Los Angeles County Public Health Director Dr. Barbara Ferrer (Photo: Public Domain, Wikipedia)
Barbara Ferrer Obliterates ‘Misinformation’
Parent lawsuit reveals LA COVID censorship drive based on opinion
By Thomas Buckley, October 24, 2023 1:54 pm
Barbara Ferrer did a good thing last week – a very good thing.
She didn’t know she was doing it, she did it by accident, and it will not be good for her or her Los Angeles County Department of Public Health’s fight against the censorship lawsuit they are facing.
But it will be good for everyone else in Los Angeles, in California, in the nation, and maybe even the world.
Because Barabara Ferrer said in open court that misinformation – as defined by those who, like herself, use it as a cudgel to censor other people – does not exist.
The global censorship-industrial complex publicly bases its existence on the need to fight misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, and other things people say and write that are inherently false and dangerous. Obviously, the real reason has nothing to do with true/false and is only about maintaining the power of the elites and their servants, but – at least according to a frightening number of new polls – many people have bought the public lie and think it’s okay to censor/block the speech of spreaders of “misinformation.”
But if misinformation is merely a matter of opinion, a malleable subjective standard then there can be no “for the good of society, for your safety, for your benefit” even theoretical justification for censorship.
Anyone paying attention knew this already, but now one of its practitioners has admitted it under oath:
“I think misinformation to me and misinformation to you would – it’s completely possible that they would be two separate things,” Ferrer said on the opening day of testimony in the Alliance of Los Angeles County Parents freedom of speech lawsuit against her department.
In other words, misinformation is in the eye of the beholder.
Not only did Ferrer largely gut her own legal defense, she also shined a light into the psyche of every censor currently roaming the halls of power.
“It’s a matter of hubris,” said Jay Bhattacharya, one of the plaintiffs in the separate national Missouri v. Biden case involving federal censorship activities that has successfully proven clear First Amendment violations and will soon be heard by the United State Supreme Court. “They believe that anything that contradicts them is misinformation.”
Bhattacharya – a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration which called for a more targeted pandemic response – is a professor of medicine at Stanford, has a Ph. D in economics, and is an actual medical doctor. Ferrer is not a medical doctor and, it seems from her testimony, is not exactly sure what her Ph.D is actually in, explaining that she “was in a program at Brandeis (University – Boston)” focused on public health policy but would “have to look” to check exactly what her Ph. D is in.
At the heart of the Alliance lawsuit was Ferrer’s decision to shut off public comments on the department’s social media sites and her communications’ director pushing then-Twitter to shut down an account critical of her and the department.
The decision to shut off comments came in July, 2022, around the time the department was considering re-imposing a countywide mask mandate. News of that possibility infuriated members of the public who let Ferrer and her department know (though comments, emails, and such) that they were not supportive of the idea.
“Not supportive” is actually an understatement. Ferrer’s defense counsel – Kent Raygor – emphasized the lurid nature of the messages and their putatively threatening nature to justify the shut off. The comments ran the gamut from A to B to C to F to MF to N (Nazi, not the other N word) to P to S words – to be blunt, they were not kind.
Also around this time, doctors at LA-USC hospital said at a staff “town hall” function that the idea that COVID cases were increasing to the point that masking was called for was (at the very least) surprising, saying they were “just seeing nobody with severe COVID disease.”
A video of the doctors made the rounds and put a damper on Ferrer’s mask mandate plans.
When asked by Alliance attorney Julie Hamill if the USC doctors were engaging in misinformation, Ferrer hemmed and hawed, before settling on calling their statements “inaccurate.” She did stress that she believed the pandemic was still very much active last summer and that the numbers her office was seeing were for the entire county and higher than LA-USC’s and, therefore, not reflective of the county as a whole.
Hamill noted that in the past Ferrer had stated COVID impacted lower-income people more and that since LA-USC is a public “safety net” hospital, its number should theoretically be higher than at the other 74 hospitals in the county.
The social media comments were shut off after the decision to not reinstitute masking was made. In response to the shut off, an “alternate” department Twitter account was created by an Alliance member. The account re-posted information from the department account but left the comment/reply section open.
