Supreme Court Allows State to Investigate Doctors Who Challenge COVID-19 Policies

On January 13, the U.S. Supreme Court denied an emergency application that sought to halt the Washington Medical Commission’s investigation into licensed physicians in the state for their criticism of COVID-19 policies.

The Washington commission views the doctors’ dissenting opinions on the pandemic as potentially harmful misinformation that ought to be curbed. The physicians response is that their medical licenses do not mean they forfeit their First Amendment rights.

Under Supreme Court rules, an application turned down by one justice can be presented to another. Both Thomas and Kagan did not elaborate on their decisions.

This application was filed by former NBA player John Stockton along with Drs. Richard Eggleston, Thomas Siler, Daniel Moynihan, over 50 unnamed medical practitioners, and the Children’s Health Defense, a nonprofit established by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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President-elect Donald Trump, set to be inaugurated on January 20, has suggested Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for the position of Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy, also an attorney, is listed as co-counsel on the application.

The case is still pending in the Ninth Circuit.

The application states that it pertains to the state’s initiative that targets “Washington-licensed physicians for expressing public opinions on COVID-19 that diverge from the established consensus.”

The state classifies the doctors’ viewpoints as “misinformation” and claims that it has the authority to “regulate this speech,” despite the Supreme Court ruling in National Institute of Family and Life Advocates v. Becerra (2018) that it does not have such power, according to the application.

In September 2021, leveraging its authority from Washington state’s Uniform Disciplinary Act, the Washington Medical Commission began enforcing a policy penalizing doctors “for public expressions critical of COVID-19 policies,” which has led to “disciplinary measures against at least ten healthcare professionals,” it noted.

“During our fight against COVID-19, despite many protective tools available, viral misinformation based on unproven scientific claims often hinders our efforts.”

The commission is pursuing Eggleston and Siler for opinion pieces they authored in The Lewiston Tribune and American Thinker, respectively, which criticized COVID-19 policies.

The nonprofit Children’s Health Defense, which has a Washington medical doctor as a member, joined the application to advocate for “freedom of speech and issues related to COVID-19 vaccinations,” as stated in the application.

Richard Jaffe, another attorney for the doctors from Sacramento, California, informed The Epoch Times that the case is far from resolved.

The latest ruling from the Supreme Court suggests the case will proceed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, with oral arguments scheduled for the week of May 12, he indicated.

“It was ambitious to request the justices to intervene in a case while an appeal is ongoing, but we believed the effort was justified because the notion that the state can punish a physician for voicing public concerns about a public interest issue feels fundamentally un-American and contradicts views expressed by numerous judges and justices on this matter,” Jaffe remarked.

“We will continue to remind the courts and those currently shaping the medical narrative that the changing tides of time, science, and politics mean that what is now scorned may one day be accepted, and what is presently accepted might become unpopular.”

In Kory v. Bonta, three doctors are seeking Supreme Court intervention to prevent the California Medical Board from investigating them due to their opposition to state-sanctioned COVID-19 policies.

The Epoch Times reached out to Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson, the respondent in Stockton v. Ferguson, for comment, but no response was received by the time of publication.