This story was originally published by the WND News Center.
It was Francis Collins, who was Joe Biden's director of the National Institutes of Health, who demanded a "swift and devastating takedown" when experts in the field of medicine suggested that the Biden administration's lockdowns, shutdowns, social distancing, and masking demands weren't really needed to deal with COVID-19.
Collins falsely characterized those physicians as "fringe epidemiologists."
He worked with Anthony Fauci, then Biden's medical adviser on COVID, and others, to accomplish his goals
"The government had a vast censorship enterprise," explained Dr. Jay Bhattacharya explained in a report in the New York Post.
"It was systematically used to threaten and coerce and jawbone and tell all these social media companies, 'You better listen to us: Censor these people, censor these ideas, or else.'"
Social media companies in unison suppressed the information.
"Subsequent reporting from Elon Musk’s so-called Twitter Files — internal documents and communications released by Musk, after he bought the platform, to expose Twitter’s inner workings — revealed that Bhattachrya’s profile was being suppressed on the platform," the Post report said.
"It’s akin to the efforts by governments to suppress the printing press when it first was invented when books represented an enormous threat to power," Bhattacharya said, referring to efforts by King Henry VIII and the Catholic Church to curb the use of the printing press in the 16th century, according to the Post..
"There’s an analogous fight that’s currently going on with social media, which makes it vastly easier for anybody to express their ideas, and very powerful people find that incredibly threatening."
The report, pointing out that Bhattacharya "won in court," cited a recent ruling from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that "found that the Biden administration and other federal agencies 'engaged in a years-long pressure campaign [on social media outlets] designed to ensure that the censorship aligned with the government’s preferred viewpoints' and that 'the platforms, in capitulation to state-sponsored pressure, changed their moderation policies.'"
The ruling said the surgeon general, CDC, and FBI under the Biden administration likely were part of a scheme to violate the First Amendment.
Bhattacharya said the ruling was "akin to the second Enlightenment. It’s a ruling that says there’s a democracy of ideas. The issue is not whether the ideas are wrong or right. The question is who gets to control what ideas are expressed in the public square?"
The court says Biden's appointees "shall take no actions, formal or informal, directly or indirectly" to force social media companies to censor posts.
Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine, economics, and health research policy at Stanford University and co-wrote the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020, advocating for a "focused protection" against COVID. They suggested safeguarding the most vulnerable but allowing others to live lives as normal as possible.
That actually was done in other nations, with great success.
Bhaattacharya, however, said the Biden administration, rather than following science, was intolerant of science.
"We were just acting as scientists, but almost immediately we were censored," he explained. "Google de-boosted us. Our Facebook page was removed. It was just a crazy time."
Biden has since taken his demands for the right to censor any idea with which he disagrees to the Supreme Court, but Bhattacharya believes a different outcome isn't likely.
