What a wild coincidence: one branch of government (judiciary) doesn’t mind another branch of government (executive) doing whatever it likes extraconstitutionally.
That’s called Democracy™, boys and girls, and it’s sacred.
What a wild coincidence: one branch of government (judiciary) doesn’t mind another branch of government (executive) doing whatever it likes extraconstitutionally.
That’s called Democracy™, boys and girls, and it’s sacred.
“Meta Platforms defeated an appeal by Children’s Health Defense, an anti-vaccine group founded by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., challenging its censorship of Facebook posts that spread misinformation about vaccines’ efficacy and safety.
In a decision on Friday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Pasadena, California, said the nonprofit did not show that Meta worked with or was coerced by federal officials to suppress views challenging “government orthodoxy” on vaccines.
Children’s Health Defense sued in 2020, saying that Meta had violated its constitutional rights by flagging “vaccine misinformation” as false, and taking away its right to advertise on Facebook.”
Not being a legal scholar, I’m sure there’s a good answer to this, but I’m not clear: why would CHD sue Meta and not the government for violating its First Amendment rights, when it was at the government’s behest that Meta acted?
“CHD’s suit accused the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other federal agencies of “privatizing” the First Amendment by teaming up with Facebook to censor speech which, “under the Bill of Rights, the Government cannot censor.”
According to the lawsuit, filed in August 2020 — and amended in December 2020 — the CDC and the World Health Organization “collaborated closely with Facebook to suppress vaccine safety speech by using a ‘warning label’ and other similar types of notices which, while purporting to flag misinformation, in reality censor valid and truthful speech, including content posted by plaintiff on its Facebook page regarding vaccines.”
This collaboration amounted to “state action” and was in violation of the First Amendment, CHD said…
Second, the CPSO is commanding doctors to breach their pledge to patients to seek out and apply evidence-based medicine in their care and treatment. Instead of a full range of current and emerging evidence from multiple sources, doctors are restricted to applying stagnant information from only one source: the government.
Third, doctors are being ordered to violate their patients’ right to be fully informed before receiving medical treatment.This implies that doctors will also have to violate their own duty to obtain fully informed consent, putting themselves at risk for eventual lawsuits.
On April 30, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) announced explicitly a controversial policy that many Ontario doctors had intuitively feared it would adopt. Its Twitter feed, @cpso_ca, contained the framed statement shown below.
CPSO commands Ontario’s doctors not to make any statements that might be considered anti-vaccine, anti-masking, anti-distancing, or anti-lockdown. It forbids them to promote “unsupported, unproven” treatments for COVID-19. (Unproven by what standards? CPSO doesn’t say.) Doctors are further forbidden to make comments that might encourage people to act contrary to public health orders.
Finally, there’s a naked threat: say the wrong thing and you’ll face “disciplinary action”. This translates into, “We’ll suspend your licence, cut off your income stream and impoverish you.”
This is a horrifying statement from both a medical and a legal perspective.
A courageous group of doctors calling themselves Canadian Physicians for Science and Truth quickly pushed back with this online Declaration. As I write this, 548 doctors and 14,487 concerned citizens have already signed it.
The doctors make these three major objections. First, the CPSO is commanding them to abandon the scientific method, which requires vigorous, open debate in order to test existing theories and improve upon or replace them with more accurate ones. That’s how science advances.
Second, the CPSO is commanding doctors to breach their pledge to patients to seek out and apply evidence-based medicine in their care and treatment. Instead of a full range of current and emerging evidence from multiple sources, doctors are restricted to applying stagnant information from only one source: the government.
Third, doctors are being ordered to violate their patients’ right to be fully informed before receiving medical treatment. This implies that doctors will also have to violate their own duty to obtain fully informed consent, putting themselves at risk for eventual lawsuits. Full information about masks, social distancing and vaccinations is not something you can impart to a patient in a 5-minute office visit. Half the world has spent the past 15 months seeking out information about these subjects, and there’s still plenty of room for debate.
It’s therefore easy to see why doctors are outraged by the new CPSO policy. But as a lawyer, I can see two other problems.
