On 5 August 2026, Senior U.S. District Judge William B. Shubb issued a preliminary injunction in Kory v. Bonta. The order bars California's Attorney General and its medical boards from investigating, prosecuting, or sanctioning three physicians: Dr. Pierre Kory, Dr. Le Trinh Hoang, and Dr. Brian Tyson, based on the viewpoint of the COVID-19 advice they give patients. This includes advice that departs from the positions of public-health authorities. The boards may not reframe such advice as a violation of the standard of care or informed-consent rules simply because it contradicts official messaging.
The ruling is narrow in formal scope. It is preliminary, not final. It protects only these three doctors. It leaves intact the boards' power to act against fraud, actual negligence, unsafe prescribing, false records, or genuine failures of informed consent that do not turn on viewpoint. Yet its significance is larger than those limits suggest. It applies a clear constitutional principle to the doctor-patient conversation at a moment when that conversation had become a primary site of regulatory pressure.
California's AB 2098, enacted in 2022, declared the dissemination of COVID-19 "misinformation" to patients a form of unprofessional conduct. Misinformation was defined by reference to "contemporary scientific consensus." The statute was enjoined in other litigation and repealed effective 1 January 2024. The claimed authority did not disappear with the statute. Regulators continued to assert that ordinary disciplinary provisions could reach the same speech by redescribing it as substandard care or deficient informed consent.
Kory and his colleagues sued in early 2024. The district court initially denied preliminary relief, treating speech during treatment as regulable professional conduct. The Ninth Circuit affirmed. The Supreme Court denied certiorari. The legal landscape then shifted. In Chiles v. Salazar (March 2026), the Supreme Court held 8–1 that a state cannot strip speech of First Amendment protection simply by calling it "conduct" or "treatment." Justice Gorsuch's majority opinion rejected the word game: professional licensing power does not convert viewpoint-based restrictions on pure speech into ordinary regulation of conduct. Strict scrutiny applies.
Judge Shubb applied that holding. The renewed injunction followed.
Medical boards exist to protect patients from demonstrable harm: incompetence, dishonesty, exploitation, and clear departures from accepted practice that endanger people. That function is legitimate and necessary. The COVID period revealed how easily the same machinery can be turned toward orthodoxy. Official positions on transmission, masks, natural immunity, early treatment, myocarditis risk, and vaccine side-effect profiles changed over time. In real time, however, dissent from the prevailing public-health line was frequently treated as professional misconduct rather than as contestable scientific or clinical judgment.
When a regulator can redefine disfavoured advice as "conduct," the First Amendment becomes a formality. The doctor's licence becomes a leash. The threat of investigation, suspension, or loss of livelihood produces silence long before any final adjudication. Patients who seek independent assessment of risks and alternatives lose access to it. The consulting room ceases to be a space for individualised judgment and becomes an extension of official messaging.
Kory v. Bonta rejects that conversion. It insists that viewpoint discrimination remains viewpoint discrimination even when the speaker holds a medical licence and the audience is a patient. The state may still punish lies, negligence, and dangerous practices. It may not punish the expression of a contested medical opinion by calling it something else.
The decision does not declare any particular COVID-related claim true or false. It does not immunise reckless or dishonest practice. It does not prevent boards from acting when a physician fails to take a proper history, ignores material risks, or issues false certificates. Those remain legitimate subjects of regulation. The ruling simply prevents the boards from using the content of a physician's COVID advice, specifically its departure from public-health orthodoxy, as the basis for investigation or sanction.
Because the injunction is preliminary and limited to the named plaintiffs, its practical reach depends on how other courts and other states respond. Boards elsewhere may still test the boundaries. The principle established in Chiles and applied in Kory, however, is now clear: professional speech that consists of advice and recommendation is speech, and viewpoint-based restrictions on it face the highest constitutional scrutiny.
The COVID years produced an unusual concentration of regulatory power over medical speech. Licensing bodies, public-health agencies, and professional associations moved in concert to enforce a single narrative. Dissent carried career risk. The asymmetry was striking: ordinary clinicians faced immediate professional jeopardy for questioning claims that later required revision, while senior officials retained full procedural protections when later called to account.
Kory v. Bonta is one judicial correction of that imbalance. It does not solve every problem of institutional capture or scientific uncertainty. It does reassert a basic boundary. In a free society the state may regulate the practice of medicine to prevent harm. It may not conscript physicians into a ministry of truth by holding their licences hostage to the approved message of the moment. The doctor-patient conversation remains a protected space for judgment, disagreement, and the honest presentation of uncertainty. That is the core significance of the decision.
https://ianbrighthope.substack.com/p/the-us-government-will-never-be-able