FLASHBACK: First doctors censored after speaking out on COVID-19

A viral video from the early days of the pandemic has resurfaced showing the first ER doctors to be censored for challenging the federal science on COVID-19.

California physicians Dr. Dan Erickson and Dr. Artin Massihi publicly stated in an April 2020 press conference that they were “emphatically” opposed to isolation, lockdowns and shuttered businesses. 

“Do we need to still shelter in place? Our answer is emphatically no. Do we need businesses to be shut down? Emphatically no. Do we need to test them and get them back to work? Yes, we do,” Erickson said at the news conference.

Dr. Erickson also made the then-shocking claim that the government’s skyrocketing COVID-19 death statistics were inflated from counting deaths “with COVID” and not only “from COVID”.

“COVID was part of it, it is not the reason they died folks. When I’m writing up my death report I’m being pressured to add COVID,” added Erickson. 

“Why is that? Why are we being pressured to add COVID? To maybe increase the numbers, and make it look a little bit worse than it is. We’re being pressured in-house to add COVID to the diagnostic list when we think it has nothing to do with the actual cause of death.”

The video quickly garnered over five million views and gained public support from Elon Musk at the same time that Dr. Anthony Fauci was rising to power and demanding more restrictions, even after the country was locked down.

The establishment’s response was swift and coordinated. In less than a week, YouTube had pulled the video off the platform. The Google-owned streaming video giant issued a statement claiming it removed the content because it “explicitly disputes the efficacy of local healthy authority recommended guidance on social distancing that may lead others to act against that guidance.”

Mainstream media quickly found doctors eager to defend the government and trotted them out to paint Drs. Erickson and Massihi enemies of science and outcasts from the medical community who were not qualified to speak about epidemiological matters.

“Dubious coronavirus claims by California doctors condemned by health experts,” ran a headline from CNN the next week, which was then regurgitated by other news outlets.

“California doctors with dubious COVID conclusions debunked,” the Los Angeles Daily News proclaimed.

Yahoo! News parroted Fauci that the inflation of COVID deaths was a “conspiracy theory”.

Soros-funded fact-checkers warned the internet that the doctors’ opposition to lockdowns “doesn’t hold up”.

The American Academy of Emergency Medicine (AAEM) came out with a statement condemning the doctors for “COVID-19 misinformation” and said their “reckless and untested musings do not speak for medical society and are inconsistent with current science and epidemiology regarding COVID-19.”

The assault was so total that a year later, MedScape was still talking about Erickson and Massihi and even using them as scapegoats to push for career-ending punishment for doctors who challenge federal science.

Of course, science has since decisively vindicated the doctors and conclusively shown that shelter-in-place orders and lockdowns not only added no benefit but were detrimental to society.

As far as the physicians’ claim that COVID numbers were inflated, by 2022 the CDC had admitted that a large chunk of reported COVID hospitalizations were not actually COVID patients and that it had withheld crucial data from the public.

Last month, totalitarian and mainstream media health expert Dr. Leana Wen, who once advocated for the unvaccinated being locked in their homes, called for the government to stop inflating COVID-19 deaths.

It is unclear whether Erickson and Massihi have received any apology from their detractors, but they are likely not holding their breath.