The truth about coronavirus is scary. The global war on truth is even scarier.

At a time when access to accurate information can be a matter of life or death, draconian restrictions on speech — even those that target falsehoods and conspiracy theories — threaten to scare people into silence and disrupt the flow of crucial health information, said David Kaye, the United Nations special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression and a clinical professor of law at the University of California, Irvine. “Public health can be a basis for restricting information under human rights law, but these kinds of broad restrictions are basically unwarranted and ultimately dangerous to public health, in my honest opinion,” Kaye told National Observer.