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Authored by Brad Jones via The Epoch Times,

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has signed legislation to repeal a portion of the state’s COVID-19 “misinformation” and “disinformation” law intended to punish doctors who refused to comply with the government’s narrative on masks, vaccines, and treatments during the pandemic.

On Sept. 30, the governor signed Senate Bill 815 repealing provisions in the law—under Assembly Bill 2098—that “expressly designate the dissemination of misinformation or disinformation related to COVID-19 as unprofessional conduct,” according to an analysis by the bill’s author, Assemblyman Richard Roth (D-Riverside).

A year ago when Mr. Newsom signed AB 2098, introduced by Assemblyman Evan Low (D-Campbell) and co-authored by then-Sen. Richard Pan (D-Sacramento) into law, he warned of a “chilling effect” other potential laws could have on the freedom of physicians and surgeons to effectively talk to their patients about the risks and benefits of treatments for COVID-19 but said he was “confident” the bill was “narrowly tailored” to apply only to egregious instances in which a doctor was acting with malicious intent or clearly deviating from the “required standard of care.”

Just days later, the law, which vaguely defined “misinformation and disinformation” as “unprofessional conduct,” was challenged in court. The law defined disinformation as “misinformation that the licensee deliberately disseminated with malicious intent or an intent to mislead” and misinformation as “false information that is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus contrary to the standard of care.”

Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, a former professor of psychiatry and human behavior at the University of California–Irvine’s School of Medicine and director of the medical ethics program, was fired on Dec. 16, 2021, for refusing to get a COVID-19 vaccine, claiming he had natural immunity after contracting the illness and recovering from it.

He and four other doctors—Tracy Hoeg, Ram Duriseti, Pete Mazolewski, and Azadeh Khatibi—sued Mr. Newsom, state Attorney General Rob Bonta, and several administrators at the Medical Board of California.

Judge William Shubb of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California granted a preliminary injunction blocking the state from enforcing AB 2098, ruling that the statute’s “unclear phrasing and structure” could have a “chilling effect.”

Dr. Kheriaty said he’s glad SB 815 has negated the “misinformation” and “disinformation” provisions of AB 2098.

Dr. Kheriaty suspects the governor and state legislators realized when the preliminary injunction was granted that the court would most likely rule against AB 2098 and ultimately declare it unconstitutional.

Attorneys for the five doctors have filed a motion for a summary judgment from the court.

Dr. Kheriaty said the case shows that because “scientific consensus” during the pandemic evolved quickly, doctors were punished for simply being ahead of the curve and expressing or endorsing ideas the rest of the medical community had not yet caught up with because they weren’t paying as close attention to the available research.

While AB 2098 attempted “to fixate a particular scientific consensus,” the court found scientific consensus to be an ill-defined legal concept, he said.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has since indicated that it should not discriminate between vaccinated and unvaccinated because vaccines don’t stop infection and transmission.

Natural immunity is “robust, durable, and long-lasting,” Dr. Kheriaty said. “So, I guess I lost my job for being nine months ahead of the curve.”

Mixing Politics With Science

In his book, “The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State,” Dr. Kheriaty examines the “age-old problem” of mixing politics with science.

The book, he said, is about the biomedical security state melding an increasingly militarized public health apparatus with the use of digital technologies of surveillance and control, such as vaccine passports, and backing those two elements with police powers of the state and the declared state of emergency which allowed governors and the president to accrue additional extra-constitutional powers and “wield tremendous authority” effectively “micromanaging the lives of citizens.”

Scientism, he explained, tries to monopolize science and claim that it is the only valid form of knowledge and then appoints its preferred “so-called experts” to speak in the name of science.

Scientism is “totally antithetical to science,” which relies on open-ended inquiry, hypothesis, conjecture and debate, evidence, reputation and the willingness to change one’s mind, he said. “And so, trying to fix a particular ‘consensus’ as unassailable completely contradicts the whole ethos of scientific investigation. Science advances precisely by challenging conventional thinking or consensus or what we take to be common sense.”

Prior to the lawsuit, Dr. Kheriaty challenged the University of California system’s vaccine policies in an opinion article published in the Wall Street Journal “just to try to get a conversation going,” he said.

But the UC Irvine authorities weren’t interested in discussion or debate and fired him for allegedly refusing to comply with the vaccine mandate after they twice declined a medical exemption signed by his physician and accused him of unprofessional conduct.

