Court Slaps Down Commiefornia’s Attempt to Muzzle Doctors Who Dissent From Covid Groupthink

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by ANNE COURCHAINE

The court’s decision represents a victory against authoritarianism, but censorship by Covid scaremongers should still trouble Americans.
 
A federal judge halted California’s attempt to censor doctors when, last Wednesday, the court enjoined the state statute that banned medical professionals from spreading purported “misinformation” or “disinformation” to their patients about Covid-19. The decision represents the latest victory against the authoritarian edicts that quickly followed the outbreak of the pandemic three years ago but continue to this day.
 
In August of 2022, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law Assembly Bill 2098 (AB 2098), adding a new provision to California’s extensive regulations governing the professional and ethical conduct of physicians — regulations that ban practices ranging from human cloning to performing a pelvic exam on an unconscious or anesthetized female patient without her knowledge or consent.
 
The new statute sought to stop what the legislature called a “pernicious” threat to public health — doctors who spread “misinformation” or “disinformation” to their patients about Covid-19. Specifically, AB 2098 provides:

It shall constitute unprofessional conduct for a physician and surgeon to disseminate misinformation or disinformation related to COVID-19, including false or misleading information regarding the nature and risks of the virus, its prevention and treatment; and the development, safety, and effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccines.

The California law defines “disinformation” as “misinformation the [physician] deliberately disseminated with malicious intent or an intent to mislead,” while “misinformation” is “false information that is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus contrary to the standard of care.”
 
In passing the law, the California legislature made multiple “findings,” including facts purveyed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that there is a much higher risk of death for unvaccinated individuals from Covid-19 than the vaccinated. The legislature also found that “the spread of misinformation and disinformation about COVID-19 vaccines has weakened public confidence and placed lives at serious risk” and that “major news outlets have reported that some of the most dangerous propagators of inaccurate information regarding the COVID-19 vaccines are licensed health care professionals.”
 
Soon after Newsom signed AB 2098, a group of doctors and organizations representing doctors filed suit in federal court in California. The plaintiffs in Høeg, et al. v. Newsom, et al. argued the statute violated their First Amendment rights to free speech and their constitutional right to due process. The plaintiffs in Høeg then filed a motion for a preliminary injunction, seeking to prevent the state from enforcing AB 2098 until the resolution of the doctors’ constitutional challenges.
 
On Wednesday, presiding Judge William Shubb, a George H.W. Bush appointee, granted the motion and entered an injunction barring California from enforcing the law.
 
In his ruling, Shubb first held that the plaintiffs had “standing” or the right to sue because, if allowed to go into effect, the doctors faced an actual injury in the form of disciplinary action. The court then held that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the merits of their due process claim — “likelihood of success on the merits” is the controlling standard at the preliminary injunction stage — because the terms “misinformation” and “contemporary scientific consensus” were unconstitutionally vague, making it impossible for a reasonable person to know what the law prohibited.
 
The court further stressed that the phrase “contemporary scientific consensus” lacks an understandable meaning because it has no technical meaning within the medical community and was left undefined in AB 2098. Covid-19 is a “quickly evolving area of science that in many aspects eludes consensus,” the court noted, reasoning that while the phrase “contrary to the standard of care” is a clearly defined term in law, by adding the undefined language, “false information that is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus,” the California legislature made the statute “grammatically incoherent.”
 
Because the court concluded the plaintiffs were likely to prevail on their due process claim given the vagueness of AB 2098, Shubb held he did not need to reach the plaintiffs’ argument that the California law violated the First Amendment by preventing medical professionals from openly discussing issues with Covid-19 shots, alternative treatments and therapies for Covid-19, or the merits of universal masking with their patients. Shubb, however, added that AB 2098 “clearly implicates First Amendment concerns.”
 
Following Wednesday’s decision in Høeg, the corporate press quickly coalesced around the vaccine-denier narrative by highlighting that one of the plaintiffs in the case was the Children’s Health Defense, an “advocacy organization” connected to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Then, rather than focus on the significance of the court’s decision and California’s blatant violation of doctors’ constitutional rights, the left-leaning media intoned that the Children’s Health Defense has “long promoted false information about standard childhood vaccines.”

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A blow to totalitarianism. Don’t think the left will give up.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a true “classical liberal,” in every sense of the term.
Like his father and uncle.
Somehow he’s still alive altho he bucks the uniparty system like each of his dead relatives did.
Even his cousin’s plane crash cleared the way for commie Hillary as Senator.
His Children’s Health Defense newsletter is worth reading.
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender_category/covid/

But, as this article points out, all the above is being used as diversion by the media to diminish the significance of this court’s decision about doctors having a right to free speech.

Remember when one of the main arguments against “ObamaCare” ACA was that doctors would become slaves instead of health partners?
This case was about that.
Amazing how many doctors willingly became slaves to the cdc covid narrative when it was that or break out on their own without a provider network.