Earlier this month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled in Missouri v. Biden that by coercing social media platforms “via urgent, uncompromising demands” into censoring users who voiced dissenting or disfavored views, officials from the White House, the Surgeon General’s office, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation likely violated the First Amendment.
And by “commandeering their decision-making processes,” these same officials significantly encouraged social media platforms to censor speech the government didn’t like. That poses First Amendment problems, too. As the court wrote: “Social-media platforms’ content-moderation decisions must be theirs and theirs alone.”
Harvard University Professor of Medicine Martin Kulldorff, one of the plaintiffs in Missouri v. Biden, said “it wasn’t just that the government censored false information but it censored true information” about Covid. “Of course, the First Amendment should be valid for both, but it’s also true that the government censored true information, and people died because of that.”
One fact the government continually censored is that people who make it through a Covid infection develop robust immunity against a repeat infection, Kulldorff told The Federalist in an interview published on Sept. 28. The immunity conferred on survivors of most diseases, “We’ve known about this since 400 BC with the Athenian plague. We’ve known about this for 2,000 years, yet they questioned that for Covid,” he added said. “It’s astonishing.”
Acting on this long-proven scientific fact by hiring naturally immune workers in nursing homes, for example, could have prevented deaths in one of the highest-risk locations during the Covid pandemic, Kulldorff pointed out.
Kulldorff, an epidemiologist and infectious disease expert with more than 200 research articles published in peer-reviewed publications and cited more than 25,000 times, said he attempted to make scientific arguments against lockdowns in U.S. publications since February 2020, but he could only get his views into Swedish publications.
“Anthony Fauci, when he was director of NIAID, he sat on the biggest pile of infectious disease money in the world. NIH, [controlled during lockdowns by] Francis Collins, controls funds for not only infectious diseases but all of public health,” Kulldorff noted. “So when they take a very strong stand on a specific policy … it’s very concerning, because that means that scientists are not going to dare to speak up because they are afraid of losing research funds, they are afraid of losing their livelihood. I think that was a huge problem in the pandemic.”
Kulldorff told The Federalist that he tried getting his support for “focused protection” instead of mass lockdowns out on social media. In his view, it was especially important that American children be allowed to go back to school, while neighbors continued to take precautions on behalf of the elderly and others at high risk of a Covid infection, unlike most children.
In attempting to speak on Twitter, however, Kulldorff was blocked by what Missouri v. Biden lawsuit later discovered was a “vast censorship enterprise” throttling Americans’ ideas online at the behest of multitudes of government officials and government-funded proxies.
When the lawsuit was filed, Kulldorff and other plaintiffs including Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University had no idea of the lengths the White House and other federal agencies, including the FBI and Department of Homeland Security, were going to to censor Americans’ social media accounts and suggesting keywords to platforms to ban and throttle, Kulldorff said. They just knew social media platforms kept banning their accounts, posts, and ideas when they publicly disagreed with federal officials.
Open records requests before the lawsuit revealed that high-level federal officials moved to stop people from reading or hearing about the Great Barrington Declaration that Kulldorff co-authored with Bhattacharya and Dr. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University, who are epidemiologists with sterling professional records.
The Great Barrington Declaration, published online in October 2020, was co-signed by nearly 1 million people, including more than 62,000 verified scientists and health-care professionals. It argued for “focused protection,” or extra measures to protect those at high risk from Covid while ending lockdowns, because for the vast majority of people the costs of lockdowns were greater than their risks from Covid.
“[F]our days after the Declaration’s publication, then-Director of NIH, Dr. Francis Collins, emailed Dr. Anthony Fauci and Cliff Lane at NIH/NIAID about the Great Barrington Declaration,” says the plaintiffs’ Supreme Court filing. “This email stated: ‘Hi Tony and Cliff, See: https://gbdeclaration.org/. This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists who met with the Secretary seems to be getting a lot of attention – and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises.' ”
Missouri v. Biden notes that, soon after the declaration was published, Google made it harder for people to find in online searches and elevated hit pieces on the declaration in its search results. The Biden administration has appealed the case to the Supreme Court.
Reddit banned links to the declaration in its Covid forums, and Facebook temporarily suspended the declaration’s page without an explanation, the lawsuit also says.
In May 2021, Twitter suspended Kulldorff’s account for a month after he posted that “masks endow vulnerable individuals with a false sense of security, because they actually do not work well to protect against viral infection.” In 2022, the “Twitter Files” showed that Twitter employees had also kept Kulldorff’s ideas from spreading on an equal basis to other posts on their platform. Twitter “slapped” his expert opinion with a “misleading” label and banned likes and replies.
Kulldorff noted: “At this point I think everybody realizes that was a big mistake and people like Fauci, who were arguing for school closures in 2020, they are now claiming they wanted schools to be open. Silencing people, censoring people, slandering people did create worse outcomes in this pandemic than we would otherwise have had.”
From the #TwitterFiles: I was not only blacklisted and temporarily suspended by Twitter. When I gave accurate #CovidVaccines information, some Twitter dude labelled it misleading and suppressed it by prevented comments and likes. https://t.co/9ppjIJOrmL
— Martin Kulldorff (@MartinKulldorff) December 26, 2022
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