Instapundit links to a The College Fix article with this headline:
‘Health misinformation’ should be a federal crime, First Amendment law professor says
I love it when somebody proposes a regulation or law that will have obvious unintended consequences, like this one. Let's imagine this had become law prior to the Covid-19 outbreak, what would have happened differently.
For starters people like Fauci, Birx and Walensky would have made many fewer pronouncements, and those made would have been so hedged around with qualifications and caveats as to make them essentially useless. How would people have dealt with "We don't know yet, we'll have to see what happens" answers? Would this have been preferable to what occurred? I'm sure, after the fact, many would say "yes."
When the pandemic first started people were scared and needed reassurance, even if they weren't always correct answers as seen in the merciless gaze of hindsight. For people like me, and I hope my readers, who are comfortable with "what we know so far," it would have been fine.
I'm not certain that qualified answers would have worked for most folks. Had the proposed law been in place, there would have been no "this is the truth" responses from government or academic sources. Do we really want to make it a crime to sound positive and reassuring?
Science is always finding new answers, which often modify or contradict the old answers. How would statements about health issues be known to be "misinformation?" Imagine convicting someone who is later exonerated by later, better research findings. Or the reverse, where someone is not convicted and later findings show they were wrong and should have been guilty?
The geologist who first proposed the continental drift hypothesis was viewed as a total crackpot for decades; plate tectonics as it's now called is today's mainstream belief. I conclude there is no practical way to make "health misinformation" a federal crime, it is another in a long series of partially-baked ideas.
