We in the West are horrified to discover that most people in Russia don’t know that their military are raining bombs on Ukrainian civilians, including maternity hospitals and psychiatric wards, preventing them from leaving or even gaining access to food, water, heat or shelter.

A Russian protester identified as Olga reportedly said that some 70 percent of her friends completely buy the information from the official government-controlled Russian media that Ukraine’s ‘Nazi, drug-addicted leaders’ are bombing their own citizens and that Russia’s operation in the country is only as a savior to rid its people of these fascist dictators.

Information broadcast on Russian state TV and fed to children also claims that the Kremlin is always on the side of the good, which is why they should love their president and leader, Vladimir Putin.

‘My sister knows the truth, one of my girl friends knows the truth, her mother knows the truth. But my mum doesn’t,’ Olga told the Independent newspaper.

In fact, her mother is convinced that Olga and her friends have been brainwashed by the foreign media as she herself grew up on a steady diet of state-controlled information convincing her that the US and the rest of the West were the enemy of Russia.

We are horrified by how this totalitarian state is controlling the narrative, banning outside information and muzzling any protest with threats of 15 years’ imprisonment for anyone daring to say anything against this war.

The horrors of these Russian actions are not only a call to all of us in the West to help Ukraine, but a salutary lesson to all of us – ‘some hint,’ as Joan Didion famously put it, ‘at the monstrous perversion to which any human idea can come.’

As we shake our heads over the suppression of and access to free information in Russia, I point you to what we’ve all recently been through in terms of state-controlled information.

Take, for instance, those few doctors, nurses and scientists on the frontline of Covid, who wished to let their people know that the virus wasn’t as bad as we were being told, or that there were effective treatments out there that they were prohibited from using, or that the vaccine didn’t work as well or wasn’t as safe as we were all led to believe.

My husband Bryan Hubbard got in touch with one of these brave souls and discovered that this is what he received from the General Medical Council, which licenses doctors in the US.

It’s a letter triggered if the GMC ostensibly claims to get a few complaints from the public. The letter allows that ‘all doctors have a right to express their personal opinions about the Covid-19 vaccine,’ but that ‘we ask that you consider what implications this complaint might have for your practice.’

So after that veiled threat, the doctor is told that he’s to get a visit from the GMC’s ‘Responsible Office’ (I’m not being euphemistic – that Orwellian moniker, incredibly, is its name) and that he’s to engage in further ‘reflection’ before this visit.

During said visit, the Responsible Office is given the extraordinary power to decide if the doctor’s sin was grave enough, or if he wasn’t contrite enough, to warrant taking away his license to practice medicine, not only in his own practice but anywhere in the world.

In fact, the Responsible Office has the ultimate power to do this without a hearing, a trial or anything resembling due process of law.

They did just that to the extraordinary Dr. Sam White, an integrative British doctor, whose videos questioning the safety of the vaccine and the effectiveness of mask wearing got taken down by the GMC, claiming that they were a danger to the public and discredited medicine.

The GMC also took away his license, but gave it back a month later, while continuing to ban him from posting his critical videos. As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post, Dr. White took them to court for violating his free speech and miraculously prevailed, with the High Court of Justice agreeing in part that the GMC had failed to demonstrate that Dr. White’s views were wrong.

Nevertheless, in the legal commentary that followed, however, he was referred to as one of those medics who engage in ‘Covid-19 denial activities.’

Sam White wasn’t in denial over Covid. He was just expressing the educated view that what the government was telling people about the best ways to stay safe from Covid wasn’t the truth, the whole truth and nothing but, and that there were better ways to prevent or treat the virus.

But Sam is an exception. In another recent ruling after a woman took the Office of National Statistics to court to release data on the number of children who have suffered adverse reactions to the Covid jab, High Court judge Jonathan Swift denied the application on the premise that parents do not have the ability to accurately interpret the data.

‘We have no information,’ the mother, only identified as ‘EF,’ said. ‘They can’t tell us if the jabs cause cancer or blindness and until we know, how can we make a properly informed decision?’

On both sides of the Atlantic, our mainstream media, lauded over their brave reporting on the Ukraine front, were utterly silent when it came to questioning or investigating the official Covid narrative.

However, information is now seeping out, bit by bit, as the scientific analysis begins. Recently released analysis of 24 studies from Johns Hopkins and Lund University in Sweden has concluded that lockdowns prevented just 300 deaths and may even have contributed to the increased death rate by keeping people indoors to pass on the virus to other family members, preventing people from getting medical help for other health issues, closing businesses and much more (Studies in Applied Economics, 2022, 200).

And even none other than the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now admits that Covid vaccines increase the chances of myocarditis (inflammation of the heart) by a whopping 133 times in boys up to age 15 (JAMA, 2022, 327, 331-40).

So in our own Covid war, we’re beginning to pick apart the government’s version of the correct response to Covid. But during that time, so many of those doctors and scientists who disagreed with the official narrative were suppressed, ridiculed or worse – and many by the media itself.

People like Dr. David Brownstein in Michigan, who was successfully treating the sickest of patients with a cocktail of intravenous vitamin C, D and the like; or the MATH+ critical care doctors, who produced effective treatments for patients in the hospital and those well enough to be home; or even Oxford University’s Sunetra Gupta, banned from talking against lockdown and in favor of just protecting the vulnerable on the BBC and demonized as a right-wing crazy (she’s politically left wing) for suggesting that lockdown just isn’t going to work.

What we have – what we still have – is the right to post this blog, and to engage in a lot of after-the-fact soul-searching over our response to Covid.

But what we must never allow to happen again is to suppress information for the ‘public good.’ One of the most fundamental pillars of democracy, the very thing that will continue to distinguish us from Vladimir Putin’s Russia or any other totalitarian state, is our right to openly disagree.

Protect it with your life.