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Last Night, the U.S Government Will Never Get to Tell Doctors What They Can Say Anymore
In Kory v. Bonta, a federal judge just barred California’s Attorney General and its medical boards from coming after me and my colleagues for the expert opinions we share with patients.
As of Last Night, the U.S Government Will Never Get to Tell Doctors What They Can Say AnymoreIn Kory v. Bonta, a federal judge just barred California’s Attorney General and its medical boards from coming after me and my colleagues for the expert opinions we share with patients.
What California Attorney General Rob Bonta, whose ass we just kicked in court, probably looks like today. Last night I received a call from my amazing lawyer, Rick Jaffe, who also represented Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski back in the day during the FDA’s decades-long persecution of him, which I wrote about previously. Anyway, he called me with some big news: a federal judge had just signed an order that, four years ago, I thought I would never get. In the case Kory v. Bastard, err, I mean Bonta, senior United States District Judge William B. Shubb granted our renewed motion for a preliminary injunction and ordered not only California’s Attorney General but also the Medical Board of California and the Osteopathic Medical Board, as well as ANYONE acting on their behalf, to stop investigating us, stop prosecuting us, stop harassing us. Most importantly, stop threatening our licenses over any professional opinions we might share with our own patients about Covid-19, the “vaccines,” ivermectin, anything. The order names me and my two colleagues, Dr. Le Trinh Hoang and Dr. Brian Tyson. Let me remind you what this fight was about, because it represents one of the most glaring absurdities perpetrated during the Covid clown show. In 2022, California passed AB 2098, a law that made it professional misconduct for a physician to give a patient Covid advice that departed from the government’s position. Let me repeat that. In the supposed United States of America (which I started to call the United States of Pharma early on in Covid), American physicians in that state, where I was licensed at the time, would have been literally forced to spew state propaganda in our patients’ ears or we would have lost our licenses. Not for fraud. Not for malpractice. No, it would have been for having a different medical opinion from that of our “beloved,” “un-captured” (yeah, right) government health agencies led by Saint Fauci (who, in a beautiful twist of fate, is in a contempt hearing today). The penalty would have been our licenses, which is to say our careers, our livelihoods, and our ability to care for the people who came to us precisely because we would tell them the truth as we saw it. The state took the most personal conversation in medicine, the one between a doctor and a frightened patient, and tried to put its own words in our mouths, with our licenses held as collateral to make sure we complied. We sued. And, incredibly to me at the time, we initially lost. In April 2024, this very same judge initially denied our motion, based on the theory that when a doctor speaks to a patient, that speech is really just “conduct,” and conduct the state is free to regulate. Yup. Under that logic, the most important speech a physician ever delivers, the counsel we give at the bedside, carries less First Amendment protection than a billboard. So we said $%#! that and kept going. Finally, the ground shifted, and it shifted at the Supreme Court. But it wasn’t easy because our appeal was denied by Justice Kagan and then a petition for certiorari was met with… ten months of silence. That is because they were considering a similar case, that of Chiles v. Salazar, which was finally decided this past March. There, the Court provided what I like to call “correction and direction” to Judge Shubb by holding that a professional’s speech to a client is still speech, protected by the First Amendment, and not some lesser category of “conduct” that the government can freely script. That decision pulled the foundation out from under the ruling against us. So we went back to the same courtroom and asked again. This time the answer was yes. To learn of all the shenanigans pulled by the Medical Board and the state of California, as well as all the barriers that Attorney Rick Jaffe had to overcome, please read his post about the case, titled “The Doctor Will Speak To You Now.” It is excellent. |
