Multiple Scientists Sue Biden Admin For Censoring COVID-19 Facts

Several scientists have joined a lawsuit filed by the states of Louisiana and Missouri alleging that the Biden administration worked with tech companies to censor American citizens discussing issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) joined the lawsuit representing Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, and Martin Kulldorff, former professor of medicine at Harvard University as well as a former member of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) Vaccine Safety Subgroup. Two more doctors, Jill Hines and Aaron Kheriaty, are also represented by NCLA in the lawsuit.

The press release reads as follows,

“Public statements, emails, and recent publicly released documents establish that the President of the United States and other senior officials in the Biden Administration violated the First Amendment by directing social-media companies to censor viewpoints that conflict with the government’s messaging on Covid-19. Today, the New Civil Liberties Alliance joined the lawsuit, State of Missouri ex rel. Schmitt, et al. v. Joseph R. Biden, Jr., et al., representing renowned epidemiologists and co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, Drs. Jayanta Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, as well as Dr. Aaron Kheriaty and Jill Hines. Social media platforms, acting at the federal government’s behest, repeatedly censored NCLA’s clients for articulating views on those platforms in opposition to government-approved views on Covid-19 restrictions.

This insidious censorship was the direct result of the federal government’s ongoing campaign to silence those who voice perspectives that deviate from those of the Biden Administration. Government officials’ public threats to punish social media companies that did not do their bidding demonstrate this linkage, as do emails from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to social media companies that only recently were made public.

Government-induced censorship is achieved through a wide variety of mechanisms, ranging from complete bans, temporary bans, “shadow bans” (where often neither the user nor his audience is notified of the suppression of speech), deboosting, de-platforming, de-monetizing, restricting access to content, requiring users to take down content, and imposing warning labels that require click-through to access content, among others. These methods also include temporary and permanent suspensions of disfavored speakers.

This sort of censorship, which strikes at the heart of what the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect—free speech, especially political speech—constitutes unlawful government action. The federal government is deciding whose voices and ideas may be heard, and whose voices and ideas must be silenced. Moreover, this state action deprives Americans of their right to hear the views of those who are being silenced, a First Amendment corollary of the right to free speech. The government’s policy of coercing social-media companies to censor Plaintiffs’ viewpoints should be declared unlawful and halted immediately.”