“Real Time” host Bill Maher ripped into the government, medical agencies and social media platforms for shutting down “dissenting opinions” on COVID-19 opinions Friday.
“As the years roll by now, we see that the dissenting opinions on a lot of these things were quite the right ones,” the HBO host told his guest, author and journalist Kara Swisher.
The conversation started when Maher brought up Murthy V. Missouri, a Supreme Court case that originated from a lawsuit filed by state attorneys general from Missouri and Louisiana accusing government officials of colluding with social media companies to censor posts online.
These allegedly censored posts included statements about COVID-19 and Hunter Biden’s laptop, among other topics.
Swisher pushed back on Maher’s points, noting that it was a confusing time for everyone.
Maher said earlier in the interview that he “was always on the page during the pandemic that they should not be shutting down debate about medical matters.”
“I was a dissenter on many of these issues,” he said, before noting that there were valuable opinions that were silenced or discouraged at the height of the pandemic.
Facebook — now Meta — owner Mark Zuckerberg said last year that the “establishment… kind of waffled on a bunch of facts and asked for a bunch of things to be censored that, in retrospect, ended up being more debatable or true.”
On “Real Time,” Swisher told Maher that “we’re not going to know perfectly.”
The host continued, providing examples of where speech on the topic was discouraged.
“OK, but we should have been able to argue about whether it came from a lab, which we weren’t. Things like that,” he said.
“Natural immunity — whether it was better to go to the beach and get sun and fresh air, as I would have said, as opposed to sitting home and day-drinking and putting on weight.”
“They never mentioned that obesity was the biggest factor,” Maher continued.
“They have a lot to answer for.”
Swisher replied: “They do, but you’re in the middle of a plague and a debate that people don’t know, and so you’re going to… “
Maher cut her off: “Yes, so you should be able to debate it — this is medicine.”
“Yes you should,” Swisher responded.
“This is not — the moment was not — people make mistakes, and science says it makes mistakes.”
Maher explained more background about the lawsuit.
“There were two doctors, Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff. They’re from Stanford and Harvard, and they said, ‘We were shut down. Not always fully, but there are ways to do that.’”
“And they’re not radicals,” he said.
“They were saying that we’re going too far with school closures — again, I think, has been proved right. My question was always, ‘Why are your doctors more important than my doctors, the ones I want to listen to?’”
“And the social media companies were in the tank with the government,” Maher said.
