If you asked me five years ago, I might have struggled to name many people I considered to be heroes. I have many heroes now, many of them people who stood up to censorship. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya is a highly credentialed doctor, which means that we should have been allowed to hear his opinions during the pandemic. But he was censored, so we did not learn of all of these harms that a lock-down would create:

In the following interview, Dr. Bhattacharya tells his story, including his contributions to the Great Barrington Declaration to his role in the case of Missouri v Biden, which appears destined to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.

I created the following transcript for those who absorb details better through reading:

The sad fact is that we are living in a time where our once liberal societies are no longer liberal. We live in a deeply illiberal society that punishes people for openly expressing heretical thoughts. And that statement that I just made that we live in, in illiberal society requires some justification. I mean, nominally, we have democracies with constitutions, charters, whatever committed to essential civil liberties necessary for a liberal society.

And I admit, before the pandemic, I took these rights for granted. I took the right to free speech for granted. The right to worship. The right to protest the right to free movement across borders. But during the pandemic, what I learned was that the government could violate each and every one of these rights in the name of infection control. During the pandemic, governments made it nearly impossible for independent scientists to discuss and disseminate ideas contrary to government public health policy. The government censored smeared and defamed dissident scientists who criticized government authorities in the name of science. And I say this from firsthand experience.

What I want to do today is I want to tell you the mechanisms by which the government accomplished this amazing feat of silencing scientists. The way that the US government, I learned, violated my free speech rights, and those of my scientists, colleagues for questioning federal government COVID policies. The American government working in concert with big tech companies, defamed and oppressed me and my colleagues for criticizing official pandemic policies, that criticism that’s proved to be prescient. And while this may sound like a conspiracy theory, in fact it’s a documented fact, and its one just one recently confirmed in a Federal Circuit Court.

So the main reason I am so looking forward to talking to you is to tell you about my experience with this court case, which has absolutely blown the lid off of the mechanisms by which the government suppresses speech. In August of 2022, the Missouri and Louisiana Attorney General’s Offices in the United States asked me to join as a plaintiff in a lawsuit against the Biden administration. The suit, still ongoing, aims to end the government’s role in censorship and restore free speech rights.

The lawyers in this case, this Missouri versus Biden case, took sworn depositions from many federal officials involved in the censorship effort, including Tony Fauci, I highly recommend if you have time, to go look at the eight-hour deposition that he gave to the lawyers where he could not recall basic scientific facts. In fact, he said, I don’t recall 179 times in eight hours. It’s great, amusing listening, if you have a few moments to hear somebody who stated the  narrative tell you that he doesn’t recall the scientific basis on which he said it.

The legal discovery also unearthed email exchanges between the government and social media companies. The content of these emails were absolutely shocking. It showed an administration willing to threaten and use regulatory power to harm social media companies that did not comply with censorship demands.

The case revealed that a dozen federal agencies and this includes the Surgeon General’s Office, the US CDC, the FBI, the State Department. They pressure Google, Facebook, Twitter to censor and suppress speech contradicting federal pandemic priorities. If you ever had any post on Google or on Twitter or on Facebook suppressed, it may very well been as a result of the demands by the US Federal Government, that speech that contradicted its policies be censored. In the name of suppressing misinformation, the government forced the social media companies to suppress true facts. This included facts relating to the evidence for immunity after COVID recovery, the inefficacy and damage of mask mandates and the inability of the vaccine to stop disease transmission. True or false, if that speech interfered with government priorities, it had to go. And it didn’t matter if you had credentials. That didn’t matter. If you had facts or papers on your side, your speech would be labeled as misinformation or it would be taken off the platform altogether.

And the threats were severe. Essentially, what the government told the social media companies that is that if they didn’t suppress speech, then the government would would go after the social media companies using regulatory powers. One judge writing about this evidentiary records analogize it to a mob mob attack with someone like Al Capone, going to a company and saying, “Well, that’s a nice company you have there, wouldn’t it be terrible something would happen to it?” And of course, social media companies complied. They like to have their companies run, and so they silenced a tremendous number of people, including scientists, to suppress speech.

