X, formerly Twitter, announced Sunday that it would cover the legal bills of a Canadian physician who was disciplined for her 2020 posts on the site questioning lockdowns and Covid-19 vaccines.
“X is proud to help defend Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill against the government-supported efforts to cancel her speech,” declared a March 24 post by X News.
Gill, a highly respected Toronto-area doctor specializing in pediatrics and immunology, “has a large following on Twitter where she has shared scientific studies and opinions about various government COVID policies since the start of the pandemic, including her concerns about the harms caused by lockdowns, particularly to the most marginalized, and the lack of ethical and scientific justification for unprecedented lockdowns,” according to the Democracy Fund (TDF), a Toronto-based nonprofit civil-liberties organization representing Gill.
Gill — who TDF says “regularly administers vaccines” and “supports COVID-19 vaccines for high-risk individuals with informed consent” — also had the nerve to challenge the push for widespread, mandatory vaccination for a disease that would eventually become relatively harmless once herd immunity was achieved.
“In August of 2020, she was the target of a malicious online campaign, encouraging the public to file complaints to the CPSO [College of Physicians and Surgeons] about her tweets,” wrote TDF. “Over a span of a week, six complaints were filed, with a further one later and a separate Registrar’s investigation initiated as a result.” In early 2021, the CPSO’s Inquiries, Complaints and Reports Committee (ICRC) dismissed five of the complaints but placed three “cautions” in Gill’s public record over just two tweets from August 4, 2020:
The former, of course, was undeniable when it was posted and has since been borne out by post-lockdown studies and even a grand-jury report. The latter, noted TDF, “was in relation to a press conference that day by [Canada’s chief public health officer] Dr. Theresa Tam in which she stated that, despite the anticipated authorization of a vaccine possibly by that year’s end, it would not be a silver bullet and lockdowns and restrictions could persist for at least another two or three years.”
The ICRC, naturally, sided with public-health officials and declared that Gill’s anti-lockdown tweet was “misinformed and misleading” as well as “irresponsible.”
“It was unreasonable for the CPSO to insist that doctors’ comments align with the government,” civil-liberties attorney Lisa Bildy told TDF. “The College’s duty is not to the government, but rather to the public, and those interests are not necessarily aligned. To punish a doctor for raising alarm bells, and to stifle scientific debate especially on novel measures being imposed on a massive scale, is a dangerous path to be on.”
The government, not surprisingly, took the opposite view. When Gill sued various doctors, so-called medical experts, and media outlets for libeling her over her scientifically grounded opinions, a judge “ruled in their favor, saying that if the suit went ahead ‘its chilling effects would have an impact well beyond the parties to this case,’ deterring experts and the media from calling out potential misinformation,” reported the National Post.
Instead of awarding Gill the $12 million she sought in damages, the judge ordered her to pay the defendants’ $1.1 million in legal fees. On appeal, the cost order was reduced to $300,000, due Monday.
Gill, who had already spent her life savings on her legal battle, set up a crowdfunding page to raise the $300,000. When it became clear that the page was not going to bring in enough money — Gill has raised just over $200,000 as of this writing — the doctor appealed to X Chairman Elon Musk, reminding him of his August post promising that X would pay the legal bills of those “unfairly treated … due to posting or liking something on this platform.”
“Hi @elonmusk @X — as one of the first [Canadian] MDs to oppose lockdowns on twitter in 2020, in a socialized healthcare system where govt is sole-payer, I’ve been persecuted for 4yrs solely d/t my tweets,” Gill wrote Thursday. “Pls help a fellow Cdn!”
By Sunday, Musk had made good on his promise. X News said the platform “will now fund the rest of Dr. Gill’s campaign so that she can pay her $300,000 judgment and her legal bills.” Gill later posted that Musk had also “committed to assisting my appeal of 3 CPSO cautions.”
“May Waheguru [God] bless you,” she added.
X News concluded its post thus: “Free speech is the bedrock of democracy and a critical defense against totalitarianism in all forms. We must do whatever we can to protect it, and at X we will always fight to protect your right to speak freely.”
While Gill continues to fight to clear her reputation, the CPSO, which touted communist China’s alleged success with lockdowns as part of its reason for disciplining her, has yet to apologize for taking such an utterly unscientific and authoritarian approach toward the debate over how best to combat a then-novel virus.
Nevertheless, Musk’s assistance is, as Stanford University’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya put it on X, “a prayer answered.”
“The Canadian government and media and medical establishment,” he scolded, “should be ashamed of itself for trying to destroy the life of someone willing to speak truth to power.”
