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This is a transcript of a speech I gave at the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons Annual Meeting in 2024. The topic was “Free Press, Free Speech, and Implications for Physicians, Patients, and Public Health.”
Today, I am here to discuss an issue that is not only central to your ability to practice medicine but is also critical to the very fabric of our nation and our future. But before I begin, I’d like to start with an illustration. 
If you’re able, I’d like to ask all of you to stand. 
I want you to take a moment and look around the room at your colleagues. You’re surrounded by some of this country's best and brightest minds—physicians, researchers, scientists, lawyers, authors, and even elected officials. All of you have devoted a significant amount of time to your education, and many of you have dedicated your lives to advancing medicine, whether through research or countless hours spent with patients.
Now, I’m going to ask you a series of questions, and if your answer is "yes" to any of these questions, I would like you to take a seat:
If, during the COVID-19 pandemic, you attempted to publish a paper in a scientific or medical journal but were rejected—or you published a paper that was then retracted—please take a seat.
If you were told by a medical board, licensing body, or your employer that you couldn’t prescribe certain medications, question COVID-19 vaccines, or advocate for alternative treatment protocols such as hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, please be seated.
If you shared something on social media about COVID-19, vaccines or boosters, face masks, or early treatments and landed yourself a spot in Facebook jail, had your posts flagged, removed, or censored, please take a seat.
If you have witnessed a patient or family member become injured by a government directive that was based on “science” that turned out to be nothing more than false propaganda, please take a seat.
If you shared a news story or posted your own thoughts that challenged the government’s pandemic narrative and had your post fact-checked, flagged, or removed? Please be seated. 
Now, take a moment and look around the room at how many people are still standing.
What you’ve just experienced is a small glimpse into the censorship and control that gripped not only our nation but the world during the COVID-19 pandemic—and is still at play today. This censorship aimed to reshape the practice of medicine, eroded the quality of care patients received, limited access to critical research, perpetuated bad science, and arguably resulted in the loss of countless lives that could have been saved.
Now, let’s be clear—To think this was a one-off event incapable of being repeated is wishful thinking at best. The only thing that stopped the deep state from carrying out its agenda was free speech, a platform willing to publish it, pushback from Americans, and physicians who refused to join the consensus. But what you saw with the pandemic was nothing more than a warm-up.
Your right to free speech is currently hanging on by a thread, and the free press that is vital to the advancement of science, research, and medicine is becoming obsolete right along with it either because corporate media and social media platforms are actively censoring or because these entities are censoring themselves in the name of neutrality—so that they don’t offend anyone. Make no mistake, remaining “neutral” at a time when so much is at stake and, by extension, turning a blind eye to reporting the truth is just as dangerous.
If we lose our First Amendment rights to free speech and free press, medicine as you know it will cease to exist, and we will forever secure our spot as the sickest industrialized country in the world. Today, as we navigate this complex post-pandemic landscape, it’s crucial that you understand where these rights came from, why they’re essential to the practice of medicine, what efforts are being made to restrict them, how to preserve what you have left, and how to get back what you lost. 
A free press refers to the right of media organizations and journalists to report news, express opinions, and publish information without government censorship, interference, or fear of retribution. With social media, this extends to your ability to do the same. It is an outlet for your voice and, by extension, science. A free press is a fundamental component of a democratic society and ensures that citizens have access to diverse viewpoints and accurate information necessary to make informed decisions. 
There is not a single country in the entire world that has a First Amendment like ours. 
The Founding Fathers included freedom of the press in the Constitution because they recognized it as a fundamental safeguard for democracy and individual liberty. They were acutely aware that unchecked government power leads to tyranny, and they crafted our system to prevent it. Having experienced the oppression of a British monarchy that stifled dissent and controlled information, they wanted to ensure that our government would be held accountable—that our government would be different.
