots for those who had already developed natural immunity, I was suddenly treated by the university as a public enemy.
As a leader in medical ethics, I believed that I had a responsibility to lead by example and follow the logic of the science, so I declined to be vaccinated. Rather than allow a public debate among medical professionals about this critical scientific question, the university fired me.
And it didn’t stop with the State of California. As we now know, the White House was severely pressuring social media companies to silence scientific voices that contradicted the official narrative. So when a podcaster interviewed me about the ethics of vaccine mandates, and the Covid vaccine in particular, YouTube labeled the interview “misinformation,” blocked the interview, and even suspended the account of the woman who had dared to interview me. We now know that social media censorship like this was done at the behest of several federal government agencies.
Now, it is widely recognized that what I was saying was correct. The State of California, the White House, and YouTube were silencing true science about a critical medical question.
And it wasn’t just me. Even those in the scientific community who enjoyed the highest levels of prestige and respect were not immune. When Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration urging focused protection strategies instead of universal mandates, prolonged school closures, and lockdowns, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, personally disparaged Bhattacharya and urged Dr. Anthony Fauci to orchestrate “a quick and devastating . . . take down” of the declaration.
And indeed, Fauci and others stirred up a wave of media slander directed against Bhattacharya and his colleagues; the goal was to silence their voices and control the narrative. As Bhattacharya has said, they made his life “a living hell.” “They systematically tried to make it seem like everyone agreed with their ideas about Covid policy, when in fact there was deep disagreement.” With poetic justice, Bhattacharya has now been tapped to direct the NIH, pending Senate approval.
Americans at every level need to stand up against government efforts to define truth and control speech about science and medicine. I myself became a plaintiff in a case — along with Bhattacharya and his Great Barrington co-author Martin Kulldorff — challenging the government pressure behind social media censorship during the Covid years. Sadly, while the Supreme Court acknowledged that there was overwhelming evidence that White House officials had pressured tech giants to censor disfavored opinions, they dismissed the request for an injunction for technical reasons. The case continues to be litigated at the district court.
Now, Kaley Chiles is challenging Colorado’s efforts to censor her counseling conversations with her clients, and to “make it seem like everyone agrees” with the state’s opinions about the best path to mental health for young people suffering confusion and pain over their gender and sexuality. The Supreme Court should take this opportunity to send a much-needed message to the government and medical establishment: Free speech is as essential in science and medicine as it is in politics and culture, for all our sakes.
