Dr. Mary Talley Bowden of Houston has joined a lawsuit accusing the Federation of State Medical Boards of conspiring to punish and silence doctors who expressed dissenting opinions on vaccine mandates and COVID-19 treatments.
The lawsuit accuses the Federation of State Medical Boards and multiple state medical boards, including Texas’, of violating both the First and Fourteenth Amendments over disciplinary actions taken against doctors who expressed concern about the safety of the COVID-19 vaccine.
Bowden is joined in the case by Dr. Mary Kelly Sutton, Dr. John Humiston, and Dr. Mark Brody, who are all seeking to stop both the FSMB and the state medical boards of California, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, Indiana, and Texas from censoring and disciplining doctors for giving their medical opinions to patients.
According to the filing, all four doctors “have been disciplined by six separate state medical licensing authorities for conveying valid medical information that dissented from what the FSMB’s national leadership considers to be the prevailing scientific consensus.”
Even though the FSMB is not a government agency, plaintiffs allege that the FSMB was acting as a government agent when coordinating the censorship of physicians’ speech under their “Censorship Policies.”
FSMB censorship policies instruct medical boards to consider the full array of authorized grounds for disciplinary actions when judging cases dealing with misinformation and disinformation.
“State medical boards should not be dissuaded from carrying out their duty to protect the public by concerns about potential challenges to disciplinary decisions when these decisions are based on sound regulatory considerations for public protection,” reads a report entitled “Professional Expectations Regarding Medical Misinformation and Disinformation.” That report was adopted by the FSMB in April 2022 and instructs state medical boards on how to discipline physicians spreading medical disinformation, particularly in relation to COVID-19.
Misinformation is defined in the report as “health-related information or claims that are false, inaccurate, or misleading, according to the best available scientific evidence at the time.” The report defines disinformation as “misinformation that is spread intentionally to serve a malicious purpose, such as financial gain or political advantage.”
Plaintiffs also allege that the report fundamentally redefines the term scientific evidence.
The lawsuit states that since the beginning of the Scientific Revolution, “scientific evidence has been defined as observations of physical phenomena that are rendered into general theory by inductive reasoning—with the general theory capable of falsification by any observations that the general theory fails to predict.”
In the report, scientific evidence is defined by the FSMB as “information from peer-reviewed journals, methodologically-sound clinical trials, nationally or internationally recognized clinical practice guidelines, or other consensus-based documents that receive broad acceptance from the medical and/or scientific communities. Where evidence does not exist in these forms, there must still be a plausible basis in theory or prevailing and consensus-based, peer-acknowledged practice to justify any proposed treatment.”
In 2022, Dr. Bowden came under scrutiny by the Texas Medical Board for prescribing Ivermectin to treat COVID-19 and for being critical of the COVID vaccine. She was reprimanded by the TMB for “unprofessional behavior” in October 2025 for prescribing and attempting to administer Ivermectin to a hospitalized patient at Texas Health Huguley Hospital in Fort Worth.
Following the decision from TMB, Bowden announced plans to appeal.
Texas Scorecard reached out to the Texas Medical Board for comment, but was told that they were unable to comment on any potential or pending litigation. The Federation of State Medical Boards did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
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