It’s Time for the Supreme Court to Stop Censorship in Science and Medicine

W hen government censors science and medicine, patients pay the price. And censorship is frighteningly widespread today, from a humble counseling office to the upper reaches of the scientific establishment. That problem is at the heart of Chiles v. Salazar, a pivotal case that the U.S. Supreme Court agreed on March 10 to take up.

Kaley Chiles is a licensed therapist in Colorado with a mission to help troubled young people. Some clients want professional help as they try to recover comfort with the body and the sex they were born with. Even Chase Strangio, the lead ACLU advocate for childhood gender transitions, admitted to Justice Samuel Alito during December’s argument in United States v. Skrmetti that people’s understanding of their gender “shifts.” And, in the same hearing, the solicitor general of the United States noted to Justice Brett Kavanaugh that “some people might detransition or regret this care.”

They might, but Colorado wants to stop them. Colorado prohibits Kaley from talking with her clients to help them through any such “shifts” or “regrets.” As the Alliance Defending Freedom notes, Colorado’s law now “allows counseling conversations that aim to steer young people toward a gender identity different than their sex but prohibits conversations that aim to help them return to comfort with their sex when they desire that.” In addition, the state law threatens Kaley with stiff fines and even loss of her license if her conversations help a client to detransition or to reject transgender ideology. This constitutes an unwarranted state intrusion into the relationship between therapist and client, and between doctor and patient, which harms patients by compromising their autonomy. The government wants to censor speech about identity and mental health and control the narrative even inside the privacy of a therapist’s office.

It doesn’t stop there. The government’s determination to define truth and control what can or cannot be said has invaded our universities. I’ve been there. I was a professor of psychiatry and director of the Medical Ethics Program at the University of California, Irvine . . . until I questioned the official Covid narrative. When I published an article questioning the risk-benefit balance — and thus the ethics — of mandating Covid shots for those who had already developed natural immunity, I was suddenly treated by the university as a public enemy.

As a leader in medical ethics, I believed that I had a responsibility to lead by example and follow the logic of the science, so I declined to be vaccinated. Rather than allow a public debate among medical professionals about this critical scientific question, the university fired me.

And it didn’t stop with the State of California. As we now know, the White House was severely pressuring social media companies to silence scientific voices that contradicted the official narrative. So when a podcaster interviewed me about the ethics of vaccine mandates, and the Covid vaccine in particular, YouTube labeled the interview “misinformation,” blocked the interview, and even suspended the account of the woman who had dared to interview me. We now know that social media censorship like this was done at the behest of several federal government agencies.

Now, it is widely recognized that what I was saying was correct. The State of California, the White House, and YouTube were silencing true science about a critical medical question.

And it wasn’t just me. Even those in the scientific community who enjoyed the highest levels of prestige and respect were not immune. When Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration urging focused protection strategies instead of universal mandates, prolonged school closures, and lockdowns, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, personally disparaged Bhattacharya and urged Dr. Anthony Fauci to orchestrate “a quick and devastating . . . take down” of the declaration.

And indeed, Fauci and others stirred up a wave of media slander directed against Bhattacharya and his colleagues; the goal was to silence their voices and control the narrative. As Bhattacharya has said, they made his life “a living hell.” “They systematically tried to make it seem like everyone agreed with their ideas about Covid policy, when in fact there was deep disagreement.” With poetic justice, Bhattacharya has now been tapped to direct the NIH, pending Senate approval.

Americans at every level need to stand up against government efforts to define truth and control speech about science and medicine. I myself became a plaintiff in a case — along with Bhattacharya and his Great Barrington co-author Martin Kulldorff — challenging the government pressure behind social media censorship during the Covid years. Sadly, while the Supreme Court acknowledged that there was overwhelming evidence that White House officials had pressured tech giants to censor disfavored opinions, they dismissed the request for an injunction for technical reasons. The case continues to be litigated at the district court.

Now, Kaley Chiles is challenging Colorado’s efforts to censor her counseling conversations with her clients, and to “make it seem like everyone agrees” with the state’s opinions about the best path to mental health for young people suffering confusion and pain over their gender and sexuality. The Supreme Court should take this opportunity to send a much-needed message to the government and medical establishment: Free speech is as essential in science and medicine as it is in politics and culture, for all our sakes.