CNN opened its coverage of Murthy v. Missouri, the historic censorship case argued in the Supreme Court yesterday, as follows:

CNN — For doctors like Eileen Barrett, a pending Supreme Court case challenging the government’s ability to communicate with social media companies isn’t principally a fight about the fraught politics of online speech.

Instead, they say, it’s a matter of life and death.

“I have seen countless statements that are at best problematic and at worst flat-out disinformation that I’m terribly fearful are causing harm to patients,” said Barrett…

144 HERBAL REMEDIES TO... Mashiach, Eliyah Best Price: $14.87 Buy New $20.99 (as of 10:37 UTC - Details) If CNN’s line about “a matter of life or death” sounds a bit dramatic, it’s at least a perfect echo of the original defendant in the case, President Joe Biden. In July of 2021, Biden said Internet companies were “killing people” when they refused to remove content his White House deemed “problematic.” However, the White House itself contributed to enormous problems during the pandemic by wildly overestimating both the impact of the disease, and the effectiveness of vaccines. Somehow, this form of “misinformation” never gets proper billing.

The government’s performance in oral arguments in the Supreme Court yesterday has already led to huge success on this front, from a public relations perspective. Instead of hearing about a broad, military-scale operation spanning multiple agencies to address social media posts about everything from Ukraine to Gaza to immigration to schools and gender issues, the public heard the case was about “the government’s ability… to combat misinformation,” and stop “posts that officials said spread falsehoods.” Instead of a case about the state attempting to enforce uniform narratives on huge ranges of subjects, and being consistently wrong when doing so, the public will hear yesterday’s case was about occasional, gentle efforts to offer input about one or two emergencies.

Here’s the answer to both CNN and Biden, and a snapshot of why this case went to the heart of the First Amendment:

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, one of the plaintiffs in Murthy, was placed on a “trends blacklist” at Twitter, but not for purveying misinformation or disinformation. He didn’t publish hate speech, issue threats, or incite. He has little interest in politics and didn’t attempt to “influence elections.” In a textbook example of why free speech is crucial to the success of democracies, Bhattacharya’s offense was conducting true research that corrected official misinformation.

“COVID-19 antibody seroprevalence in Santa Clara County, California” was published on April 17, 2020, at the beginning of the international Covid-19 panic. Bhattacharya tested blood samples from 3,300 people early in the pandemic, uncovering two crucial pieces of information. The first was that the infection mortality rate of Covid-19 was roughly 0.15%, making the disease about 22 times less deadly than the terrifying 3.4% number released by the WHO in early March 2020.

Bhattacharya, an ingratiating, forgiving personality, didn’t try to show up officialdom. “It’s still quite a lethal virus,” he told the Stanford Daily. But his study showed the disease was far less lethal than Americans were being told. Dr. Anthony Fauci testified to the House on March 11 2020 that even if the WHO was wrong, Covid-19 was “at least 10 times more lethal” than flu, adding, “I can’t give you a realistic number” on eventual fatalities “until we put into the factor of how we respond,” suggesting it could be “many, many millions” if extreme measures were not taken. One-Minute Prayers for... Harvest House Publishers Best Price: $0.96 Buy New $7.23 (as of 11:17 UTC - Details)

Fauci was misinforming the public, and moreover already had access to enough data to know he was doing it. A crucial piece of news involved the Diamond Princess cruise ship that left Yokohama, Japan for a 14-day cruise in January 2020 and had to be kept docked in quarantine after passengers who disembarked in Hong Kong fell ill. Of more than 3,500 people on board, 712 fell ill, and of those, 11 died, an infection mortality rate of .154%, which more or less exactly predicted Bhattacharya’s results.

Both the WHO and American officials would eventually concede the same lower infection fatality rate. On the way, however, they took every opportunity to scare the pants off the public, with headlines like “Fauci puts it bluntly: Coronavirus deaths are undercounted” common especially in early months.

As Matt Orfalea showed in this furious compilation, even the 3.4% number was amplified through conventional media in early 2020, with commentators denouncing anyone who said otherwise. The misinformation was turbocharged by political anger, since Donald Trump called 3.4% a “false number” and said that based on his conversations with advisors, the real number would come in “way under 1%.” These words sent people like Brian Stelter into a frenzy. “The percentage is 3.4%,” he said, “and no hunch from the president can change that.”

Bhattacharya’s other finding was that the infection rate in his Santa Clara sample was “50-85 times higher” than official estimates. This meant the disease was so infectious that interventions in the form of lockdowns especially were unlikely to be effective. Again, data on this appeared early on, but the suppression of social media posts and media appearances of people like Bhattacharya and fellow plaintiffs Dr. Aaron Kheriaty and Martin Kulldorff (formerly of the University of California and Harvard, respectively) meant that even the educated set often didn’t hear about these numbers until too late.

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