The California legislature has approved a bill that seeks to target and punish family doctors who “spread disinformation” by veering from the official narrative while advising their patients on vaccines and treatments for COVID-19.
Earlier this week, lawmakers in the Democrat-led Golden State approved AB 20098.
The New York Times summarized the passing of the measure as, “California Approves Bill to Punish Doctors Who Spread False Information.”
If California’s Democrat Governor Gavin Newsom signs the bill into law when it lands on his desk, the state will establish a “Disinformation Authority” that would investigate doctors for contradicting the official proclamation on Covid treatments.
A group of doctors, the Physicians for Informed Consent (PIC), opposes the legislation.
The PIC is pushing back against the bill on the grounds that it would “intimidate” physicians into silence when advising their patients.
The group explains in a statement that the law unconstitutionally targets them, “attempting to intimidate by investigation, censor and sanction physicians who publicly disagree with the government’s ever-evolving, erratic, and contradictory public health Covid-19 edicts.”
In an effort to derail the bill, the group has filed a lawsuit seeking an injunction to prevent the Medical Board of California from acting on the law.
The doctors argue that the bill’s definition of “misinformation” is “hopelessly vague,” according to The Post Millennial.
According to the lawsuit, if Newsom enacts the law, it would suddenly revise the legal definition of “unprofessional conduct” in a medical capacity, a term that carries a lot of weight in the world of medical regulation.
The Medical Board of California states this is presently defined as “breach of confidence, record alteration, filing fraudulent insurance claims, misleading advertising, failure to sign death certificates in a timely manner, failure to provide medical records to a patient, patient abandonment, etc.”
However, there is a lot of law that rests on that one definition, and altering it capriciously or carelessly is inherently dangerous.
Yet, that’s precisely what this law does.
In the bill, AB 2098, the text makes seemingly intentionally-vague references to “misinformation” and “disinformation.”
In Section 3 of the bill’s “definitions,” it states:
“‘Disinformation’ means misinformation that the licensee deliberately disseminated with malicious intent or an intent to mislead.”
“‘Misinformation’ means false information that is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus contrary to the standard of care.”
By introducing a skewed “definition” of the word “misinformation,” the California bill creates vagueness.
By resting the definition on a patently nonsensical notion like “contemporary scientific consensus,” and by hinging its definition of “disinformation” on the skewed definition of “misinformation,” it would produce a law that’s dangerously vague.
The vagueness in the language appears deliberately done so that the punishment can be applied arbitrarily, at the whims of those in authority.
It is unconstitutional, unethical, and fundamentally un-American.
The bill is reminiscent of Democrat President Joe Biden’s failed “Disinformation Governance Board.”
While the Biden admin’s disinfo board was shut down before it even got off the ground, thanks to a severe backlash, the push from the Left to fight so-called “disinformation” appears persistent.