The state then used him as an example to send a message to other doctors who dared to step out of line, he suggested.

Dr. Kheriaty now runs a private practice in Orange County. He is also a scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Judeo-Christian based group in Washington, D.C., the chief of medical ethics at The Unity Project, a non-profit medical freedom and parental rights group, and the Brownstone Institute has supported his work in public health.

Dr. Kheriaty is also a plaintiff in the Missouri v. Biden case, alleging the federal government violated the First Amendment by pressuring social media companies to censor disfavored speech.

'Legislative Power Grab'

Dr. Robert Malone, who helped invent the technology used in the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, told The Epoch Times on Oct. 2 that AB 2098 would not likely have survived a legal challenge and is “an embarrassment for Newsom” and his presidential ambitions.

Dr. Malone called AB 2098 a “legislative power grab” from the state medical board to the legislature and criticized state lawmakers for interfering in the practice of medicine.

To have COVID-specific legislation on regulating medical standards is “bizarre” in the first place because there is already “perfectly adequate” legislation regulating medical standards, he said.

He said Mr. Low’s Sept. 12 statement that the “update” will still hold doctors accountable suggests the new law is “a wolf in sheep’s clothing,” he said.

A doctor with an adverse finding or even a pending investigation against their medical license cannot transfer their licenses to another state, so physicians in this situation are forced to decide whether to leave the state before it has an opportunity to impose an action against their license or run the risk of losing it, “which would make it impossible for them to leave the state,” said Dr. Malone.

“Independent thinkers—the very people that you most want to have medicine—are being run out by the state legislative policies,” he said. “It means that people with no qualifications to practice medicine are mandating how medicine must be practiced directly.

Dr. Malone, the chief medical officer at The Unity Project, is known for expressing concerns about the possibility of immune imprinting. He claimed vaccines provide poor protection over time, with some indications the shielding turns negative.

The “politicization of medicine,” during the pandemic years was “bad medicine,” he said, noting that recent reports about myocarditis are “stunning.”

For more than a year-and-a-half, news reports have documented that the CDC “has been withholding critical information from the medical community relating to COVID-19 vaccines and their safety, Dr. Malone said.

Laura Sextro, CEO of The Unity Project, told the Epoch Times there was no need for SB 815 or AB 2098.

“The writing is on the wall,” she said. “There’s a temporary injunction right now against AB 2098, and I think the authors of this terrible legislation knew that they had to do something to modify this because it’s so horrendous.”

Ms. Sextro said a doctor who owns an urgent care clinic with seven practitioners in California told her on Oct. 2 the clinic would be shuttered because of legislation like AB 2098 and SB 815.

“They’ve made the decision to close the clinic,” she said.

“I think that bills like AB 2098 are actually designed to penalize the sole proprietor doctors—the single-practice doctors who are not associated with … big box medical groups,” she said.

Other Legal Challenges

AB 2098 has since met other legal challenges, including complaints from Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the American Civil Liberties Union and two California doctors, Dr. Mark McDonald and Dr. Jeff Barke.

Shubb's ruling runs contrary to Judge Fred W. Slaughter’s earlier decision to deny a preliminary injunction in the case involving Dr. Barke and Dr. McDonald, who sued the medical board, Mr. Newsom, and AG Bonta in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California last year. The lawsuit, which is still pending, asked the court to declare AB 2098 unconstitutional and sought a preliminary injunction to prevent its enforcement.

Dr. Simone Gold, a Beverly Hills physician who founded America’s Frontline Doctors, called AB 2098 an “unconstitutional, Orwellian gag-order,” that attempts to mandate a new and undefined standard known as ‘contemporary scientific consensus’ and illegally suppress dissenting professional medical opinions.

Eric Hintz, legislative director for Assemblyman Bill Essayli (R-Corona) told The Epoch Times several Republicans voted against SB 815 because they knew the Democratic majority would pass it to remove the “misinformation” and “disinformation” provisions in AB 2098 and because Republicans wanted to voice opposition to fee increases for medical licenses in the state.

The bill increases medical license fees for all physicians by $288, from $863 to $1,151.

“So, I think that’s the reason why a lot of Republicans decided to vote against it,” Mr. Hintz said.

The bill would also extend the regulatory powers of the medical board by two more years from a Jan. 1, 2026, sunset clause to Jan. 1, 2028.

“That would be another reason why someone might oppose the bill,” he said.