They Didn't Need Twitter to Silence Doctors. They Had Licensing Boards.

Dr. Mark Brody sent a cautionary email to his patients in Rhode Island. He told them the vaccine data was still thin and they might want to wait before getting the COVID shot. Rhode Island suspended his medical license.

When given a choice — renounce his opinion or complete a board-imposed ethics course — he chose neither. He fought back.

The story gets covered, when it gets covered at all, as a medical free-speech case. That frame is accurate as far as it goes. But it misses the structural point. The COVID-era censorship operation people associate with Twitter takedowns and Facebook removals ran through a different set of institutions with a more powerful tool than a platform ban. Medical licensing boards can end a career. They answer to state governments. And they operated for three years under explicit guidance from the Federation of State Medical Boards stating that physicians who generated COVID-19 "vaccine misinformation" could face discipline.

The FSMB issued that guidance in June 2021. It was non-binding on state boards, which means its practical effect varied by state. It also did not define misinformation with precision.

It did not need to.

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The mechanism worked like this. A physician expressed a view diverging from CDC or FDA guidance. That divergence was characterized not as a clinical difference of opinion but as "unprofessional conduct" subject to licensing discipline. The standard for professional discipline is considerably lower than any legal standard of proof. Boards can act on complaints. Complaints can come from anyone.

Licensing boards have always had authority to discipline physicians for egregious patient harm — including, in some cases, prescribing practices with no clinical basis. That authority is legitimate and the patient-safety rationale behind it is real. What happened during COVID was something different: the standard shifted from demonstrated harm to departure from official guidance, and the definition of that guidance was controlled by the same institutions issuing the discipline.

California made this explicit with AB 2098, signed in October 2022, which formally defined sharing COVID "misinformation" with patients as unprofessional conduct subject to license revocation. The Ninth Circuit struck it down in February 2024. In Hoang v. Bonta, the court ruled the law's definition of misinformation was unconstitutionally vague — specifically, that "current scientific consensus" did not give physicians adequate notice of what speech was prohibited.

The court did not rule on whether the underlying science was correct. It ruled that using "scientific consensus" as a legal enforcement standard gives the government authority to define truth in real time. That distinction — between what was medically correct and who gets to decide what is medically correct — was the one that got elided for three years.

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The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic held hearings in 2023 and 2024 examining federal coordination with social media platforms to remove COVID content. The Supreme Court addressed that federal-platform axis in Murthy v. Missouri in 2024. The majority held that the plaintiffs lacked standing at that stage of the litigation. The Court explicitly declined to reach the merits of the coordination claims — it did not rule that the coordination was acceptable, only that these particular plaintiffs could not yet challenge it.

The platform story has a Supreme Court case. The licensing board story has almost no sustained reporting.

A platform ban is reversible. A medical license suspension is not — it affects livelihood, professional identity, and patient access. When the same underlying conduct triggers both a platform removal and a licensing investigation, the severity lands heavily on the licensing board side. The political attention stayed on the platform side.

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How widespread was the licensing board enforcement? The public record is incomplete. No national database tracks how many physicians faced complaints versus formal discipline versus exoneration during this period. What the record does show is that it extended beyond Brody. Dr. Mary Bowden in Texas had her hospital privileges — legally distinct from her state license, though both affect a physician's ability to practice — suspended after she publicly questioned COVID treatment protocols. Physicians in multiple states faced licensing complaints for prescribing ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine off-label.

Off-label prescribing is routine and legal across medicine. The clinical question of whether those treatments worked is separate from the question of whether physicians should lose their licenses for using them. The licensing boards conflated the two.

What emerges is not a conspiracy. It is something more prosaic and, in some ways, more durable: a professional regulatory apparatus that absorbed a political priority and applied its normal enforcement tools to an abnormal standard. The FSMB issued guidance. Some state boards acted on it. Physicians who stepped out of line faced career-ending proceedings.

The standard those boards were enforcing was "scientific consensus." The Ninth Circuit found that standard too vague to survive First Amendment scrutiny.

Dr. Brody's patients never got to weigh the full picture. They got the consensus. So did his licensing board.

Sources

1. Rhode Island Department of Health disciplinary records — Dr. Mark Brody, MD. https://health.ri.gov/licensing/index.php

2. Mary Bowden MD. Post on Dr. Brody's case, June 19, 2026. https://x.com/i/status/2067351559722156332

3. Federation of State Medical Boards. "FSMB: Member Boards Have Authority to Discipline Physicians Who Generate and Spread COVID-19 Vaccine Misinformation." June 29, 2021. https://www.fsmb.org/advocacy/news-releases/fsmb-member-boards-have-authority-to-discipline-physicians-who-generate-and-spread-covid-19-vaccine-misinformation/

4. California AB 2098 (Physicians: unprofessional conduct). Signed October 1, 2022. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=202120220AB2098

5. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Hoang v. Bonta, No. 23-55019. February 26, 2024. https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2024/02/26/23-55019.pdf

6. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. Hearing: "