A free press exposes government wrongdoing, corruption, and abuses of power. It ensures that those in authority are held accountable and that our governance doesn’t slip into the shadows of unchecked power.
For democracy to function effectively, its citizens must be able to make informed decisions—you, as healthcare providers, must be able to access information that allows you to make informed recommendations for your patients, and by extension, your patients must be able to make informed decisions for themselves. A free press facilitates open debate, the exchange of diverse ideas, and the airing of different viewpoints, ensuring that only the best ideas prevail—and, by extension, the best policies and the best science.
Without free speech or a free press, what remains? You have a controlled consensus that makes decisions based on a predetermined narrative that suits bureaucratic interests and sub-par science.
Our Founding Fathers were also keenly aware of the dangers of state-controlled media. They understood that a government that controls information can manipulate public opinion and suppress dissent. By guaranteeing freedom of the press, they aimed to prevent the government from controlling information and propagating propaganda. 
By ensuring that the press could operate without fear of censorship or punishment, they sought to protect the broader principles of free expression and speech, which are crucial to personal liberty. This interconnectedness of rights means that when one is threatened, all are at risk. 
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Now, imagine how this foundational freedom plays out in the realm of public health. The free flow of information isn't just a cornerstone of democracy—it's a lifeline in medical science, where transparency and open debate can mean the difference between life and death. 
In today’s world, social media plays a pivotal role in how we intake and share information—and has largely replaced the mainstream media in many areas. Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and even Substack have become key channels for sharing information, challenging official narratives, and organizing dissent. Unlike traditional media, which the government could more easily control (and has attempted to control, especially through government agencies like the CIA), social media allows people to quickly share information and connect on a massive scale. 
You can see why this might be problematic to those who rely on propaganda to control people. It became really hard for the World Health Organization, World Economic Forum, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, U.S. regulatory agencies, top health officials, pharmaceutical companies, the not-so-Trusted News Initiative, and the Biden Administration to manipulate the American people when social media outlets were available to us to challenge what we were being told and there were still media outlets willing to publish the truth and provide a voice to the right experts. 
That is why you see so much pressure on social media companies to police content and control subjectively defined or has yet to be defined “misinformation.” If they get these companies to police content, they can suppress the science they don’t like. They can promote the treatments they want. They can prop up a multi-billion-dollar gene therapy injection made by a pharmaceutical company without a challenge. They can take a relatively safe and inexpensive medicine that could help people and pretend it's just for horses. 
Ironically, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the most dangerous source of misinformation wasn’t an obscure online conspiracy or a misinformed influencer. The greatest perpetrator [ [link removed] ] of misinformation during the pandemic was the United States government and its top health officials. 
Allow me to give you a few examples in case you’re on the fence about whether the government is our friend and whether it really cared about public health:
The government told us COVID-19 spread primarily through surfaces, that vaccinated immunity was better than natural immunity, that face masks [ [link removed] ] were effective, and that getting vaccinated would protect your neighbor. They claimed myocarditis was more common after infection than vaccination—when, in fact, it’s 4 to 28 times more common after vaccination. 
They insisted young people needed boosters, despite two top vaccine experts [ [link removed] ] at the FDA quitting in protest over this issue and no data to show that they do. They told Americans that COVID-19 vaccines are effective because they elicit neutralizing antibodies. Yet in early 2022, the FDA and its vaccine advisors admitted during a meeting [ [link removed] ] that neutralizing antibodies are not a correlate of protection and that there is no defined correlate of protection. Dr. Peter Marks said the FDA was working with the NIH to establish one—and never did. 
Our government and top health officials went to great lengths to suppress the truth about COVID-19’s origins, silencing any suggestion that the virus came from U.S.-funded gain-of-function research. However, during the September 10th presidential debate, Vice President Harris admitted the virus came from a lab—a "conspiracy theory" the Biden-Harris administration had actively censored across scientific journals, mainstream media, and social media platforms.
