Sue Lani Madsen: Speaking freely has a high cost for former local doctor

When Dr. Renata Moon let her medical license lapse in Washington last March, it wasn’t because she’d made a medical mistake. “Words can’t describe what I see now in with the loss of free speech in America,” Moon said on a recent visit to Spokane from Florida. “I can’t ethically practice medicine in a state where I can’t have honest conversations with parents.”

What was this dangerous speech that got her into trouble?

In December 2022, Moon accepted an invitation from U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., to join a panel of physicians testifying in Washington, D.C. She arranged coverage of classes she was teaching at WSU and attended as a private citizen. She made it clear she was not representing the university.

And she questioned the U.S. government’s official position on COVID-19 vaccines, still being used under emergency use authorization as the emergency subsided. She questioned why an untested vaccine was being pushed for healthy children who had a statistically near-zero risk of fatality. She questioned the risk versus benefit, the kind of analysis the medical academy should be providing.

Teaching has long been part of her life. Moon described her service on the admissions, DEI and accreditation committees for the WSU Elson S. Floyd College of Medicine. “I can accurately say I was one of the founding faculty members of the school as a volunteer,” Moon said.

Her last paid position with the university was clinical associate professor of medicine, teaching first- and second-year students the basics of the art and practice of medicine. Her contract was not renewed at the end of the 2022-2023 academic year, but the free speech chill began earlier.

Moon cared for some of the sickest children in the Inland Northwest as a hospital-based pediatrician for 17 years before joining Kaiser Permanente at a Spokane clinic in 2019. She had always promoted the typical recommendations for childhood vaccination. When early in her career the rotavirus vaccine was pulled from the market, Moon said she felt reassured the system was working. And then 2020 happened.

The infection fatality rate for children was low and linked to co-morbidities. After the early rounds of emergency vaccination, she started looking at the data in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System for COVID-19 and comparing her observations with pediatricians around the country. Risk of myocarditis was clearly increasing. “If we’re giving children something that may harm them, shouldn’t we be telling parents what the risk is?” Moon said. “We recalled the rotavirus vaccine over less than 100 cases of rare reactions, but this is a human catastrophe.”

COVID-19 vaccination was added to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2023 recommendations for birth through age 6 in 2023 and is on the 2024 Recommended Child and Adolescent Immunization Schedule for ages 18 years or younger. Moon does not recommend it for otherwise healthy children.

She left Kaiser in 2021. She let her Washington license lapse in 2023, and retains her medical license in Idaho and Florida.

Moon sees a direct parallel between how she was treated by WSU in 2023 and her mother’s university experience under Communist control in Czechoslovakia.

Her mother often told young Renata the story of listening to her professor being berated by officials for teaching an unorthodox biology lesson in Mendelian genetics. Under communism, the Mendelian concept that specific traits might be inherited had been declared a pseudoscience. That professor was taken away and her mother never saw him again.

Moon was taught to be careful when the family had rare telephone contact with relatives because government censors were listening. On a family visit to Prague at age 11, she was invited to secretly listen to Radio Free Europe with her grandmother, and was proud to be a citizen of an America that stood for truth. She knew her relatives were not free to speak.

Dr. Jeff Haney, chair of the Department of Medical Education and Clinical Sciences, filed a complaint with the Washington Medical Commission in July , after Moon’s contract had already been terminated, “to report possible spread of misinformation” for her December 2022 presentation to the U.S. Senate. Her words were contrary to the orthodox government interpretation of the data.

Haney declined to comment for this column, saying, “It is not my place to comment on or discuss current or former employees.”

But his report to the commission was an effective way to signal to other faculty to toe the party line or be unwelcome on campus.

Academic freedom and democracy are under attack. Not because we’ll apparently be stuck with one of two grumpy old men in the White House. The Constitution is strong. It can withstand the drama.

But not if we lose the First Amendment. Not if we lose freedom to speak without fear of retribution.

Contact Sue Lani Madsen at rulingpen@gmail.com.