Collapse of the COVID Truth Regime – Tablet Magazine
While mainstream media outlets pushed a propagandistic narrative to build popular acceptance of radical and unprecedented measures, government agencies pressured social media companies like Twitter and Facebook to suppress analysis from skeptics. From the lab leak hypothesis, to natural immunity, to mask mandates, much of this analysis has turned out to be entirely legitimate. By skewing the scientific debate, social media content moderators allowed state-sponsored misinformation to proliferate unchecked. Three years later, the alarming trend of non-COVID excess mortality in Western countries is an indictment of the COVID response and the censorship that accompanied it. If the job of public health officials was to minimize harm, ongoing excess mortality after the peak of COVID is evidence of failure.
As this failure becomes undeniable, we are witnessing the collapse of much of the censorship campaign that helped shield authorities from criticism. Under Elon Musk, Twitter ended its COVID misinformation policy and reinstated many banned accounts. The Twitter files and the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit have revealed that the White House, the CDC, and even Pfizer were all involved in a coordinated, systematic silencing of dissent around COVID policies and vaccines.
Against this backdrop, one of the country s most draconian censorship efforts is facing a major challenge. On Jan. 25, U.S. District Judge William Shubb granted a motion for a preliminary injunction in the Hoeg, et al. v. Newsom lawsuit, temporarily blocking California s Assembly Bill 2098 (AB 2098). If AB 2098 is eventually implemented, the law will allow the California Medical Board to disbar doctors who disseminate COVID-related misinformation to patients. Judge Shubb called the state s definition of misinformation ( false information that is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus ) nonsense and ruled in favor of the injunction on the grounds that the vagueness of the law would violate doctors 14th Amendment right to due process.
The state has decided not to appeal Shubb s decision, but the ultimate fate of the law is still in limbo, in part due to an ongoing separate lawsuit (McDonald v. Lawson). Nevertheless, the initial victory of the plaintiffs in Hoeg, et al. v. Newsom has highlighted the pernicious nature of speech restrictions and represents a major blow against the far-reaching censorship machine that shaped the COVID era.
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