How do you defeat COVID misinformation from the left? You take them to court. It started back in 2020. Between March 2020 and July 2022, there were more than 1,000 court rulings on challenges to government orders and regulations designed to control the spread of Covid, according to Public Health Law Watch.
This from Politico.
Early in the pandemic, the Supreme Court blocked California and New York’s restrictions on religious gatherings to reduce Covid-19 transmission, as well as the CDC’s moratorium on evictions. In 2022, it stayed OSHA’s order that large companies require employees to be vaccinated or regularly tested for the virus. Federal courts have ruled against Biden’s Covid-19 vaccine requirement for federal employees and stopped the CDC’s mask mandate on public transportation. On March 31, a federal judge in Texas struck down the administration’s requirement that employees of Head Start programs be vaccinated.
But not just any court. Medical freedom activists have already started enjoying some successes in front of conservative judges. At the local level, several have sided with plaintiffs who’ve sued hospitals for refusing to give patients ivermectin. But it’s been on the federal level, with Trump-appointed judges, where they’ve enjoyed some of their most significant successes. In 2021, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the Biden administration over a proposed policy that would have required Covid vaccinations for all Head Start employees. In March 2023, Judge James Wesley Hendrix of the Northern District of Texas, a Trump appointee, struck down the proposed policy. In January 2022, a group of government workers sued the Biden Administration over the president’s vaccination requirements for all federal employees; in 2022, Judge Jeffrey Vincent Brown, whom Trump appointed in 2019, ruled in their favor. That ruling was briefly overturned, but in 2023, the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans upheld it; the opinion was written by Trump appointee Judge Andrew Oldham.
In August 2022, a group of physicians sued the Biden Administration over its efforts to hold social media companies accountable for platforming physicians who spread misinformation about Covid. The plaintiffs, two of whom created the 2020 Great Barrington Declaration to oppose pandemic protections, accused the federal government of violating their First Amendment rights. “The US government used its vast power over social media and big tech to censor legitimate scientific and policy discussion about Covid during the pandemic,” Jay Bhattacharya wrote in a statement. That case is still ongoing, but in March, Trump-appointed judge Terry Doughty, in the Western District of Louisiana, denied a motion to dismiss it.