First, the dictates of the CPSO violate the Ontario Human Rights Code. Section 6 of the code says: “Every person has a right to equal treatment with respect to membership in any trade union, trade or occupational association orself-governing profession without discrimination because of race, ancestry, place of origin, colour, ethnic origin, citizenship, creed, sex…” [emphasis added].
The CPSO’s threat is a clear statement of its intention to discriminate on the basis of creed. Although some people interpret “creed” as religion, it actually has a broader meaning. If ever anything qualified as a creed, a doctor’s Hippocratic oath would. It requires doctors to use their own judgment for the benefit of their patients and to “abstain from whatever is deleterious.” Doctors also pledge to “give no deadly medicine to anyone if asked.”
Any doctor who has extensively researched the scientific literature on mask-wearing, social distancing, lockdowns and COVID vaccinations will know that there is an increasing body of evidence that all of these practices can do more harm than good. More than 5,100 vaccination-related deaths have this been recorded in the US database called Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), where adverse events are notoriously under-reported. The number in Europe is over 10,000. Doctors can’t “un-see” this information. It forms an important part of the cost/benefit analysis in determining whether or not COVID vaccines are appropriate for their patients.
The CPSO, by threatening the licences of doctors who speak up about these issues, is forbidding them to exercise their creed and discriminating against those that do, contrary to the Human Rights Code.
Doctors also have rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms: section 2 rights to freedom of conscience, belief, opinion and expression, as well as section 7 rights to liberty and security of the person. The CPSO statement, with its implicit threat to cut off doctors’ incomes, violates these rights. As the body exclusively empowered by the state to govern doctors’ conduct, there’s no question that the CPSO is an agent of the state and is therefore governed by the Charter.
Other professionals in the health care industry – chiropractors and naturopathic doctors – have told me privately that they too are being bullied into silence and forced to comply with inadvisable practices such as masking.
Eventually, this issue will come before the courts – possibly when a doctor disobeys the CPSO and is facing disciplinary action, or when doctors proactively hire lawyers to sue the CPSO for violating their rights. For me, the moment can’t come too soon.
Karen Selick [send her mail] is a retired lawyer who now works as a freelance writer, editor, and video maker.
How is it that what is essentially a slanderous lie gets repeated over and over again in prominent media outlets as if it is the truth?
Think about this while you are waiting to pump aluminum and mercury into your 6 month old or are waiting in line at the grocery/pharmacy for your discount, 20% effective flu vaccine.
Do what you are told-it is for your own good. Obey.
As the US Senate holds entirely one-sided hearings on the topic of vaccines, with the likely goal of imposing vaccine mandates nationwide, we’re hearing it again: The claim that we are now experiencing dangerous outbreaks of a disease that had already been eradicated (they aren’t, and it hadn’t), and that it’s all the fault of Dr. Andrew Wakefield and his “discredited” Lancet paper.
According to this narrative, after the publication of the Lancet paper, (which identified a possible association between the MMR vaccine and autism, and called for further investigation), parents panicked, stopped giving their children the MMR vaccine, and measles cases skyrocketed.
“But following the popularization of Andrew Wakefield’s 1998 fraudulent study, linking the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine to autism in children, followed by celebrity endorsement of vaccines linked to autism, vaccination rates declined over the past decade, leading to larger and larger outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases, many of which carry life-threatening and/or organ-threatening complications.”
“In the U.S., measles was declared eliminated in 2000. Since 2000, however, there has been a resurgence of measles, with more than 2,216 reported cases. Wakefield’s anti-vaccine fanaticism contributed to the 2015 outbreak in Disneyland in California, which eventually infected more than 130 people, and to the 2017 measles outbreaks in Minnesota, where his message persuaded many parents not to vaccinate their children.”
It’s a thrilling narrative for those who seek to force vaccines on the people around them. The only problem is that it’s not true.
MMR vaccination rates in the US did drop slightly in 1997 – the year before the Wakefield study was published – and again in 1998. However they rose again the following year, and have remained at or above pre-1997 rates since then. In fact, the four years immediately following the Lancet study saw higher MMR vaccination rates than in the four years preceding the study. Read the rest of this entry »
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