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California approves bill to punish doctors who spread false information

nytimes.com

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Re: California approves bill to punish doctors who spread false information

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The law would designate spreading false or misleading medical information to patients as “unprofessional conduct,” subject to punishment by the agency that licenses doctors, the Medical Board of California. That could include suspending or revoking a doctor’s license to practice medicine in the state. You are discussing a completely different situation compared to the one that the news reports is addressed by the b…

All laws are subject to interpretation. Didn't you just appoint a judge to your Supreme Court who openly admitted that she couldn't define "a woman" because she "wasn't a biologist?" When you have such people interpreting laws, good luck to you with this one. It's clearly designed to suppress dissent, given the disastrous events of the last two years.

Here is an edge case:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCevedoce

Here's another:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klinefelter_syndrome

A general page on the topic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex#Prevalence

A podcast from a Stanford professor that talks about the topic from a biological point of view (not really social):

https://hubermanlab.com/biological-influences-on-sex-sex-dif...

Between genetic factors, hormonal factors, environmental factors, social factors, and developmental factors it seems pretty clear that the definition of "woman" is a little more complicated than "has a vagina."

The judge knew she didn't know things and said the equivalent of "I'm not an expert, I would defer to someone who knows more." When someone asks a yes or no question and you answer "I don't have sufficient information to answer the question" that is the type of person who should be given power. Saying something confidently while being blissfully unaware of complexity is a major problem, especially for a position that primarily deals with legal edge cases. The most valuable lesson in college is that "just because something is intuitive, doesn't mean it's correct."

Personally, I trust a judge that thinks about edge cases much more than one ignores them or one that thinks they're an expert in a field they're not.

Re: California approves bill to punish doctors who spread false information

#62
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it will at least make sense without demonizing a person who thinks differently. I specifically do NOT demonize people who think differently, hence why I don't find it appropriate to leverage the authority of the state in order to prevent them from thinking differently.

I think this is a fair re-statement of what you said: > "How can anyone believe we need more authoritarian control of information?" The direct implication of this statement is "it's unreasonable to want more authoritarian control of information", stated differently, "only an unreasonable person would support this bill because this bill increases authoritarian control of information." That is demonization. You've defi…

You keep telling me that I'm failing to understand what motivations someone might have for controlling information. I understand perfectly well what the motivations might be, and I understand how it could actually be beneficial given that the information that they're controlling for is unbiased and correct. The issue is that there is no unbiased or correct in the middle of an emerging pandemic with a novel pathogen and two new vaccines using completely novel technology platforms, both of which are a radical departure from existing vaccines.

Mind you, I would have a difficult time supporting legislation like this, even in the event that our institutions had actually just demonstrated total competence, good faith, and mastery of the facts. However, what we've just witnessed is the near opposite of that situation.

- Beginning of pandemic, disease is being controlled by contact tracing and quarantine. Events of community spread occur, which should result in an immediate change in strategy, which does not happen. The first case of community spread should have been followed by alerting the country that this is no longer contained, contact tracing is no longer capable of containment.

- Masks are said to be useless, in bad faith, with the goal of preventing the population from buying out PPE supply while healthcare professionals secure inventory

- Disease isn't declared airborne until nearly a full year after incontrovertible evidence

- mRNA and viral vector vaccines declared safe and effective, despite a typical safety profile on a vaccine taking about 7 years...for well understood pathogens using well understood technologies (attenuated virus vaccines, subunit protein vaccines, etc). mRNA vaccines and viral vectors vaccines are a radical departure from existing technology. Both encode for the production of an antigen (on RNA and DNA respectively), and have our own cells produce the spike antigen and express them on their surface to be targeted by the immune system. Viral vector had only been deployed in humans outside of a lab one time for a very recent ebola outbreak, and mRNA vaccines had never been deployed. Both were deployed to hundreds of millions of people, with virtually no prospective studies in place. Skepticism regarding these specific vaccines was made to be synonymous with skepticism regarding vaccines in general.

- Vaccine mandates ignored prior COVID infection

- Vaccines targeted a single antigen, providing highly narrow immunological profile for which the virus could escape, Incidentally, nearly all viral variants have escaped immunity by mutations on this single antigen. The virus has over 20.

- The antigen selected for production in the vaccines has since proven to be problematic. Once it was announced that myocarditis and pericarditis were likely associated with the antigen, trimerization and prefusion of the S1 and S2 subcomponents of the antigen was retroactively asserted to have been done in the vaccines in an effort to mitigate certain harmful elements of the antigen. In actuality trimerization and prefusion were outright declared to have been done strictly for the purpose of increasing efficacy...not for safety. Regardless, the pathogenic behavior associated with the spike antigen has been found to take place from all of the vaccines, regardless of these changes.

- The highly likely "lab leak hypothesis" was dismissed as a conspiracy theory for over a year, before legitimate institutions and publications began to treat it as a potential explanation regarding the origins of the virus.

- By the time Delta variant came around with a fair degree of immune escape, right around when the first wave of vaccine efficacy started to fade, infections among the vaccinated were declared rare "breakthrough infections" for months. I personally witnessed countless vaccinated individuals go to extremely high risk events under the pretense that they were immune, only to catch COVID and not understand how that was possible.

