Information is beautiful
In thanks to the good doctors who kept their oaths and shared what they knew.
Last month, March 2024, Ontario physician Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill made a public appeal on X. She had only a few days to pay $300,000 in legal costs imposed by an Ontario court, or she’d lose her home.
In a podcast with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a calm yet concerned Dr. Gill explained her predicament. She had been engulfed in legal battles for four years, defending herself from both censure and censorship for expressing her opinions about the government’s chosen COVID measures. She had already spent her life savings on legal bills. If she did not pay the money by the end of March, she might have to declare bankruptcy.
The cost order arose from a lawsuit Dr. Gill had launched to counter what Dr. Bhattacharya called a “malicious online smear campaign.” Her crime? Early and often, she had taken to Twitter to decry the catastrophic effects of lockdowns—especially for vulnerable populations like her own patients. She also tweeted on core components of natural immunity: on T cells, which she calls the “unsung warriors and heroes” of our immune systems, and on the resulting lack of any need for a COVID-19 vaccine.
But perhaps her biggest transgression was that she continued sharing her views and sources—despite a statement by her regulatory college, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO), that no Ontario physician could do so.
The CPSO’s (now-deleted) statement appeared on April 30, 2021. It threatened investigation and possible disciplinary measures against doctors who communicate “anti-vaccine, anti-masking, anti-distancing and anti-lockdown statements and/or promoting unsupported, unproven treatments for COVID-19.” Regulatory colleges in other provinces issued similar statements, making physicians the first group in Canada to be submitted to a far-reaching censorship regime.
I knew of Dr. Gill’s information campaign through Twitter. Her tweets offered a lifeline in a period that could best be described as a made-in-Ontario Twilight Zone, with its bizarre and interminable lockdowns; ever-shifting public health rules; cloying slogans; cordoned-off play grounds; shuttered schools and churches. Once the spring weather came in 2020, amber alerts blared orders through Ontarians’ cell phones not to walk, not to drive, to stay home and shelter in place—subtext: to be very afraid.
When the lockdowns began, I tracked the death rates nightly. A website called Information is Beautiful laid them out in brilliant technicolour graphs and tables. Except for a few places like Italy and New York City, the COVID-19 death rates were ridiculously at odds with the panic conveyed through the measures. One graph, now removed, set SARS-CoV-2 on axes of contagion and deadliness relative to infectious diseases such as ebola, polio, and SARS-CoV-1. By May 2020, COVID-19 was already showing up as far, far less deadly than the 1918 Spanish flu.
The measures squared with neither observation nor available data, and yet were ushered in to every Western democracy. Confused and relentlessly propagandized, Ontarians were forbidden to enjoy even a solitary walk in a public park.
What happened—and why? In their 2023 book, Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic, Alberta political theorists Barry Cooper and Marco Navarro-Génie describe a pervasive alternative reality that descended in 2020. They enlist Michel Foucault’s idea of power-knowledge in tracing the emergence of a new lingo divorced from common sense language—of comorbidities, PCR tests, contact tracing, case rates, et cetera. The new language created a regime of knowledge that was more political than scientific. Indeed, COVID power-knowledge depended on denying scientific truth: “For the suppression strategy to be effective,” the authors state, “the basic biology of naturally acquired immunity had to be ignored. It was.”
It was an old-fashioned power grab—with a totalitarian dimension. Featuring unprecedented levels of control, the new regime’s basis was fear. Fear prompted the public to swallow the pseudo-scientific language whole. Fear gave cabinets the cover to sideline legislatures; rack up expenditures far beyond wartime levels; pull off what federal MP Leslyn Lewis called a “socialist coup” that paid able-bodied citizens to stay home. Fear, the authors state—even a palpable pleasure in being very afraid together—allowed governments to introduce surveillance, propaganda, and censorship at an alarming clip.
Into this panicked morass, the good doctors deployed their healing knowledge. To bring calm and save lives, they courageously shared what they knew. To those who would listen, they addressed the rising panic stoked by public health bureaucracies, media, and opportunistic “experts.” As the power-knowledge introduced ever-more harm and absurdity, the good doctors became archipelagos of medical sanity.
And for this, they were targeted. In the United States, the lead architects of the COVID moral panic descended with their infamous “quick and devastating published takedown.” Universities and health bureaucracies stripped the good doctors of their teaching roles, maligned their motives—in one known case, even questioned their sanity. The regulatory colleges took the licences of some, leaving others to practise with highly public reprimands and restrictions. Many lost their Twitter accounts. Some lost their savings, homes, and colleagues.
But the good doctors kept going. They appeared on alternative media, offered to debate their critics on scientific grounds (their offers were never accepted). Officially censored and castigated, their fame grew—due partly to their reputations prior to COVID, but mostly to their useful information, frank opinions, and laser focus on patient well-being.