The government pushed the narrative that vaccine mandates would boost vaccination rates. Yet, several studies [ [link removed] ], including a study from George Mason University [ [link removed] ], show they didn’t. In fact, mandates negatively impacted the pediatric vaccination schedule. U.S. regulatory agencies touted studies to support their recommendations—studies funded by their agency, conducted by their own paid employees or funded by the pharmaceutical companies whose products they are supposed to be regulating. 
The CDC released a flawed study [ [link removed] ] on natural immunity [ [link removed] ] because it supported the narrative they wanted, and they did the same with masks and vaccines. Their recommendations on social distancing weren’t supported by any data at all, something recently admitted by Fauci during a congressional subcommittee hearing. 
And let the record reflect that we were told COVID-19 vaccines were almost 100% effective at preventing COVID-19 (not severe infection, the actual infection) that we would only need two doses of an mRNA vaccine like Pfizer and Moderna or one dose of Johnson & Johnson’s clot shot to prevent COVID-19. Some people are now on their tenth vaccine dose. The government has marketed mRNA vaccines as messenger RNA vaccines when Pfizer and the FDA explicitly state these are modified RNA vaccines [ [link removed] ]. There’s a big difference [ [link removed] ] between these two products. 
Former CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky and Dr. Fauci made numerous false statements that were repeated and promoted by the mainstream media. For example, Walensky in March 2021 said during an interview [ [link removed] ] with MSNBC host Rachel Maddow that CDC data, clinical trials, and real-world data suggest “vaccinated people do not carry the virus” and “don’t get sick”—statements that were later disproven as breakthrough cases emerged and became too great in number for the CDC to ignore. 
Dr. Fauci, in May 2021, told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes [ [link removed] ] that COVID vaccines were “highly highly effective” and “really good” against variants. “When people are vaccinated, they can feel safe that they are not going to get infected,” he said.
During the same interview, Fauci claimed COVID vaccines provided complete protection against infection, but if one were to get COVID, they would likely be asymptomatic. Fauci added that a vaccinated person’s chance of transmitting the virus to someone else was “exceedingly low.” 
President Joe Biden, during a CNN Town Hall [ [link removed] ] in July 2021, said, “If you’re vaccinated, you’re not going to be hospitalized, you’re not going to be in an ICU unit, and you’re not going to die.” Further in the interview, Biden said, "You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations."
Three months later, on Oct. 4, 2021, 30,177 patients had been hospitalized or died despite being fully vaccinated — a number the CDC acknowledged [ [link removed] ] was an undercount of all infections among fully vaccinated persons. 
We were told that vaccine injuries were “rare.” Behind the scenes, the NIH and NIAID were trying to figure out as early as February 2021 how to cover up the neurological injuries occurring post-vaccination and make the vaccine injured go away. I know this because I have read their internal communications. Tens of thousands of vaccine-injured people are without the medical care they need. These people are left in the dark, with research underfunded and potential treatments unexplored.
Data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System show 1,646,000 adverse events [ [link removed] ] following COVID-19 vaccination as of August 30, including nearly 38,000 deaths [ [link removed] ]. Now, we can say that these reports don’t prove causality. But, even so, this is estimated [ [link removed] ] to be only 1% of the actual numbers, even the CDC admits injuries to VAERS are underreported [ [link removed] ], and it’s a crime to file a false VAERS report [ [link removed] ], so there’s probably not a lot of people doing it. 
And let’s not forget the efforts to suppress the Great Barrington Declaration [ [link removed] ] and the “fringe epidemiologists [ [link removed] ]” who authored it. 
We’ve seen a pattern that goes beyond using the best judgment with available information. We’ve seen something unforgivable—and that is the weaponization of medicine itself through censorship. 
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the government also pressured social media platforms [ [link removed] ] like Facebook and Twitter [ [link removed] ], to control what could be promoted or discussed. According to an Interim Staff Report [ [link removed] ] of the Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government—even true information that didn’t align with the government’s narrative was suppressed. Internal communications revealed that Facebook was instructed to remove posts about the origins of COVID-19, vaccine side effects, and other legitimate concerns. 
