UC Faculty Challenge University's Suppression of Free Speech

ABSTRACT

A group of senior University of California professors was denied free speech and academic freedom by university administration and its nine student newspapers during the COVID-19 pandemic in furtherance of the university’s abominable policy of silencing all dissent, questioning, and criticisms of its draconian COVID policies. The system’s failure to allow public access to numerous highly credentialed scientific critiques of its scientifically unsubstantiated adoption of unproven, dangerous public health policies was blatant censorship causing immense mental, emotional, ethical, and physical suffering and harms. We write this article to caution the academic community to marshal its resolve to resist the silencing of scientific dissent and critique in the not unlikely event of future global emergencies.

BACKGROUND

In December 2019, the China office of the World Health Organization (WHO) reported a “novel” type of pneumonia circulating in Wuhan. Just one month later, the WHO’s International Health Regulation Emergency Committee named it “2019 Novel Coronavirus” (SARS CoV-2) and declared it a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC, i.e., a pandemic), the strongest global alert they can issue. This PHEIC quickly led to cataclysmic global economic and social disruption.

International, national, and local media immediately stoked public fears of the virus’s massive lethality and lack of effective treatment. By March 2020, lockdowns, “social distancing,” and mandatory masking were haphazardly imposed despite glaring lack of empirical evidence of their effectiveness. The result was nation-wide confusion, chaos, and anger. Ferocious and vindictive actions were taken against individuals deemed out-of-compliance, including job terminations, arrests, fines, and prison sentences.

In December 2020, the FDA granted Emergency Use Authorizations for mRNA injections dubbed “vaccines.” The long-standing dictionary definition of a vaccine was itself changed to facilitate public acceptance of hastily-tested genetic mRNA technology that in the previous decade had failed to move beyond Phase 1 clinical trials for several serious infectious disease-causing viruses and bacteria, including influenza, Zika, and HIV (Feldman et al. 2019; ModernaTX 2010). Curiously, in the United States, only mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were recognized despite the WHO approving and recognizing other COVID-19 vaccines. This policy forced non-citizens from other countries to take two doses of mRNA vaccine if they wanted to enter the States, but citizens had no such requirement, further highlighting unscientific and irrational policies. An intensely unremitting hourly global media campaign urged, cajoled, and coerced universal uptake for all ages, including pregnant women and young children (despite no reports of serious illness or death from COVID-19 in healthy children under 18).

Government agencies and mass media became proxy advertisers/promoters for vaccine manufacturers’ initial claims that the shots were 95% “safe and effective,” not only to protect oneself, but to prevent transmission to others. Simultaneously, a cynical media campaign vigorously protected Big Pharma advertisers by censoring and suppressing all questions and concerns about the products, including testing data, safety records, the speed and scale with which shots were deployed, selective reporting of adverse events, and absence of explicit procedures for informed consent. Jabs were administered at schools without parental consent, with children and minors offered cash and other incentives to submit. Big Pharma-influenced legacy and social media all but forbade any public debate, and banished highly credentialed medical experts from their platforms for “spreading misinformation”

Public health figures, politicians, and celebrities argued that those who refused the COVID-19 vaccines should be shamed, banished from society, forced into quarantine camps, denied food, and even left to die. Any report of death regardless of cause of an unvaccinated individual was celebrated with glee in mainstream media. We cited an Op-ed published in the Baltimore Sun highlighting the societal implications of these vaccine mandates (Doshi and Bhargava 2021) and how they were a form of “institutional segregation.”…