As of 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.
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.
The judge was careful to point out that this was not a license for doctors to lie or to harm. The order leaves the boards every power they should have if a doctor does that. For sure, they can still go after genuine fraud, and should. They can still discipline actual negligent treatment, real prescribing violations, and a true failure of informed consent.
What they can no longer do is punish us for telling our own patients the truth as we saw it: that in our medical judgment the state was coercing and mandating its citizens into receiving toxic, lethal, ineffective, illogical, and experimental gene therapies, and that we would not pretend otherwise. We continue to have the freedom, even in Clownifornia, to both hold and freely express opinions that contradict those of the priesthood within public health and academia. The court even said, in so many words, that the boards may not dress up a viewpoint prosecution as a “standard of care” or “informed consent” case. That was always the trick, and the judge saw through it.
This is a preliminary injunction, which means the full fight over the merits continues. But a preliminary injunction is not a small thing because a federal court does not issue one unless it has concluded we are likely to win, and it protects us right now, today, from the machine that spent years trying to grind down doctors who would not read from the state’s script. First they took my specialty certifications, then they were going to go after my license to practice. While this case was being litigated, I smartly decided not to renew my California one, because of the domino effect: if you lose your license in one state, the others could, and probably would, follow. Rick Jaffe just told me to go ahead and re-apply, but I won’t, for reasons not the least of which is the $1,500 fee California charges. Know that in other states, the fee is around $500. What a state.
The sad reality of it all is that we had to learn that a government that can tell your doctor what he is allowed to say can basically tell your doctor to lie to you. The First Amendment exists for exactly this moment, when the official position is loud, certain, and literally dead wrong. It allows for what were a few handfuls of doctors to publicly warn you. That is, if you cared to listen to what they turned us into, i.e., “discredited doctors.” We were told to fall in line or lose everything. We said no (or, in my case, the emphatic New Yorker version of no). And a federal judge just told the State of California that saying no was our right (including the New Yorker version, although he didn’t state that specifically).
Free speech prevailed. We do not have to parrot pharma-government nonsense to keep our licenses. That principle was worth every day of this fight.
My deepest thanks to our attorney, Rick Jaffe, who never stopped; to my co-plaintiffs, Le Trinh Hoang and Brian Tyson; and to Children’s Health Defense, who fought for every one of us through COVID, harder still since, and for years before it ever arrived. Every one of them stood in the fire beside me.
And I am dropping another donation to both Rick Jaffe and CHD right now, because who knows when you or I will need them for whatever evil comes up with next. I am just so sick of the persistent trampling of almost every principle of freedom we hold dear, and it helps me sleep at night to know that we have some of the smartest, most dogged, and deeply principled people fighting for us at every turn.
More soon.
*If you value the late nights and deep dives into all the “rabbit holes” I write about, your support is greatly appreciated.
Note to readers:
One discovery consumed my last year: a volcanic mineral extract made by the Japanese scientist Shimanishi fifty years ago — the “Golden Elixir” of the old traditions, made real. It led me to write two three books, retire my patient panel (but not from Leading Edge Clinic), and start a company with one mission: to carry this forgotten chemistry off the page. Aurmina for the water we drink, and Primora Bio for the water our soil, crops, and animals crave.
From Research to Practice - Links Below Image
I so much appreciate you and your fight. Losing a job over refusal to take the jab should never be forgotten. Ever.
Congrats on the victory! Bonta is a bolshevik bastard. Hope Steve Hilton wins and prevents Becerra from failing up after his disastrous tenure as the autopen administration's HHS secretary.