Physician Group Files Amicus Brief Against Biden in COVID-19 Censorship Lawsuit

Doses of Pfizer's Covid-19 vaccine that received emergency authorization await distribution at George Washington University Hospital in Washington on Dec. 14, 2020. JACQUELYN MARTIN/POOL/AFP via Getty Images

The Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) filed an amicus brief against the Biden administration in a Supreme Court case, criticizing the government’s online censorship of COVID-19 information.

The lawsuit, Murthy v. Missouri, alleges that the administration engaged in coercing social media platforms to suppress COVID-19 content.

The American Medical Association (AMA) and other groups filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court supporting the Biden administration.

In its brief, AMA and its allies said that the federal government had a “compelling interest” in the case. They justified censorship by arguing that “combatting vaccine misinformation is, at its simplest, the government trying to prevent factually incorrect statements from costing people their lives.”

The AAPS filed its brief on Feb. 7,  slamming AMA’s position.

“Our national motto is not ‘In Vaccines We Trust’, or even ‘In Government We Trust.’ The right to criticize vaccines and government mandates of vaccines should not be abridged” as sought after by the AMA and “other allies of the Biden Administration,” the brief said.

“Freedom to criticize is an essential safeguard against tyranny, and a First Amendment right … It is alarming that any professional organization would argue for censorship as the AMA Amici do in this case.”

The AMA amicus brief is supported by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American College of Physicians, and the American Geriatrics Society.

“The argument by the AMA Amici to declare a compelling interest in vaccination such that censorship of it would be allowed should be firmly rejected here,” AAPS said in its brief. For more than 50 years, there have not been any new categories of unprotected speech, it said.

“Criticism of vaccination is warranted in response to the exaggerations of benefits of vaccination and the denial of its proven harms, as illustrated by the AMA Amici brief here.

“A sharp decline in the prevalence of diseases cited by the AMA Amici began before the relevant vaccine became commonly used, thereby disproving the asserted cause-and-effect.”

The AMA brief also fails to reference the “immense harm” caused by several novel or contaminated vaccines, like the first polio shots, AAPS stated.

Allowing the federal government to censor vaccine criticism will open the doorway to “an unaccountable license to play God in tinkering with human biology.”

AAPS warned that by seeking to censor criticism of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine, the AMA brief signers “implicitly seek censorship of criticism of anything that may be called a vaccine in the future under yet another redefinition of that term.”

Could Ban RFK Jr.

If adopted, AMA’s proposal would allow the government to censor presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose book “The Real Anthony Fauci” could also be banned by the administration, AAPS added.

“The same arguments made by the AMA Amici could be extended to other types of speech disfavored by the Biden Administration, such as criticism of transgender procedures and late-term abortion,” the group said.

“The requested censorship by or with government should be fully rejected here.”

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on March 18. The lawsuit was filed by the state of Missouri, Louisiana, several social media users, and the founder of the blog Gateway Pundit.

The Epoch Times reached out to the White House and AMA for comment.

Under President Joe Biden, the federal government is alleged to have engaged in censorship of COVID-19 vaccine-related discussions online.

In February 2022, then-White House press secretary Jen Psaki said that the administration wanted “every platform to continue doing more” in calling out what the government deemed to be “COVID-19 misinformation.”

Facebook Faces Pressure

Last year, it was revealed that Facebook complied with requests from White House staff to throttle the reach of a 2021 video by Tucker Carlson that discussed COVID-19 vaccines.

Facebook was also pressured to censor content suggesting that COVID-19 could have been man-made, according to certain emails released last year.

In a message from July 2021, Nick Clegg, Facebook’s head of global affairs, asked colleagues why Facebook was “removing—rather than demoting/labeling—claims that Covid is man-made?”

An employee responded: “Because we were under pressure from the administration and others to do more.”

Earlier this month, newly disclosed emails showed that Biden administration officials pressured Amazon to censor some COVID-19 books.

In another amicus brief filed in the Murthy v. Missouri lawsuit, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) told the U.S. Supreme Court that “getting the correct answer in this case is extraordinarily important given the interconnected mosaic of First Amendment issues the Court is considering this Term.”

“A common thread running through these cases is whether the government actors may evade constitutional review by strategically claiming they are doing something other than speech regulation. The Court should not let them get away with it.”

The Biden administration is also facing another free speech lawsuit filed in December by the state of Texas and conservative media outlets The Federalist and The Daily Wire.

The lawsuit accuses the State Department, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and several officials from the department’s Global Engagement Center of intervening in the news media market by creating blacklists of outlets deemed to be spreading “disinformation.”

“These entities generate blacklists of ostensibly risky or unreliable American news outlets for the purpose of discrediting the disfavored press and redirecting money and audiences to news organizations that publish favored viewpoints,” the complaint said.