UC faculty challenge university’s free speech suppression

A group of senior University of California professors was denied free speech and academic freedom by university administration and its nine student newspapers during the Covid-19 pandemic, furthering the university's abominable policy of silencing all dissent, questioning, and criticisms of its draconian Covid policies. The system's failure to allow public access to numerous highly credentialed scientific critiques of its scientifically unsubstantiated adoption of unproven, dangerous public health policies was blatant censorship causing immense mental, emotional, ethical, and physical suffering and harm. We write this article to caution the academic community to marshal its resolve to resist the silencing of scientific dissent and critique in the not unlikely event of future global emergencies.

Context

In December 2019, the China office of the World Health Organization (WHO) reported a "novel" type of pneumonia circulating in Wuhan. Just one month later, the WHO's International Health Regulation Emergency Committee named it "2019 Novel Coronavirus" (SARS-CoV-2) and declared it a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC, i.e., a pandemic), the strongest global alert they can issue. This PHEIC quickly led to cataclysmic global economic and social disruption.

International, national, and local media immediately stoked public fears of the virus's massive lethality and lack of effective treatment. By March 2020, lockdowns, "social distancing," and mandatory masking were haphazardly imposed despite a glaring lack of empirical evidence of their effectiveness. The result was nationwide confusion, chaos, and anger. Ferocious and vindictive actions were taken against individuals deemed out-of-compliance, including job terminations, arrests, fines, and prison sentences.

In December 2020, the FDA granted Emergency Use Authorizations for mRNA injections dubbed "vaccines." The long-standing dictionary definition of a vaccine was itself changed to facilitate public acceptance of hastily-tested genetic mRNA technology that in previous decades failed to move beyond Phase 1 clinical trials for several serious infectious disease-causing viruses and bacteria, including influenza, Zika, and HIV (Feldman et al. 2019; ModernaTX 2010).

Curiously, in the United States, only mRNA Covid-19 vaccines were recognized despite the WHO approving and recognizing other Covid-19 vaccines. This policy forced vaccinated non-citizens from other countries to take two doses of mRNA vaccine if they wanted to enter the States, but citizens had no such requirement, further highlighting unscientific and irrational policies. An intensely unremitting global media campaign urged, cajoled, and coerced universal uptake for all ages, including pregnant women and young children (despite no reports of serious illness or death from Covid-19 in children under 18).

Government agencies and mass media became proxy advertisers/promoters for vaccine manufacturers' initial claims that the shots were 95% "safe and effective," not only to protect oneself but to prevent transmission to others. Simultaneously, cynical media campaigns vigorously protected Big Pharma advertisers by censoring and suppressing all questions and concerns about the products, including testing data, safety records, the speed and scale with which shots were deployed, selective reporting of adverse events, and the absence of explicit procedures for informed consent.

Jabs were administered at schools without parental consent, with children and minors offered cash and other incentives to submit. Big Pharma-influenced legacy and social media all but forbade public debate, and banished highly credentialed medical experts from their platforms for "spreading misinformation."

Public health figures, politicians, and celebrities argued that those who refused the Covid-19 vaccines should be shamed, banished from society, forced into quarantine camps, denied food, and even left to die. Any report of death regardless of the cause of an unvaccinated individual was gleefully celebrated in mainstream media. An op-ed we published in the Baltimore Sun highlighted the societal implications of these vaccine mandates (Doshi and Bhargava 2021) including as a form of "institutional segregation."

After billions worldwide had received one or more Covid shots, reports of adverse events on both VAERS (the US vaccine adverse events reporting system) and Great Britain's Yellow Card Vaccine Reporting Site skyrocketed, and excess deaths among working-age populations in the most vaccinated countries rose by as much as 40%, the WHO finally ended the PHEIC declaration on May 5, 2023.

The University Response

On December 15, 2021, University of California President Michael V. Drake (coincidentally a Board Member of pharmaceutical giant Amgen) issued a Covid-19 Booster Mandate and Return to On-Site Operations requiring all students, staff, and faculty to be fully vaccinated against Covid-19, including boosters, if they wanted to set foot on campus during the 2022-2023 academic year. This redefined university policy from "fully vaccinated" to " up to date," suggesting innumerable boosters would be required in perpetuity.

We soon thereafter petitioned university administrators to reverse the mandate, or at least provide an exemption option (as was the case for all other vaccines). We presented substantial medical/scientific expertise disputing the need to vaccinate the naturally immune who had previously contracted and recovered from Covid-19, and were chagrined to receive no reply whatsoever.

Because the matter was literally one of life or death, we sought to publicize our findings via a guest editorial which, throughout March 2022, we sent to each of California's major daily newspapers. With no response from any of them, we finally submitted our editorial to the university's nine student-managed newspapers; we received expressions of interest only from UCLA's Daily Bruin and UC Berkeley's Daily Cal. Ultimately, after days of discussing and advising the intention to print, neither published the editorial, presumably, in the face of pressure from higher up to censor any coherent counter perspective. We subsequently posted our editorial online (Browner et al. 2022).