Missouri v. Biden [ [link removed] ] (also known as Murthy v. Missouri) highlighted the most massive attack against free speech in United States history—citing more than 1,400 facts showing that top officials in the federal government coerced and colluded with big tech social media companies to violate Americans’ right to free speech, particularly on topics related to COVID-19.
In March 2021 [ [link removed] ], Congress allocated $10 billion [ [link removed] ] for HHS to "strengthen vaccine confidence," including $3 billion for the CDC to fund outreach efforts [ [link removed] ]. This initiative wasn’t just about providing information—it was about creating and reinforcing a narrative. 
According to a Freedom of Information Request [ [link removed] ] filed by The Blaze, the Biden administration made direct payments to nearly all major corporate media outlets, including ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, to deploy a taxpayer-funded outreach campaign [ [link removed] ] designed to push only positive coverage about COVID-19 vaccines and to censor any negative coverage. Media outlets did not disclose the federal government as the source of ads in news reports promoting the shots to their audiences.
HHS also ran media blitzes in major media publications, including The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, BuzzFeed News, Newsmax, and hundreds of local TV stations and newspapers across the nation.
I spent a great deal of time on the phone with a CDC employee, who ironically no longer has a working email address, who helped me find these HHS and CDC contracts. HHS and the CDC contract with the PR firms, who then contract with the media companies to push out their agenda with our tax dollars. 
They also attach strings to the funding they give entities like the AMA, ACOG, and the AAP. Why do you think ACOG was encouraging physicians to promote COVID-19 vaccines [ [link removed] ] to pregnant women without safety or efficacy data—because the money they received from HHS contractually required them to do so. HHS wanted to get the OB-GYNs on board, and they used ACOG to do it.  
Physicians who had legitimate concerns about the safety and efficacy of vaccines or who advocated for alternative treatments were silenced. This not only compromised the practice of medicine but also put patients at risk.
The result was a one-size-fits-all approach to a complex and evolving pandemic, where alternative treatment protocols were dismissed, and vaccine side effects were downplayed or ignored. This censorship led to a loss of trust in public health institutions and fueled skepticism about the very measures intended to protect public health. And ironically, the media that was actively engaging in censorship banded together to fact-check your posts on social media. 
This crisis is compounded by the fact that the same financial entities controlling what news is reported also have a vested interest in the pharmaceutical industry. When you have large institutional investors like Vanguard and BlackRock with significant stakes in media companies and pharmaceutical companies, there’s an inherent conflict of interest. The press, which should serve as a watchdog, is instead financially entangled with those very interests.
As I conclude, I want to leave you with another illustration that provides a roadmap for the path forward. Admiral William H. McRaven, ninth commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command, once described an aspect of Navy SEAL training that I thought was fitting to share with all of you:  
During Navy Seal training, students are flown out to the San Clemente island, which lies off the coast of San Diego. The waters off San Clemente island are a breeding ground for white sharks. To pass SEALS training, a series of long swims must be completed. One is the night swim. Before the swim, the instructors joyfully brief the students on all of the sharks in the water off the coast of San Clemente—and show students videos of the most horrific shark attacks they can find.
They assure you, however, that no student has ever been eaten by a shark, at least not that they can remember. But you are also taught that if a shark begins to circle your position, stand your ground. Do not swim away. Do not act afraid. And if a shark is hungry for a midnight snack and darts towards you, summon up all your strength and punch him in the snout, and he will turn and swim away. This is difficult because you’re overriding your body’s instinct to swim away. 
There are a lot of sharks in the world. If you hope to complete the swim, you will have to deal with them. So, if you want to preserve the ability to truly and freely practice medicine—don’t back down from the sharks. This is the life or death of your profession.
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