A federal appeals court ruled that the White House, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the FBI, and the surgeon general violated a Stanford doctor's First Amendment rights by using social media to silence him.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine, economics, and health research policy at Stanford University, co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020, which raised important questions about how lockdowns and other COVID-19 policies were handled in the U.S. during the pandemic.
"We were just acting as scientists, but almost immediately, we were censored. Google de-boosted us. Our Facebook page was removed. It was just a crazy time," Bhattacharya told the New York Post.
A three-judge panel based in New Orleans found that the federal government worked with social media companies to silence certain viewpoints on COVID-19.
"The government had a vast censorship enterprise. It was systematically used to threaten and coerce and jawbone and tell all these social media companies, You better listen to us: Censor these people, censor these ideas, or else," Bhattacharya said.
Jeremy Frankel ✉
Jeremy Frankel is a Newsmax writer reporting on news and politics.