A lawsuit was filed Tuesday against President Biden and his administration by several people who are suffering from confirmed or suspected Covid-19 vaccine injuries, claiming government officials violated their rights to free speech.
The plaintiffs state in the lawsuit that the government pressured social-media companies to flag and shut down accounts of people who shared “disfavored viewpoints” about their Covid vaccine experiences, as they were “deemed a threat” to the government’s agenda of vaccinating all Americans.
The case challenges the government’s ongoing mass-censorship program, which violates the free-speech rights of all Americans. The suit’s introductory statement declared, “This sprawling enterprise has involved the efforts of myriad federal agencies and government actors (including within the White House itself) to direct, coerce, and, ultimately, work in concert with social media platforms to censor, muffle, and flag as ‘misinformation’ speech that conflicts with the government’s preferred narrative — including speech that the government explicitly acknowledges to be true.”
Shaun Barcavage, Kristi Dobbs, Nikki Holland, Suzanna Newell, Ernest Ramirez, and Brianne Dressen are the listed plaintiffs in the case. All of them use social media and have or had accounts on several platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, and GoFundMe.
Dressen, a preschool teacher who lives in Utah, was struggling to get care from local doctors while dealing with neurological symptoms that became apparent after she got vaccinated. She was tested at National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2021, where she finally got an appropriate diagnosis from lead researchers in Covid.
The Epoch Times reported:
Medical records from Dressen’s visit shows NIH doctors diagnosed her with “persistent neurological symptoms following SARS-CoV-2 vaccine” and “post-vaccine neuropathy.” SARS-CoV-2 is another name for the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which causes the disease COVID-19. Neuropathy is nerve damage that can affect patients’ nervous systems and lead to symptoms including weak limbs, vision loss, and loss of muscle control.
Finally knowing the cause of her disorder, Brianne, like the other plaintiffs who had serious problems following a Covid vaccination, sought a place to inform others of their experiences. According to the lawsuit, they began to rely on “social media as a means of sharing their personal experiences after they, or a loved one, were medically harmed after taking the vaccine; exchanging advice, medical research, and support with others who were injured after taking the vaccine; and engaging with other users in private support groups for vaccine-injured individuals and their loved ones. Plaintiffs’ use of social media in these ways has been met with heavy and ongoing censorship.”
All of the plaintiffs had their speech “repeatedly flagged as misinformation or removed entirely while their social media accounts were at constant risk of being frozen or disabled.” One example shared in the suit stated that in July of 2021,
Facebook shut down a private support group for vaccine-injured individuals called “A Wee Sprinkle of Hope,” of which Ms. Dressen was a member, after she posted an infographic that listed certain symptoms that people had experienced post-Covid vaccine, as well as a link to a press conference where she had recently spoken about her vaccine injuries. Facebook informed her that the group was disabled for violating Facebook’s “Community Standards on misinformation that could cause physical harm.”
Sixteen-year-old Ernest Ramirez, Jr. died five days after taking his first dose of the Pfizer Covid vaccine. His father, Ernest Ramirez, as stated in the lawsuit, launched a GoFundMe page in August of 2021 to help raise enough money for a trip to Washington, D.C., to speak about his son’s story. Shortly after, GoFundMe informed Mr. Ramirez that his account had been removed for violating the platform’s terms of service for “Prohibited Conduct.” All the funds raised were forfeited.
The lawsuit statement shared,
On November 11, 2021, which would have been his son’s seventeenth birthday, Mr. Ramirez posted a photo on Facebook and Twitter of himself beside his son’s casket at his funeral. The caption of the photo read: “My good byes to my Baby Boy.” Facebook flagged the post with a warning box viewable to other users labeling it as “partly false information.” Twitter deleted the photo altogether and warned Mr. Ramirez: “Make sure you’re sharing reliable information. Visit the COVID-19 Information Center for reliable vaccine info and resources.”
Numerous other examples were listed in the lawsuit that proved the government was censoring speech that was deeply personal and frequently private. The case claims that the plaintiffs were simply engaging with others “to discuss their own pain, experiences, advice, and sources of hope,” but were met with censorship and accusations of spreading lies and “inciting violence.”
The lawsuit declared,
Through this irrational and brutal censorship regime, Defendants have treated what is, in truth, personal and intimate speech as impermissible political dissent to the government’s preferred policies. Thus, what began as personal and intimate has been forcibly converted into political speech by government suppression. Plaintiffs are innocent victims in the federal government’s exhaustive crusade against any message that might threaten — or even question — its vaccination agenda.
Under the First Amendment, the federal government must play no role in policing private speech or picking winners and losers in the marketplace of ideas.
New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA), a nonpartisan, nonprofit civil-rights group, is representing the plaintiffs. In a press release announcing the filing of the lawsuit, NCLA Senior Litigation Counsel Peggy Little stated,
Americans injured by experimentally approved vaccines are being deplatformed, silenced, suppressed, defamed and cancelled by their own government for reaching out to others simply to share and receive information critical to their physical and mental well-being. Government actors have bullied, threatened and coerced social media companies to strip these plaintiffs of their First Amendment rights of association and speech. Suppression of speech critical of the government by the very government actors mandating the vaccine is frightening. NCLA’s lawsuit seeks to restore these plaintiffs’ civil liberties and the free flow of information guaranteed by the First Amendment for all Americans. We must never again lose our constitutional bearings in a pandemic.