That account was shut down by Twitter for “impersonation” (of the department’s account) reasons after Ferrer’s communications director Brett Morrow – with the assistance of a staffer/friend in the office of Congressman Adam Schiff (and current senate candidate) – used direct back channels to reach out to Twitter execs to have the account shuttered.
It is established legal precedent that a government agency can either have their “comments” sections on social media and other websites either on or off and that the agency can decide to turn them on if they’ve been off and turn them off if they’ve typically been on. However, a government agency cannot make that decision based on the content of the comments – in other words, it can’t close the comments (a quasi-public forum) because people are saying mean things and/or it cannot delete mean comments while leaving positive ones up online.
Morrow and an assistant – Erica Lespron – both testified nasty comments were never deleted and that discussion of turning off comments was discussed – a bit – prior to the re-masking timeframe.
That being said, Morrow had expressed frustration with “anti-maskers” and, the night before they were shut off, emailed another colleague the go ahead, saying “Let’s do it for all posts. I’m over people RN (right now.)”
Ferrer’s attorney asked her about misinformation, though not for a specific definition – she had told Hamill earlier she did not wish to “quibble” about that.
“I’m concerned about misinformation,” Ferrer said. “We’re the public health department. People coming to our sites are looking for accurate information.”
Ferrer said her office has a team of experts who “work hard to determine what is accurate information. So I would say when the information is not aligned with that, with what we’ve determined is accurate information for us, that would represent misinformation.”
Ferrer then immediately undermined her own argument, saying: “You asked a hard question because there are lots of ways people can think about misinformation.”
Bhattacharya was having none of that, noting how many claims – masks work, the vaccine keeps other people safe, too, lockdowns are necessary – used to censor people were in fact utterly false.
“They don’t think it’s possible they could be wrong and they got everything wrong,” Bhattacharya said of the pandemicist censors like Ferrer. “What she’s trying to say is that people who disagree with her are incapable of understanding. It’s antithetical to the scientific method and it’s infuriating.”
Infuriating, but unsurprising, particularly from Ferrer who said this last year: “There are some people who have seen this as a time to really promote individual liberty and freedom, a sort of sense of entitlement, of being able to make our own rules as individuals, but that is a tiny fraction of the people.”
Barbara Ferrer: "There are some people who have seen this as a time to really promote individual liberty and freedom, a sort of sense of entitlement, of being able to make our own rules as individuals, but that is a tiny fraction of the people." pic.twitter.com/N9iXLJwHkG
— Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) October 3, 2022
While a growing level of censorship existed prior and COVID topics are not the only ones by a long shot subject to the current wholesale censorship effort – see Hunter Biden’s laptop, etc. the pandemic provided a very convenient cover to massively increase the constitution-crushing practice, make the powerful much more so, and give an outlet to tiny tyrants to live out their deepest fantasies.
In other words, the global censorship campaign based on the existence of misinformation is, well, misinformation.
And now the world has it from the horse’s mouth.
All quotes were taken from an initial transcript of last week’s hearings produced by the court reporter and provided to the Globe. The hearing part of the trail is over. Both parties have until November 16 to submit closing briefs and live closing arguments will take place December 1.
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YES! Excellent, funny, and satisfying stuff for those of us in L.A. County who were choking beyond endurance under Fake Doctor Barbara Ferrer’s jackboot for so long and who wanted, more than anything, to get free once and for all of her sharp grasping talons and those of her “public health” department. Thank you thank you to the Alliance of L.A. County Parents and much gratitude to Attorney Julie Hamill, who has been quite amusing throughout in addition to being a bulldog in this matter. July 27-28, 2022 was a memorable time, and we should always remember what CAN be done, as SO MANY good people in L.A. County stepped up to throw a bucket of water on the Wicked Witch, uh, I mean Fake Doctor Ferrer. (Written) public comment list in the thousands, emails, letters, phone calls — the blowback was intense. Enjoyed watching Ferrer (mostly) melt away — and the mask mandate too (knock wood).
