By Aaron Kheriaty at Brownstone dot org.

The following was originally published in Humanum and is reprinted here with permission.

Because we would all prefer to forget the Covid crisis and move on, the following may have already faded from our collective memory. Only a few years ago, Australia rounded up citizens exposed to Covid, including asymptomatic people, and shipped them involuntarily to detention facilities against their will. Videos of Australian quarantine centers made their way onto social media before tech censors, at the behest of governments, dutifully scrubbed them from the internet.

Many provincial governors in Australia abused their emergency powers: while not every Australian state chose full-throated authoritarianism, several of them did. Canada likewise built detention facilities for infected persons, and the state of New York fought an ongoing legal battle to do so.

Authoritarian measures during the Covid crisis went beyond forced detainment of suspected or actual cases.

The Medical Indemnity Protection Society (MIPS) in Australia, which provides medical malpractice insurance to all the country's physicians, published twelve commandments for physicians on their website to avoid disciplinary "notifications" - an Orwellian euphemism for investigations overseen by the Australian Health Practitioner Regulatory Agency, the governing entity overseeing all physicians. The MIPS Commandment #9 instructed Australian doctors as follows:

Be very careful when using social media (even on your personal pages), when authoring papers or when appearing in interviews. Health practitioners are obliged to ensure their views are consistent with public health messaging. This is particularly relevant in current times. Views expressed which may be consistent with evidence-based material may not necessarily be consistent with public health messaging.

Read that last sentence one more time: "evidence-based material" refers to peer-reviewed scientific papers or other sources of credible medical information. So, if Australian doctors mention findings of a published study which are not consistent with "public health messaging" - i.e., the approved views of the public health bureaucrats in power - these physicians could potentially lose their ability to practice medicine.

Notice that this applies also to physicians "authoring papers," meaning that if a doctor conducts research and his findings contradict "public health messaging," he'd better think twice before publishing the results.

Likewise, in the US, the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB), an authority on medical licensure and physician discipline, passed a policy in May 2022 on medical misinformation and disinformation that guides all state medical boards and the nation's physicians they license. My home state of California took up the FSMB's suggestion to codify these recommendations in law with Assembly Bill 2098.

I traveled to Sacramento to testify against this legislation when it was debated in the State Senate.

The law would empower the state medical board to discipline physicians - including revoking their medical licenses - for spreading "misinformation," defined in the law as statements that contradict the current scientific consensus. Undermining its own central claims, the text of AB 2098 made three statements about Covid that were already outdated by the time I testified, because science constantly evolves. Science relies on evidence, not on consensus, which is why I argued in my testimony:

A physician with a gag order is not a physician you can trust. Advances in science and medicine occur when doctors and scientists challenge conventional thinking or settled opinion. Good science is characterized by conjecture and refutation, lively deliberation, fierce debate, and openness to new data. Thus, fixating any consensus as "unassailable" will stifle medical progress. Frontline physicians challenging conventional thinking played a key role in advancing knowledge of...