Having faced years of persecution for her tweets denouncing the vaccine mandate and lockdowns, Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill has asked Elon Musk for assistance in handling her most recent legal bill. And Musk has responded.

Gill’s call was in response to an open offer made by Musk last year in which he said he would help flip the bill for legal costs resulting from being unfairly treated by employers for what posts someone has made on X (formerly Twitter). And by all estimations, Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill has certainly been treated unfairly.

In late February, Gill was ordered to pay $300,000 (originally $1.2 million) stemming from a pre-trial procedural ruling against her that halted her defamation claims against those who Gill has characterized as a “pack of hyenas.”

Thus far, Gill has managed to fundraise just over half of her legal fees, but with the abrupt nature of the deadline given, it still isn’t enough.

As per a message from her GiveSendGo fundraising page:

In the summer of 2020, Dr. Gill was one of the first Canadian physicians to bravely speak out publicly on social media about the catastrophic and irreparable harms of lockdowns. She quickly became the target of an orchestrated malicious online smear campaign that encouraged the public to lodge complaints to her regulatory college. In an attempt to clear her name from spurious defamation, she had launched legal proceedings against those responsible; but a pre-trial procedural ruling against her had led to a cost order of up to $1.2M in October 2022.

Where did Gill’s problems begin?

Besides the recent defamation claims, at the height of lockdowns in 2020, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CSPO) began routinely investigating Gill for her stance on the vaccine mandate and lockdowns, fueled by complaints from members of the organization—though no complaints were ever filed by Gill’s patients.

This led to a hearing in 2021 in which the CPSO looked into complaints made against Gill over her tweets made in 2020.

Complaints accused Gill of “willfully spreading false and misleading information regarding COVID-19 that goes directly against the advice and recommendations of local, provincial, and federal medical/science and public health authorities.”

A panel of the Inquiries, Complaints, and Reports Committee stated that while questioning whether lockdowns are effective is valid, Gill didn’t provide substantive evidence when she was tweeting—despite the many studies and citations that Gill regularly shared. The panel then pointed to China as proof that lockdowns worked.

Ultimately, Gill was cautioned by the panel over her “lack of professionalism and failure to exercise caution in her posts on social media.”

However, Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill’s problems with the CPSO were far from over.

In October 2022, fresh complaints were brought before a disciplinary trial. As per the CPSO’s hearing notice, Gill was accused of engaging in “disgraceful, dishonourable or unprofessional conduct and/or failed to maintain the standard of practice of the profession and/or is incompetent in relation to her communications, including but not limited to communications on social media / online / digital platforms regarding the COVID-19 pandemic and related issues. This includes but is not limited to making misleading, false or inflammatory statements about vaccinations, treatments and public health measures for COVID-19.”

The CPSO drops its case

This would have resulted in a 15-day hearing in 2024; however, the CPSO ended up dropping its Notice of Hearing for September 2023.

According to Gill’s lawyer, Lisa Bildy, “While we are pleased that some of the burden has now been lifted from Dr. Gill’s shoulders and she has been vindicated, it is concerning that it went this far.”

“The top-down imposition of a singular unquestionable narrative, on pain of disciplinary proceedings, has been damaging not only to the doctors who advocated for evidence-based medicine and robust scientific debate about novel public health measures and their consequences, but it has also been damaging to the credibility of the institutions which imposed them.”