https://www.city-journal.org/article/censorship-and-the-public-health-establishment
Perhaps symbolically, on July 4 a federal judge in Louisiana enjoined a long list of federal officers, including White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, from communicating with social media companies in efforts to suppress speech. The government’s machinery for working hand-in-glove with Google, Meta, and (pre-Elon Musk) Twitter to determine jointly what facts and messages can be shared with the public concerning the Covid-19 pandemic came to a dead stop.
Not unexpectedly, after days of Beltway insiders describing the ruling as the reckless product of an uninformed rural judge, the Biden administration asked the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to stay the injunction, which it has done. For the White House and executive agencies, the ability to control speech online is apparently too great a political tool to give up without a fight.
Judge Terry Doughty’s injunction had determined that the plaintiffs in the case were likely to show that public health officials had conspired with social media platforms to censor empirically established facts about Covid-19: its origins, how it spread, what individuals could do to protect themselves, and the efficacy and dangers of the vaccines. In doing so, those officials impinged on Americans’ right to expect the truth from their government.
From virtually the beginning of the pandemic, the federal government adopted a “take no prisoners” strategy on controlling information about Covid. When Francis Collins, then head of the National Institutes of Health, and Anthony Fauci, chief Covid advisor to Presidents Trump and Biden, found their mistaken belief that everyone was equally susceptible to Covid challenged, they set out to silence dissent.
Scientists who argued that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should focus its preventive efforts on more vulnerable populations, including those over 65, found their posts removed from social media platforms by nameless operatives prompted by government liaisons, several of whom are named as defendants. The justification, without any evidence or explanation, was that their views constituted “misinformation,” an Orwellian characterization encouraged by federal officials, according to Judge Doughty.