(Mark Pellin, Headline USA) In the growing backlash to the Biden regime reportedly colluding with Big Tech to suppress, discredit and cancel any narrative that ran counter to Fauci-approved COVID thinking, a group of scientists and doctors has joined a lawsuit in the fight against government censorship.
“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,” the New Civil Liberties Alliance announced in a statement representing the group of scientists and doctors.
The group of high-profile medical experts joined the suit filed by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, which alleged that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other administration agencies abetted social media companies like Twitter, Google and Facebook to censor open discussion of the pandemic and the government’s draconian response.
“That is exactly what has occurred over the past several years, beginning with express and implied threats from government officials and culminating in the Biden Administration’s open and explicit censorship programs,” the filing alleged.
“Having threatened and cajoled social-media platforms for years to censor viewpoints and speakers disfavored by the Left, senior government officials in the Executive Branch have moved into a phase of open collusion with social-media companies to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content on social-media platforms under the Orwellian guise of halting so-called “disinformation,” “misinformation,” and “malinformation.”
The group of scientists included Drs. Jayanta Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, who claimed they were censored for promoting their co-authored Great Barrington Declaration, which gathered nearly a million endorsements from fellow scientists and doctors and expressed “grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies.”
The pair called, instead, for “Focused Protection” that concentrated efforts to benefit society’s most vulnerable citizens.
Documents recently released the America First Legal Foundation showed on ongoing and concentrated effort by government agencies and Big Tech to suppress and censor certain COVID narratives.
“These explosive smoking-gun documents . . . conclusively demonstrate that Big Tech has unlawfully colluded with the federal government to silence, censor, and suppress Americans’ free speech and violate their First Amendment rights,” AFL president Stephen Miller said in a statement.
Along with countless other medical professionals who expressed concern over the Biden administration’s lockdowns, vaccine mandates and forced masking, Bhattacharya and Kulldorff alleged they were targeted for suppression and censorship by government agencies including the CDC, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Homeland Security and Nina Jankowicz as head of the so-called Disinformation Governance Board.
I am suing the government (@POTUS, @CDCgov, Fauci, etc) for colluding with @Twitter, @facebook, @LinkedIn and @YouTube to censor our free speech during the pandemic, jointly with @Eric_Schmitt, @JeffLandry, @DrJBhattacharya, @akheriaty & @HealthFreedomLA.https://t.co/g2YvCv9wCA
— Martin Kulldorff (@MartinKulldorff) August 3, 2022
“The government may not work through private entities to accomplish censorship that the First Amendment forbids the government from doing directly,” said NCLA president and general counsel Mark Chenoweth.
“Yet that is precisely what these federal defendants have been up to,” he said.
“NCLA is delighted to join forces with these state attorneys-general to reverse this constitutional outrage and restore free speech to the social media platforms that are today’s public square.”
