California doctors face being disbarred under Covid-19 ‘misinformation’ law

California doctors who give Covid opinions that differ from the state’s health bureaucracy face being disbarred under a radical new bill.

People demonstrate against Covid-19 vaccine mandates for students in Huntington Beach, California. Picture: AFP

Californian doctors who give medical opinions on Covid-19 that differ from the state’s health bureaucracy face being disbarred under a radical new bill passed by both houses of California’s parliament that has inflamed an increasingly partisan debate over government efforts to stamp out “misinformation”.

The bill, which Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom is expected to sign into law within weeks, would make America’s most populous state the first to legislate limits on doctors’ freedom of speech specifically in relation to Covid-19.

Democrat state senator Richard Pan, who proposed the bill, said it would punish only “the most egregious cases” of deliberately misleading patients”, which supporters say have led to thousands of unnecessary deaths across a nation whose Covid-19 vaccination levels remain well below most other developed nations.

“In order for a patient to give informed consent, they have to be well informed,” Mr Pan said, in proposing the bill in February, which has faced little opposition in the state’s heavily Democrat legislature but prompted fury among free speech advocates and some doctors.

The bill defines “misinformation” as “false information that is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus contrary to the standard of care,” and ”disinformation” as providing misinformation with ”malicious intent or an intent to mislead”, leaving arbitration to the California Medical Board.

A health worker fills syringes with Covid-19 vaccine booster shots in San Rafael, California. Picture: AFP

Ram Duriseti, an associate professor of emergency medicine in the San Francisco Bay Area, said the bill reflected an increasing pattern of legislators with no clinical background “feeling increasingly comfortable telling physicians what they should and shouldn’t do”.

“But I would say at no point so far have they said ‘here is the dogma’ for a particular disease … It’s almost like it’s a mechanism for people who have been serially wrong on Covid to quell debate,” he told The Australian.

Dr Duriseti said throughout most of 2021, for instance, it was often deemed “misinformation” to say Covid-19 vaccines wouldn’t stop transmission, illness or in certain cases death, which turned out to be true.

Tracy Hoeg, an epidemiologist and physician scientist in Grass Valley, California, said the idea of scientific consensus medicine was “basically an oxymoron”. “The new bill simply decides for physicians what they can and can‘t say about Covid-19; this is of course Orwellian and anathema to science & medicine,” she told The Australian.

The bill comes amid a national debate over to what extent under the constitution US governments can censor individuals on “public health” grounds.

California Governor Gavin Newsom and US President Joe Biden. Picture: AFP

In a petition filed in a federal court on Wednesday (Thursday AEST) Louisiana and Missouri claimed “dozens of federal officials across at least eleven federal agencies” engaged in a “massive, sprawling federal ‘Censorship Enterprise,‘” with the “intent and effect of pressuring social-media platforms to censor and suppress private speech that federal officials disfavour”.

Jenin Younes, a lawyer at the Washington-based New Civil Liberties Alliance, said the bill was constitutionally “unprecedented” and would face legal challenge.

“It not only infringes on doctors’ ethical obligations to provide their patients with individualised treatment; it also violates their First Amendment rights to free speech,” she told The Australian.

Dr Duriseti said experts often disagree in medicine and conventions could change quickly, citing new-found concerns over-prescribing opioids too readily

“That stands in stark contrast to even 4-5 years ago when they were investigating physicians for complaints about not providing enough pain control.” he said.