They’re not yet being thrown in gulags like dissenting biologists in the Lysenkoist USSR, but there is an ominous similarity:
As in the old Soviet Union, scientists rejecting the government narrative in our nation are now being erased from public view.
A case in point is Dr. Simone Gold, a Los Angeles physician and founder of the group America’s Frontline Doctors. Gold was recently fired from her job for, she says, appearing in a viral “White Coat Summit” (WCS) video in which she and other physicians touted hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment.
In fact, we’re now apparently in the grip of COVID-1984. Prior to Gold’s firing, the video was scrubbed from Big Tech platforms — notably from Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter — the evening of the day it was posted (7/27), after having received, according to CNN, more than 14 million views.
Next, Gold said her website was taken down by its hosting company, Squarespace, ostensibly for “violating terms of service” (it appears to be back up, hosted by a different entity now). Shortly afterwards was when the process of “airbrushing” her out of current events resulted in her firing, an event she discussed Thursday on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight (video below).
“I’m a board-certified emergency physician for 20 years, and in fact, it seems like until five minutes ago I was considered a hero and people would be clapping and glad that I was doing what I was doing,” Gold told host Tucker Carlson. “And then the video came out and I was summarily fired for appearing in what was told to me is an embarrassing video.”
“According to HealthGrades.com, Dr. Gold is an emergency medicine specialist with more than 31 years of experience in the medical field, and is (or was) affiliated with Centinela Hospital Medical Center,” reports BPR.
While interviewing Gold, Carlson propounded the theory that the powers-that-be removed her video because they knew it “would hurt the Joe Biden for President campaign, and so they pulled it off the internet and banned anyone from sharing it.”
For her part, Gold emphasized that the video had nothing to do with her job performance and that she had excellent relationships with her patients and colleagues.
This hasn’t stopped establishment media attacks on her WCS group, however. Most comical is Snopes, a so-called fact-checker (no, I won’t provide it traffic by including a link). Throwing shade on one WCS member, Dr. James Todaro, Snopes actually wrote that he “has no known experience treating COVID-19.” My, that sounds like someone we all know quite well….
Oh, yeah — Dr. Anthony Fauci!
In fact, to the best of my knowledge, Flip-flop Fauci hasn’t seen a patient in all of his 52 years in government (no, that’s not a typo). Yet we’re all supposed to believe he speaks ex cathedra.
As for Gold, she just may extract some silver from those trying to pump lead into her endeavors: She has retained renowned attorney Lin Wood to represent her in what may be a wrongful termination lawsuit. Unfortunately, though, success in this won’t remedy our deeper problems.
First, when Big Tech removes a message contrary to a government narrative with the rapidity and reflexiveness evident here, the distinction between state and private sector censorship begins to appear, practically speaking, like a distinction without a difference.
Moreover, at issue isn’t a terrorist video or borderline child porn — which generally doesn’t get scrubbed as fast at the WCS presentation did. GoogTwitFace was just too anxious to do the establishment’s bidding.
Related to this, as with Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union, the politicization of science begets bad science. If you punish the iconoclastic and promote the fashionable, you end up with falsehoods that have become fashions.
As late novelist Michael Crichton pointed out in his interesting 2003 Caltech lecture “Aliens Cause Global Warming,” true science has nothing to do with “consensus” (or, I’ll add, endorsement by the powerful or credentialed).
“Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right,” he said.
Ignaz Semmelweis and sanitary techniques, Dr. Joseph Goldberger and pellagra, Alfred Wegener and continental drift, and Louis Pasteur and germ theory were just a handful of examples Crichton cited of scientists and claims that were impugned by the powers-that-be for being unfashionable — but that were correct.
I don’t know if Dr. Gold is “one investigator who happens to be right.” I don’t know if hydroxychloroquine is as efficacious as she claims. (Though she’s hardly alone: One poll found that 65 percent of doctors [and one I know] believe in using the drug to treat COVID-19.) I do know that she has a warning.
“Frontline doctors like myself, we’re seeing patients not get what they need, we’re seeing doctor-patient relationships being completely eroded and governors are empowering pharmacies to overrule doctors who’ve had conversations with their patients,” she also told Carlson. “It’s really something that Americans should all be alarmed about.”
I also know that she and her group have a right to be heard — and that Americans have a right to hear them.
Maybe then we won’t have to wait decades to learn whether lives could have been saved if we’d just listened to one investigator who happened to be right.
Image: screenshot from video at americasfrontlinedoctors.us
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.