“Misinformation” is an elastic term. It can cover anything from intentional falsehoods to incorrect information to contested claims to unverified claims.

But it’s hard to argue that it covers things known to be truthful.

Now I am, to say the least, not a fan of any efforts to suppress “misinformation” because it empowers some authority somewhere to impose a standard of what is true and what is not, and doing so is dangerous in itself. While I would agree that in a perfect world everything we read, hear, and speak would be entirely true and completely in context, the reality is that we live in an imperfect world where nobody knows everything and everybody has some agenda or another.

Best to let the conversation flow freely. Even “consensus” claims have turned out to be false or misleading, and often the people we recognize as geniuses are the people who were considered heretics at the time.

But I can intellectually understand why many people would like to cull the wheat from the chaff, and why some people like the idea that somebody is doing it. We all like to be lazy sometimes, and we all want the Bottom Line Up Front (BLUF). It’s easy to be spoonfed the “truth.”

But I hope that even the most avid censor of “misinformation” can agree that scrubbing the Internet of true information is utterly unacceptable, and attempts to do so by medical professionals is unethical in the extreme.

Medical professionals are, by law and by ethical standards, supposed to ensure that any consent to a medical procedure is done by people fully informed.

Informed consent is a cornerstone of medical ethics. And the US Surgeon General apparently also believes it was inconvenient and should be discarded by the US government.

The Biden administration also wanted Facebook to remove TRUE information as well. pic.twitter.com/5SWcb7ZrRS

— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) July 28, 2023

Think about that for a minute. The US Surgeon General wanted true information scrubbed from the Internet.

He should be prosecuted.

I am not joking. Every single person to whom the US government advertised the benefits of the vaccine should be allowed to sue the Surgeon General’s office, and the US Surgeon General who demanded this should go to jail.

It is not just that he tried to violate all of our constitutional rights, but he did so in service of undermining medical ethical standards and committing fraud upon us all.

In Canterbury, a young man was advised by his physician to undergo a laminectomy in an effort to alleviate back pain. The physician, aware that 1 percent of laminectomies resulted in paralysis, did not advise the patient of the risk because he believed this might cause the patient to reject the useful treatment. Following the procedure, the patient fell from his hospital bed and was paralyzed. It remained uncertain whether the laminectomy procedure or the patient’s fall caused the paralysis.

The patient sued, alleging that the physician failed to inform him of the risks associated with the procedure. The court held that “the standard measuring [physician] performance…is conduct which is reasonable under the circumstances” [3]. In other words, the court held that, instead of adhering to the community disclosure standard, physicians are now required to disclose information if it is reasonable to do so. Essentially, to establish true informed consent, a physician is now required to disclose all risks that might affect a patient’s treatment decisions.

In Canterbury, the decision outlined key pieces of information that a physician must disclose:

(1) condition being treated; (2) nature and character of the proposed treatment or surgical procedure; (3) anticipated results; (4) recognized possible alternative forms of treatment; and (5) recognized serious possible risks, complications, and anticipated benefits involved in the treatment or surgical procedure, as well as the recognized possible alternative forms of treatment, including non-treatment [4, 5].

Of course, we all know that nobody is going to jail and that no matter how egregious the behavior no government official will be held accountable.

But I hope we can all agree that this goes far beyond any effort to censor misinformation. It is an attempt to flat-out lie to the American public by depriving them of true information.

As usual, it is the government that is most interested in spreading misinformation.