Some changed their mind, such as U.K. cardiologist Dr. Aseem Malhotra. Despite his earlier support, when confronted with empirical evidence of the COVID shots’ harms, he publicly spoke against them.
Some say that Canadian doctors should be hauled to account: if enough had spoken out, we would never have suffered the harms we did. Certainly, it is true: the majority did not speak out. Yet the majority rarely does. Most lack the spiritual stamina needed to withstand trials like those of our modern-day scientist Inquisition.
And yet the good doctors who did speak out managed to set our would-be tyrants on the back foot. They surprised their persecutors, held fast to their oaths, upheld the Nuremberg Code. Before the truckers even left for Ottawa, they held the line.
Which makes it all the more important to thank them.
Readers will have their own list of physicians whose views and information helped orient them medically in those awful years. Here is mine, beginning with Ontario physicians:
Drs. Kulvinder Kaur Gill and Jean Marc Benoit, who issued early and frequent critiques of the Ontario government’s lockdown mania.
Dr. Matt Strauss, former professor at Queens and medical health officer for Haldimand and Norfolk, now Conservative candidate for Kitchener. His arch tweets on masking and other COVID measures were an early shot in the arm.
Dr. Kwadwo Kyeremanteng, critical care and ICU doctor in Ottawa, who decried Ontario’s school closures and sought a sane way forward at the nadir of our moral panic.
Dr. Mark Trozzi, former Ontario ER physician, who surrendered his home and livelihood in 2020 to continue critiquing the COVID shots. He helped found the World Council for Health.
Dr. Patrick Phillips, who strove valiantly to treat COVID patients with alternative therapeutics and shield them from vaccine injuries at ERs in Northern Ontario.
Drs. Eric Payne, Daniel Nagase, Francis Christian, Chris Milburn, Charles Hoffe, William Makis, Justin Chin, Stephen Malthouse, and Chris Shoemaker—whose astonishing tales of persecution and resistance I learned from their testimonies at the National Citizen’s Inquiry.
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, co-drafter of the Great Barrington Declaration, who also appeared in several Canadian disciplinary hearings and has brought attention to the plight of our physicians. He too testified at the National Citizens Inquiry.
Drs. Peter McCullough and Robert Malone—household names in North America after their appearances on The Joe Rogan Experience—critiqued the vaccines and also testified at the National Citizen’s Inquiry.
Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, a former UC Irvine physician specializing in psychiatry, took his fight against vaccine mandates and suppression of information to court. The censorship case, Murthy v. Missouri, is now being heard before the Supreme Court of the United States.
If the power-knowledge prevails, honour rolls of this type will help the censors compile their black-lists. And indeed, many doctors named here are still combating charges of “misinformation.” A Google search will retrieve mainly one-sided hit pieces. No media outlet, journalist, or health institution in Canada has so much as conceded their errors—much less been held to account for their defamation.
Which makes Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill’s appeal all the more interesting. Her Give, Send, Go fundraiser raised $186,000 by mid-March. She later received an offer of help from X’s owner Elon Musk. X will be covering her legal bills, including future ones to fight restrictions imposed on her by the CPSO.
In a real sense, of course, she has already won. Reality abides. Information remains beautiful. Certainly, the status quo cannot hold.
One way or another, Canadians will leave our current health care debacle behind us. And when we do—in either a vastly reformed system or a parallel one—the doctors who stepped up to share what they knew will be the ones who help lead us from the wreckage.
In gratitude, to the good doctors who resisted. May your work inspire a health care renewal. May your sacrifices bring the long-awaited glasnost to the regulators’ rule. Your information and views have helped people across the world—and still do today.
Thank you. We won’t forget.
Further Reading
Barry Cooper and Marco Navarro-Génie, Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic. Calgary: Haultain Institute, 2023.
Aaron Kheriaty, MD. The New Abonormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State. Washington, D.C: Regnery, 2022.
Jodi, This is another winner. Thank you.
I remember so many awful things that were completely senseless. Not being allowed into certain grocery stores, having a security guard block my entrance at Chapters, shouting through glass at the Pet Store and all because I refused to wear a mask. Being asked at the checkout of a small shop to put on a mask or leave. (I left) All of it was total and irrational insanity. But I also remember the places that let me shop unhindered, and for them I will always be so grateful.
Another great book to add to the list is: Turtles All The Way Down. So very full of useful information on the harms of vaccines and that absolutely none of them have ever been tested against a placebo thereby making none of them tested for either safety or efficacy.
The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario statement was captured by Archive.org as well here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210430192106/https://www.cpso.on.ca/News/Key-Updates/Key-Updates/COVID-misinformation
Dr Crystal Luchkiw is yet another brave member of the physician honour roll. Exactly the kind of doctor you'd want tending to your elderly parents. I wrote about her here (pardon the self-promotion, but her story is a doozy):
https://thankyoutruckers.substack.com/p/massive-patient-harm