Saving medicine from the health bureaucracy

There have been suggestions that the sanctioning of doctors has not necessarily been for the content of their views but how they have expressed them; invoking concepts such as incivility, rudeness, bullying, and harassment.

The Court explicitly addressed this issue in Ridd v JCU and was forthright in the view that intellectual freedom is not always pretty and wrapped in civility; curtailment on these grounds necessarily involves an assault on the fundamental phenomenon of intellectual freedom itself:

The instrumental and ethical foundations for the developed concept of intellectual freedom are powerful reasons why it has rarely been restricted by any asserted "right" of others to respect or courtesy … however desirable courtesy and respect might be, the purpose of intellectual freedom must permit of expression that departs from those civil norms.

Furthermore, the Court reinforced the concept that there is no right against embarrassment or against lack of trust resulting from someone else's assertions made in the course of intellectual freedom.

The Court quotes Dworkin:

The idea that people have that right [to protection from speech that might reasonably be thought to embarrass or lower others' esteem for them or their own self-respect] is absurd. Of course, it would be good if everyone liked and respected everyone else who merited that response. But we cannot recognise a right to respect, or a right to be free from the effects of speech that makes respect less likely, without wholly subverting the central ideals of the culture of independence and denying the ethical individualism that culture protects.

For the public's safety it's time to cancel the cancellers

It is absolutely frightening that major medico-legal organisations have issued advice to doctors to be wary about participating in intellectual freedom and that even reporting on evidenced-based scientific data might put them in peril of being professionally 'disappeared' if that data doesn't conform with the government's 'messaging'. Is that what the community at large expects?

Sure, the regime may allow some new information if it is from a regime-approved source and disseminated in a way that the regime approves. But that defeats the whole purpose of intellectual freedom and merely perpetuates the formation of insular establishment echo chambers. A previous article showed the mass lethality of that group-think and establishment thinking during the first world war until dissident thinkers like General Sir John Monash came along.

But what about supposedly 'bad ideas'?

Firstly, if those ideas are plausible, then as the High Court says, the truth is found in the 'contested marketplace of ideas'. If they are really bad ideas, then the sunlight of rigorous intellectual critique is the best disinfectant. Does driving a bad idea underground really make people think, 'Oh well, the government told me it's wrong, so it must be?'

Dr Li Wenliang was credited as one of the first doctors in Wuhan to sound the alarm about Covid on social media.