And now I want to talk for a moment about the mechanism by which modern censorship actually works. It’s not just by removing speech. I mean, the internet is such that you will be able to hear speech even if it the government wants to censor. The key mechanism is by essentially labeling scientists, labeling people, labeling ideas as as outside the bounds, essentially excommunicating heretics by labeling ideas too dangerous to even think or speak, even if they’re true. The government uses social media companies essentially to set the bounds for discussion. And if you disagree, you’re a dissident. You’re a heretic. You’re going to be smeared as a misinformation artist.

Okay, so that’s the bad news that we have governments around the world, and especially the American government, working to suppress speech in this way. But on July 4 of this year, the US Federal District Court, Judge Terry Doughty, issued a preliminary injunction in this case ordering the government to immediately stop coercing social media companies. In the decision Doughty called the administration censorship infrastructure “an Orwellian Ministry of Truth.” You wrote this in a federal ruling. And then in August, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed. The Biden ministration had indeed strong-arm social media companies and are doing its bidding. The court found that the Biden administration the CDC, the Surgeon General’s Office, and the White House itself, had engaged in a year’s-long pressure campaign on social media outlets designed to ensure that the censorship aligned with the government’s preferred viewpoints.

I must spend a couple of minutes and you all I heard you all cheer the Great Barrington declaration. I’m so grateful for every one of you that signed it. Thank you. And I’ll tell you is the results of your signing that you put yourself at some risk of being censored.  It was ideas like the Great Barrington declaration. The trouble began on October 4 2020. When my colleagues night Dr. Martin Kilduff, Professor of Medicine, Harvard and Dr. Sunetra Gupta, an epidemiologist at the University of Oxford, and their colleagues published the great Barrington Declaration.  We called for an end to economic lockdowns, to school shutdowns and to other restrictive policies. Because, I don’t need to tell you, they harmed the poor, they harmed children. They harmed the economically disadvantaged, they harmed the working class while conferring limited benefits. It calls for focused protection, for strong measures to protect high risk populations, especially the elderly. We spent trillions. Why not spend it protecting people at high risk?  And then calling for a low risk people return to normal life. Tens of 1000s of doctors public health scientists signed on.

Julian mentioned Sweden, there’s a there’s this kind of country that apparently no one remembers in the northern part of Europe. Sweden, which didn’t have lockdowns, after early problems that embraced focused protection, they had among the lowest all-cause excess deaths,age-adjusted than every other country in Europe, including the UK, including the United States, including Germany, including including Finland, including Norway.  And they suffered none of the learning loss with elementary school kids because they kept schools open for kids under 16 through the entire pandemic. In the United States, Florida, which followed a much more reasonable policy, compared to much of the rest of the US, especially places like where I live in California, Florida has had lower all cause excess deaths than California since the start of the pandemic.

It turns out that civil liberties are good for your health. That in fact, though you were told that we needed to lock down we needed to comply, needed to deal with free speech orders. All of those were actually worse, bad for your health.

Had we just simply followed a liberal society’s commitment to free speech and other civil liberties we would have better health outcomes. And that Florida-California comparison and the Swedish comparison makes that very clear.

So the government–was they wanted to suppress was the fact that there were prominent scientists opposed lockdowns and had alternate ideas like the Great Barrington Declaration. They wanted to make an illusion of consensus in favor of lockdowns.

It’s impossible for me to speculate what might have happened if we’d had a more typical scientific spirit. Without censorship, we would have won the debate and the world would have moved along with a different and better path these last three and a half years.

Censorship is the death of science. It inevitably leads to the death of people. The US and the UK should have been a bulwark against it, but it wasn’t during the pandemic. The tide is turning with cases like Missouri versus Biden, which is now sitting at the Supreme Court. But we have to reform our scientific institutions so that what happened during the pandemic never happens again. And every formerly liberal countries, governments that suppressed some free speech . . . well, we have to work together to stop them, both at the judiciary and at the ballot box. Thank you for letting me talk.