‘Truth, justice and the American way.’

That was the motto given to Superman, of all people, in comic books. It started out as just ‘truth and justice’ when the DC Comics’ superhero first appeared in 1938, but then the originators added the last bit about the ‘American way’ as an attempt to bolster public morale during the Second World War.

There it remained in Superman’s speaking balloons during the McCarthy years and beyond when Americans became paranoid about Communism and began to propagate the notion of American exceptionalism.

With the latest iteration of the superhero on film, the motto was updated last October to ‘truth, justice and a better tomorrow.’

But the original is the motto I grew up with, probably helped to form my moral compass, and had something to do with my becoming a journalist: the notion that justice and truth do prevail and that these ideals are somehow encapsulated in America with a constitution that embraced truth, justice and human rights for all.

In other words, I grew up believing that the good guys do, eventually, carry the day in order to preserve all those great fundamental rights.

These days, there isn’t much evidence of any of this in America or many other places, given all the lies and corruption in politics, industry and the media, the great economic divides, the unfairness and prejudice now built into many systems, and more.

But every so often truth and justice and all those lofty values we believe in do prevail, and not just in America.

That’s what just happened in Britain, when a court decision upheld the right of a lone UK doctor to speak up against the official line about Covid.

The plantiff’s name was Dr. Sam White, who practices in the Southeast. After qualifying as a conventional doctor, he ultimately turned to functional medicine to solve his own issues with Lyme disease and then decided to turn to integrative solutions to help his patients, too.

Dr. White’s record was impeccable until he started speaking out about Covid. He produced a YouTube video, questioning mask-wearing, lockdowns. and especially the efficacy and safety of the Covid vaccine.

National Health Service England responded by suspending him from a right to practice medicine on June 21 with the following statement:

‘Through a social media video, Dr White spread misinformation and inaccurate details about the Coronavirus and how it is diagnosed and treated, including saying the vaccine is a form of genetic manipulation which can cause serious illness and death and that he advised against wearing masks.

‘Dr White has potentially put patients at risk and diminished the public’s trust in the medical profession by disseminating misinformation and inaccurate details about the measures taken to tackle the Coronavirus pandemic.’

In the video, according to court documents, Dr. White claimed doctors and nurses were ‘having their hands tied behind their backs’ preventing them from using treatments that had been established as being effective both as prophylaxis from Covid19 infections and as treatments for it.’

During the hearing after which his license was revoked, Dr. White’s statement supporting his position ran to 106 paragraphs that addressed, point by point, the allegations contained in the summary of the YouTube video, eventually producing an  ‘extensive volume of literature and other sources’ to support his position.

Nevertheless, the UK’s General Medical Council suspended Dr. White’s license to practice medicine for 18 months, on the grounds that he was undermining public confidence in doctors, which would have a real impact on patient safety.

The Tribunal also imposed ongoing monitoring on Dr. White and  restricted him from posting or sharing his views about Covid on any social media platforms, even forcing him to remove previous posts.

The GMC quickly revoked that decision about his license a month later, but that wasn’t good enough for Dr. White.

He decided to sue them in the high court, arguing that the GMC had infringed upon his right to freedom of speech.

In hearing the case, the court did not examine the merits of Dr. White’s views – only his right to make them. Referring to Article 10 of the European Court of Human Rights, Justice Dove, who presided over the case, noted:

‘Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.’

However, as Judge Dove pointed out, freedom of expression is a qualified right and as a ‘medical practitioner expressing opinions about medical matters his entitlement to freedom of expression is not absolute.’

Nevertheless, said the court, the GMC both ‘failed to afford sufficient respect to the claimant’s right . . . to freedom of expression or to ‘take account of the support for the claimant’s views to be found in the bodies of medical and scientific opinion which he had furnished to support the witness statement he lodged in the proceedings.’

Bottom line: Dr. Sam White won. He can put up his videos, he can speak out against the standard medical response to Covid, he can criticize the vaccine, he can put forward the other side of the story. And he is more than ready to do so.

As Judge Dove said, there are always qualifications about free speech. In the US, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, in making his decision on the Schenck case in 1919 said, that the test for limiting free speech is, essentially, context. Does it present ‘clear and present danger’ or cause national panic?

His famous analogy was that an individual is free to shout ‘fire’ when in front of a handful of people, but only in a crowded cinema as long as there is one – or the person mistakenly believes there is one.

That decision was later overturned in 1969 with Brandenberg v Ohio, which enlarged our First Amendment rights by concluding that free speech can only be curtailed if it is likely to incite imminent lawless action (like a riot).

So in these fevered Covid times, when anything criticizing government and medical policy is being removed on Facebook and elsewhere, Sam White finally fought over truth and justice about free speech – and prevailed.

His case, which demonstrated that there is sufficient scientific evidence countering every aspect of the official handling of Covid, may well provide precedent to others who are being deplatformed or silenced for criticizing the official line.

He showed us all that even during times of crisis, it is absolutely crucial for a democracy to allow dissenting views to be voiced and aired if we are going to arrive at truth or justice.

That, to my mind, is the very definition of a modern superhero.