Thank you for covering this, Thomas Buckley.
How long before the actual independent data will finally swamp the clearly partisan exploitation of “election year covid”. Or will they bury it under “patient privacy” concerns.
We at least are still talking centuries down the road about the Great Tulip Bust, the South Sea Bubble and hopefully the Great 2020 Covid Hoax. When mass hysteria grips an entire planet. What is the pattern, what are the precursors.
Why did the French Revolution collapse so quickly?
Who will finally write these stories about this 21st Century mass hysteria, and when?
Good questions, Jaye. I suspect they were rhetorical —- the way to make your point, that is — but wanted to comment anyway on part of what you said.
When most people in a society have no understanding of and are not influenced by God, we see “The Madness of Crowds.”
When most people in a society have a true understanding of and are influenced by God, we see “The Wisdom of Crowds.”
When we change from God-less to God-ruled, seems to me that will be when we see those corrective accounts written. As well as remorse about what has been done to us, alongside apologies, and common sense and the truth of what happened and truth in general mostly restored. And we will likely see the liars that remain recede and skitter back to hide in their ratholes. WHEN will there be another Great Awakening? Who knows, guess we’ll see..
Your tax dollars at work. (Against you)
From Transparent California:
Barbara Ferrer
Director Of Public Health (2022)
Regular pay: $491,701.00
Overtime pay: $0.00
Other pay: $93,909.00
Total pay: $585,610.00
Benefits: $75,726.00
Total pay & benefits: $661,336.00
YUP! Absolutely sickening, isn’t it. And all that cash concentrated in one malevolent maniacal “director of public health” to be used ‘against us,’ as you pointed out. Of course there were other similar ‘public health’ officials throughout CA, and even throughout the U.S. Certainly Wash DC had their share.
So glad to see this (bribe) pay-and-benefits in black and white, broken down, and on the record here, Jaye.
Gee, only $4,664 away from. her true numerical identifier….
What a TRAVESTY, that such a BUFFOON can,be paid SO MUCH, to do SO MUCH HARM to so many people….
She is true malevolence. personified….
(And that ain’t “misinformation”…)
You know what happened, CD9, was at the end of July 2022, when the Fake Doctor was threatening the mask mandate again, armed with the empty “white paper” written by her non-medical non-scientific daughter Kaitlin Barnes that was intended to muzzle up LAUSD kids again and be trotted out elsewhere to show “masks work,” residents of L.A. County were SO COMPLETELY FED UP that even (former Obama Labor Secty, now County Supervisor) Hilda Solis found herself inundated with rabid complaints from her angry constituents. Solis, along with Supe Janice Hahn (also by then converted to anti-Ferrer status) and Kathryn Barger (always anti-Ferrer) were poised to become the three-vote board majority that threatened to fire Ferrer once and for all. That, added to the already existing backlash from county residents, was finally the turning point against the mask mandate.
The process was a joy to observe and a great lesson in the workings too, because even Hilda Solis withdrew her support for Ferrer because of the pounding she received from her unexpectedly noisy constituency).
Ferrer would love to bring masks back, even now, and one can see her trying to position herself for it occasionally, but at this point Good Luck To Her! I doubt most would comply. Or would follow her mandates for whatever else she might have up her sleeve going forward. We’ll see
I should add that, in addition to The Globe’s work, local L.A. radio (John Phillips and Randy Wang at KABC-AM 790 and John & Ken at KFI-AM 640) have been extremely effective — via making local government “entertaining” — in educating and alerting residents. I’ll bet you that THOUSANDS of SoCal people, who likely didn’t even know of the L.A. County Board of Supervisors EXISTENCE, now know of its purpose and how it functions, can name every member (and whether they are clownish or sensible), know what district they are in and who represents them, and how it all works. I would guess people learned without even knowing they were learning, considering it has all been caricatured so amusingly. Quite an accomplishment in covering important local matters!
Barbara Ferrer is a chronic carrier and superspreader of the ugly virus. I mean, she’s just super-ugly. Everything she touches turns putrid.