Vaccine-injured Americans fight to hold Biden-Harris admin accountable over censorship campaign
Novel COVID-19 vaccines advertised as "safe and effective" left multitudes of Americans injured or worse during the pandemic. Some of those individuals still physically capable went online to express their concerns, share their life-changing experiences, and engage with others medically compromised by government mandates and experimental science. However, in many cases, they found themselves unable to do so.
Their posts were suppressed. Their accounts were deleted or quarantined. Their speech was altogether stifled.
Several vaccine-injured Americans are seeking to hold the Biden-Harris administration and its apparent coconspirators to account for this insult to injury.
The New Civil Liberties Alliance filed an amended complaint Friday in the case Dressen, et al. v. Flaherty, et al. on behalf of five individuals who suffered vaccine-related injuries, along with a sixth plaintiff who lost his son to a vaccine-related death.
The suit names as defendants various elements of the Democratic administration, including President Joe Biden, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, and Health Secretary Xavier Becerra, along with alumni of the effectively defunct Stanford Internet Observatory's Virality Project.
According to the NCLA, the Biden White House, the Surgeon General's Office, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other elements of the Biden-Harris administration worked to "coerce, induce, and collude with social media platforms to censor, suppress, and label as 'misinformation' speech expressed by those who have suffered vaccine-related injuries."
The amended complaint further details how this apparent censorship scheme has continued since the lawsuit was first filed in May of last year.
'The federal government has launched a war against purported mis-, dis-, and malinformation, which it claims must be suppressed despite the First Amendment.'
"It is not the government's role to curate, filter, or suppress disfavored speech before it reaches the eyes and ears of American citizens. Yet that is precisely what is going on here," says the complaint. "This case challenges the government's mass-censorship program and the shocking role that it has played (and continues to play) in ensuring that disfavored viewpoints deemed a threat to its agenda are suppressed."
On its face, the case appears to share much in common with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Kennedy v. Biden, which was green-lit last month by U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty of the Western District of Louisiana, as well as the related case Murthy v. Biden.
Like the other two, this case points out the pressure the Biden-Harris administration exerted on social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter to censor speech that did not violate any of the platforms' existing policies. Like Kennedy, it also cites on multiple occasions the discovery produced in Murthy.
In a 6-3 June ruling, the Supreme Court said that the plaintiffs in Murthy lacked standing. Kennedy and the plaintiffs in this case appear far better positioned to succeed.
Among the many instances of censorship raised in the suit was the elimination of a private Facebook support group called "A Wee Sprinkle of Hope," which comprised thousands of vaccine-injured members.
In that instance, plaintiff Brianne Dressen — who is also suing AstraZeneca for allegedly leaving her with a debilitating injury — posted an infographic listing various post-COVID vaccine side effects, which are now widely known. She also linked to a press conference explaining the extent and nature of her injuries.
Dressen soon learned that her support page had been disabled for violating the platform's "Community Standards on misinformation that could cause physical harm," according to the complaint.
When she and other former members of "A Wee Sprinkle of Hope" started a new support group on Facebook, the platform again began policing, flagging, and "fact-checking" their posts despite using code and keyword substitutes.
Ernest Ramirez, another defendant, apparently set up a GoFundMe page to fundraise for a trip to Washington, D.C., where he intended to discuss his son's vaccine-related death. The complaint indicates Ramirez had his account terminated for supposedly violating the terms of service for "Prohibited Conduct."
Although denying a grieving father the means to provide further meaning to his boy's death was bad enough, perhaps even more unsettling was what Facebook allegedly did on the birthday of Ramirez's son.
Ramirez posted an image of himself beside his son's casket with the caption, "My goodbyes to my Baby Boy." According to the complaint, Facebook flagged the post with the label "partly false information." On the other hand, Twitter reportedly deleted the photo and told Ramirez to "make sure you're sharing reliable information."
The complaint is replete with similarly damning tales of censorship and explains precisely how the federal government put its thumbs on the scales.
Perhaps the most provocative assertion in the amended complaint is the following:
The federal government has launched a war against purported mis-, dis-, and malinformation, which it claims must be suppressed despite the First Amendment in order to protect American citizens from supposedly harmful or dangerous ideas. Indeed, Defendants admit to suppressing truthful speech, including stories of vaccine side effects that it has expressly acknowledged to be true, but which the government nevertheless targets for censorship because such speech 'could fuel vaccine hesitancy.'
The plaintiffs seek an injunction against further state-orchestrated censorship, claiming that their First Amendment rights were violated and that the government defendants, with the exception of Biden, exceeded the authority delegated to them by Congress.
Casey Norman, litigation counsel with the NCLA, said, "If there is any case that exemplifies why the First Amendment exists — as well as the abominable and Orwellian consequences that take place when the government evades its restraint — it is this one."
"The plaintiffs in this case posed a threat to the Biden Administration, because their personal experiences conflicted with the government’s heavy-handed approach to Covid-19 vaccination, which was predicated on the false claim that vaccine injuries were virtually nonexistent," said Jenin Younes, also litigation counsel with the NCLA.
This appears to be one among several signals that a possible reckoning is imminent where COVID authoritarians and reckless drug manufacturers are concerned.
In June, Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach (R) announced that the Sunflower State was suing Pfizer for "misleading claims it made related to the COVID vaccine."
The British-Swedish pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca, responsible for the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 viral-vector vaccine, is presently fighting a class-action lawsuit brought by apparent victims and deceased victims' families.
After years of denying its vaccine could cause blot clots, AstraZeneca admitted in a February court document that "it is admitted that the AZ vaccine can, in very rare cases, cause [thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome]. The causal mechanism is not known."
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