Clinical psychologist Cindy Eaton say censorship is bad, but then it is good

I asked her about AB 2098, the California bill regulating speech between doctors and their patients about COVID-19. Whether Cindy is for or against it depends on how you describe it.

Executive summary

This video is just 3 minutes long and it’s really amazing. In the video, clinical psychologist Cindy Eaton says doctors shouldn’t be restricted following the medical consensus when talking to patients.

A mere 15 minutes after the interview, Cindy comes back and DEMANDS that I IMMEDIATELY delete the interview because the NY Times article referred to the bill as censoring medical misinformation. She’s in favor of such censorship!

The problem of course is that the bill defines medical misinformation as disagreeing with the medical consensus.

What this shows is that when the bill is described using only the bill’s DEFINITION of the term “misinformation,” she’s strongly opposed. When it is described by the term “misinformation,” she’s strongly in favor of the bill.

She stood around me for more than 30 minutes telling everyone not to talk to me. She said she’d leave when I deleted the video. When that didn’t work, she called the cops on me to try to intimidate me to delete the video. That failed too.

Here’s the video that Cindy doesn’t want anyone to see.

Introduction

On October 8, 2022, I interviewed Cindy Eaton who is a clinical psychologist. The interview was in downtown Los Altos at 6:39pm.

I asked her what she thought of AB2098. She had not heard of the bill, so I described that it prohibited doctors from talking to their patients only for COVID freely; they had to restrict their speech to the "medical consensus." She thought this was a bad idea.

About 15 minutes after the interview ended, she came back and DEMANDED I delete her interview IMMEDIATELY and to show her I deleted it.

I asked her why.

She said after the interview that she read the NY Times article on AB2098 which said it regulated COVID-19 MISINFORMATION.

She said I totally misled her!

She's said that now she understands what the bill is for, she is STRONGLY in FAVOR of censoring COVID misinformation so she wanted to take back what she said.

But as you can see from the video, her claims of misrepresentation are clearly false. I described exactly what the bill prohibited while avoiding the use of the pejorative term “misinformation.”

She then said if I didn’t delete the video, she would stand there and tell everyone not to talk to me. After all, that's what all respectable medical professionals do when they change their minds about a topic, right?

I said I described the bill accurately; she should read the text of the bill.

She refused to read the bill.

Instead, she then stood around telling everyone not to talk to me because I was misrepresenting the bill (you know, the bill that she herself refused to read).

When that wasn't enough to get me to delete the video, she called the Los Altos Police Department.

Two officers arrived and agreed she had no standing. First of all, there was no criminal activity for the cops to be called.

Secondly, there is no civil action for her either since she consented to be filmed.

Once you give an interview, you can't unring the bell

Here’s a simple example. Suppose I ask you for a dollar and you give me the dollar. Then you change your mind and want it back. You don’t have a legal right to get it back. So if you want it back, you should always ask nicely.

In the case of an interview, can you imagine if Gavin Newsom said something that he later regretted at a press conference. Do you think he has a legal right to demand that everyone who was at the press conference to delete their footage while he stands over each one of them and verifies they deleted their footage? Of course not. That’s ridiculous.

If Cindy had been nice about it and made a polite request and agreed to re-do her video with her new updated views, I would have not used the original video. I would have preferred that actually.

But by standing around shooing people away telling people I misrepresented the bill (which you can see that I did not) and then calling the cops, she went over the line.

Words matter

Isn’t it amazing how reading a NY Times article which refers to disagreement with the mainstream consensus as “misinformation” can instantly shift someone’s opinion?

To me, what was fascinating about this incident is how the description of the bill makes a huge difference:

1. When the bill is described as prohibiting speech between a doctor and a patient which doesn't agree with the mainstream medical consensus, that is BAD.

2. But when the NY Times characterizes the bill as punishing "medical misinformation," that same bill is now GOOD.

The bill itself says:

“Misinformation” means false information that is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus contrary to the standard of care."

So nothing changed other than using the term misinformation. Once it is misinformation, then censoring doctors goes from being bad to good. Cindy was adamant about that.

I asked Cindy about the war on fat where all the doctors thought fat was bad. If a doctor told a diabetic patient to reduce carbs and increase fats, she would have her license to practice medicine taken away (if the bill was extended to cover non-COVID-19 information). Cindy had no comment.

I’d have loved to have asked Cindy, why the limitation for COVID-19?? What if a doctor disagreed with the medical consensus on your cancer treatment protocol? Should that doctor have their medical license revoked?

But she didn’t want to talk about that either.

Also, one doctor from Stanford Hospital walked by but he refused to comment on the bill. I got the sense he liked working at Stanford and wanted to keep his job.

So doctors don't feel safe talking about a bill that censors them.

We live in interesting times.

Next step for California: Extend AB 2098 to all fields of medicine so anyone who doesn’t comply with the consensus loses their license. After all, why stop with COVID-19?

Now she’s defaming me on Nextdoor about her interview

It’s a good thing I didn’t delete the video. It’s proof that she’s misrepresenting what I said.

Check out this post on Nextdoor. Wow. The poster’s name doesn’t match her name, but it was Cindy who took the photo, so it is either an alias for Cindy, or someone who lives at the same address.

False information eh? Check out the video and decide for yourself.

False statistics?!? Really? I’d love to know what is false. As a misinformation spreader it is so frustrating that nobody will tell me precisely which “statistics” I gave in that video were false.

If you found any “lies” in the video, please be sure to let me know in the comments!

Update: 10/10/22: That post is no longer on Nextdoor.

Cindy simply has no way out if she supports AB 2098

If I could get her on camera again, I’d ask her, “Oh, so you are saying that you think that the California Medical Board should revoke Vinay Prasad’s license if he told his patients about the paper co-authored by top people at Harvard and Johns Hopkins showing the mRNA shots should not be given to college students? Seriously?”

And if a doctor discovered the “death” safety signal triggered in VAERS and the CDC didn’t know about it, that doctor cannot warn their patients. How does that save lives?

Summary

Using the word “misinformation” is a brilliant strategy to ensure that doctors will never tell patients the truth about how dangerous the vaccines are.

I expect some other states will follow California’s lead on this bill.

Fortunately, there are efforts in California to overturn this bill since it is a violation of the first amendment for the government to regulate such speech. I suspect this will go all the way to the US Supreme Court so it could take a while to resolve.

Let’s hope that the judge grants the motion for a Preliminary Injunction. Lives depend on it and those lives cannot be recovered.