- Canadian truckers protest vaccine mandates well into the Delta era of vaccines no longer even acting as a pivotal factor in containing transmission. They are declared white supremacists, and the bank accounts of individuals who donated money to them are frozen.

These are just off the top of my head. Again, even if our institutions had gotten it completely right and operated in good faith, I would be hugely skeptical of legislation like this. But coming out of what we just went through...

Re: California approves bill to punish doctors who spread false information

#63
post #26

This will not end well. Say this law was in place when COVID-19 started and a doctor said "hey, this looks like a new virus causing this pneumonia." This is exactly what is supposed to have happened in Wuhan and those doctors were, surprise surprise, punished by their government. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/07/world/asia/chinese-doctor...

With this law would Fauci and the CDC flip-flopping as they tried to figure out what was happening land them in hot water? When doctors repeated their advice and then the CDC reversed, would they have been spreading misinformation, or is official information, even though wrong, by definition not misinformation even when it is false? This's pretty ill conceived.

Let's say they post on some blog or something. What sort of timeframe do they have to correct those? And how long back does it go?

Re: California approves bill to punish doctors who spread false information

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And was, and still is, frequently mischaracterized by critics as “all the bacon you want”, failing to mention the core tenant of “healthy natural greens and unprocessed meats”. I wonder if the people spreading what may have been deliberate misinformation about the diet would fair better under such a law, than the author of the diet information itself?

tenet

Actually, I totally meant tenant in a metaphorical sense, in which the precepts of a teaching takes up metaphysical residence in the soul of the —- alright, fine. Yes, tenet is the word I was reaching for. Thank you. :)

Re: California approves bill to punish doctors who spread false information

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All laws are subject to interpretation. Didn't you just appoint a judge to your Supreme Court who openly admitted that she couldn't define "a woman" because she "wasn't a biologist?" When you have such people interpreting laws, good luck to you with this one. It's clearly designed to suppress dissent, given the disastrous events of the last two years.

Here is an edge case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCevedoce Here's another: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klinefelter_syndrome A general page on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex#Prevalence A podcast from a Stanford professor that talks about the topic from a biological point of view (not really social): https://hubermanlab.com/biological-influences-on-sex-sex-dif... Between genetic factors, ho…

No post body was provided.

Re: California approves bill to punish doctors who spread false information

#66
post #26

This will not end well. Say this law was in place when COVID-19 started and a doctor said "hey, this looks like a new virus causing this pneumonia." This is exactly what is supposed to have happened in Wuhan and those doctors were, surprise surprise, punished by their government. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/07/world/asia/chinese-doctor...

With this law would Fauci and the CDC flip-flopping as they tried to figure out what was happening land them in hot water? When doctors repeated their advice and then the CDC reversed, would they have been spreading misinformation, or is official information, even though wrong, by definition not misinformation even when it is false? This's pretty ill conceived.

If it was well-crafted enough, there could easily be carve-outs for "at the time" advice, and requiring updates/clarifications, etc.

However, I don't know anyone who would trust Cali lawmakers to actually craft bills well.

Re: California approves bill to punish doctors who spread false information

#67

This will not end well. Say this law was in place when COVID-19 started and a doctor said "hey, this looks like a new virus causing this pneumonia." This is exactly what is supposed to have happened in Wuhan and those doctors were, surprise surprise, punished by their government. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/07/world/asia/chinese-doctor...

There's a bit of a 'boy who cried wolf' situation here, since every sensible thing that Californian lawmakers do, is described as civilization ending stupidity and/or authoritarian fascism. So, my prior is that this is perfectly fine, and the people complaining about it are lying and intentionally misunderstanding this. But I've not read anything about the specific law, so this is entirely based on the way people rea…

It took me minimal effort to find the text of the bill. It took me even less effort to find people who ran afoul of the bill for telling the truth as we currently understand it.

It even cites the major news outlets(unidentified) which seem to receive their information from the same government.

I don't like the circus either.

Re: California approves bill to punish doctors who spread false information

#68

In other words, California approves Bill to punish not pushing government-sanctioned information. How far away are they from becoming China?

I mean, pretty far. There's no way this won't be viewed as problematic and against the first amendment in the state courts, let alone if it made it to the Supreme Court.

Re: California approves bill to punish doctors who spread false information

#69
post #9

> While the legislation has raised concerns over freedom of speech, the bill’s sponsors said the extensive harm caused by false information required holding incompetent or ill-intentioned doctors accountable. There was no addressing the actual issue in this statement. If you're arguing an issue falls under free speech, then the response of "OK, but it's really bad" doesn't change the free-ness of the speech.

False statements of fact are not protected under free speech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...

Tut tut, not all false statements of fact are protected, while some are. Your statement is overly broad as to be a false statement of fact.

Re: California approves bill to punish doctors who spread false information

#70
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

False statements of fact are not protected under free speech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...

Tut tut, not all false statements of fact are protected, while some are. Your statement is overly broad as to be a false statement of fact.

Good grief. I linked to an article describing the exception and the exceptions to the exception. This exception to free speech is widely titled, cited, and summarized as the “false statements of fact exception” to free speech. It’s a name, not a complete description, which is why I provided one version of a complete description that has links to all sources.
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