SACRAMENTO, Calif. (KTXL) — California lawmakers want to crack down on COVID-19 vaccine misinformation rolling out two new bills Tuesday.
“Misinformation is undermining our ability to not only stop this pandemic, but frankly, save lives,” said State Sen. Richard Pan, D-Sacramento.
The first legislation is Assembly Bill 2098 which empowers the California Medical Board to discipline doctors who peddle disinformation. The bill allows the board to classify the behavior as unprofessional conduct.
“Inaccurate COVID-19 information contradicts the responsibility and threatens to further erode the public trust in the medical profession and puts all patients at risk,” explained Assembly Member Evan Low, D-San Jose.
Doctors in support of the bill said there is a very small number of well-coordinated, well-funded, active group of physicians spreading blatantly false information about the virus and its vaccine.
“This isn’t a call for policing of free speech, this is a call for protecting the public against dangerous misinformation which patients are parroting back to us in our emergency departments every day,” said emergency physician Nick Sawyer.
The second bill takes aim at social media sites. Senate Bill 1018 would require websites to be more transparent about how their algorithms push information to their users.
“Bottom line here is we cannot live in a world where Facebook and Google know everything about us and we know nothing about them,” said Professor Nathaniel Persily of the Cyber Policy Center at Stanford University.
The law, if passed, would also require sites to share data, showing how misinformation spreads. Congress is considering similar legislation.
“We also need to act as a state, ideally we would have a national solution to this, however, we cannot wait,” Pan said.
The bills add to the bulk of legislation introduced this year by a group of Democrats working to strengthen California’s vaccine laws for workers and children.
Both bills will likely be heard sometime in the spring.