Last September, the California Assembly passed and Governor Newsom signed, a bill, AB 2098, which allows the state medical board to punish physicians who spread what the government deems “misinformation or disinformation” related to COVID-19.
Under the statute, “Misinformation” means “false information that is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus contrary to the standard of care.” “Disinformation” means “misinformation that the licensee deliberately disseminated with malicious intent or an intent to mislead.” “Disseminate” means “the conveyance of information from the licensee to a patient under the licensee’s care in the form of treatment or advice.”
So if a doctor gives a patient medical advice contrary to the official Covid vaccine narrative, the state medical board may discipline him or take away his license.
California is a one-party state; the Democrats rule and the Republicans lack the ability to significantly influence legislation. So if you want to see the Left’s legislative Christmas list being made into law, watch California.
In addition to the law muzzling doctors and forbidding spoken dissent on the Covid Vaccine, including:
SB 107: California is a sanctuary state for parents who want to mutilate their children. This law allows children from states where physical mutilation, chemical castration, and hormone-blocking chemicals are illegal to obtain such “treatment” in California, prohibits doctors from releasing treatment information to other states, and prohibits California courts from interfering in child custody on the basis of such treatments.
AB 2147: Decriminalizing Jaywalking because of supposed differential impact of Jaywalking on black people—they jaywalk more, get fined more, and, because many are poor, they can ill afford to pay the fines. The law prevents police from stopping people who are crossing the street illegally unless they are in danger. It is difficult to imagine a law to which this type of analysis would not apply; Leftism, which controls the Democratic Party, has enormous contempt for law and order.
SB 1375: Allowing Nurses to Perform Abortions Without Doctors – This law allows nurses to perform certain abortion procedures in the first trimester of pregnancy, without the supervision of a doctor. It is intended to make access to abortion easier and less expensive.
SB 357: Decriminalizing Loitering for Prostitution – This law, another by State Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), decriminalizes loitering in public for the purpose of committing prostitution (which remains a crime). It also allows those convicted of such loitering to petition courts for the dismissal and sealing of their cases. The law aims to remove the social stigma of prostitution, and move toward de facto legalization by removing one of the most important tools the police use to disrupt sex-for-money trade.
AB 257: State Control of Fast Food Restaurants, which creates a ten-member politburo, known as the Fast Food Council, which is empowered to set wages and working conditions for the fast food industry. A coalition of restaurants sued to block this astonishing imposition of communism, and the law has been judicially stayed until a referendum can be held.
Speaking of suing, a group of five California physicians (just five?) has filed suit in federal district court for the Eastern District of California, alleging that the physician muzzling law violates doctors’ constitutional rights to free speech and due process. The law’s definition of misinformation, as “false information that is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus,” is a clear violation of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, noted Dr. Tracy Hoeg, a California physician.
“In safeguarding Americans’ rights to free speech and expression, the First Amendment applies not only to expression of majority opinions, but to minority views as well,” the suit reads. “Indeed, it is minority views that need protection from government censorship—as this law shows. Nor is there an exception to the prohibition on viewpoint-based discrimination simply because the law applies only to a regulated profession. In short, AB 2098 infringes Plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights because it impedes their ability to communicate with their patients in the course of treatment.”
The term “scientific consensus” is also unconstitutionally vague, thus violating the plaintiffs’ rights to due process of law, according to the filing.
The plaintiffs are seeking a preliminary injunction that would block enforcement until the case is resolved.
“We have no doubt that courts will see this unconstitutional law for what it is and strike it down,” Jenin Younes, a lawyer with the New Civil Liberties Alliance who is representing the plaintiffs, said in a statement. If not, “physicians will find themselves in a very difficult position of needing to choose between saying what they truly believe, saying what they think the medical board wants them to say, or simply staying silent.”
Science can never progress if the existing “scientific consensus” is protected from challenge by the force of law. This was the central issue in the Galileo affair: The Catholic Church was protecting a long-established scientific consensus on Geo-centrism that went back 1,500 years, to Ptolemy. The ancient Greek philosophers had established a consensus that the sun orbited the earth; who was Galileo to come along and say they were wrong?
Locking in the “scientific consensus” with the force of law and professional regulation is a short route back to the dark ages or, rather, forward to the coming dark ages. In the 1840s, the scientific consensus was that doctors didn’t need to wash their hands before attending childbirths. Ignaz Semmelweis tried to change that consensus, bringing forward clinical evidence that hand-washing reduced mortality from Puerperal Fever to below 1%. But the “scientific consensus didn’t agree with Semmelweis; the medical profession was offended at the suggestion that their hands needed washing. They had Semmelweis committed to an insane asylum where he was beaten so badly by the guards that he died two weeks later from a gangrenous wound.
Have we progressed since the 1840s? Governor Newsom and the California State Assembly have not, but perhaps sanity will prevail in the judiciary. That this law should be struck down is, in technical legal jargon, “a no brainer,” but the judiciary is as badly broken as the rest of our institutions, so who knows?