Many studies in the field of scientific communication have focused on the dissemination of medical disinformation. By contrast, very few seem to explore the legitimate use of digital voice by scientific experts and health professionals who must work around scientific suppression in HE. In the Health Sciences scientific suppression and intellectual harassment is particularly dangerous where it: 

1. entrenches an outdated and incorrect scientific model; 
2. suppresses scholarly debate over rival models; 
3. continues to support poor advice and interventions that result in sub-par outcomes versus proven and relatively inexpensive alternatives. 

It would seem unethical to suppress the testing of scientific models and development of academic knowledge that may greatly benefit public health. Nevertheless, this continues to occur in HE regarding the academic free speech of IRMCIH scholars. Although there is growing evidence for their model and the efficacy of its interventions, the rival blood lipid hypothesis and CMCCD model for the causation of heart disease largely remains the only one taught and researched by medical schools. There are few examples of legitimate debates between IRMCIH and CMCDD scholars in HE (Lustig, 2013; Taubes, 2007; 2011; 2017; 2020; Teicholz, 2014). Opportunities for IRMCIH research and teaching in HE are heavily constrained by scientific suppression of CMCDD dissenters (Noakes and Sboros, 2017, 2019).

Academic freedom is a special right of academics- a right to freedom from prescribed orthodoxy in their teaching, research, and lives as academics (Turk, 2014). This right seeks to avoid corruption from the vested interests of other parties, which ranges from scholarly peers and university board members to corporate donors. This right is foundational in supporting scholars to advance and expand knowledge, for example by accommodating diverse voices (Saloojee, 2013).

Academic free speech is a failed ideal where IRMCIH scholars do not enjoy opportunities to research and teach this emergent paradigm. Instead, dissenting IRMCHI scientists must negotiate scientific suppression by a multitude of entrenched networks and embedded academics. These have varied stakes in the medical establishment's highly profitable “cholesterol” model and its costly, but largely ineffective, interventions. This orthodox regime heavily constrains the IRMCIH model's development, whilst applying double-standards for evidence and proof. These demands typically ignore the sociological context of scientific knowledge. It flags key constraints, including:

A contemporary form of censorship exists that denies attention and stifles opportunities for turning scholarship and innovation into better options for public policy (Tufekci, 2017). For IRMCIH experts, cyber harassment has emerged as a 21st century form of attention-denial that CMCDD's defenders leverage. They apply a range of strategies to stifle dissident scientists' and health experts' outreach to online audiences and affinity networks. As this 21st century censorship matrix illustrates, cyber harassment is just one of many visible and direct strategies that powerful networks have used to censor dissenting IRMCIH scholars in HE.

With a wide range of vitriolic critics within and outside academia, we focused on the case of an Emeritus Professor as a convenience sample. He had first-hand exposure to OAB for almost a decade across varied social media platforms. In 'Distinguishing online academic bullying', OAB is clearly differentiated from the traditional forms of bullying (eg. academic mobbing) that he had to negotiate after taking the unorthodox, but scientific, position for IRMCIH. Major aspects are shown in the article's abstract graphic, below- academic cyberbullies strategies in OAB may range from misrepresenting an employer's position as "official" to hypercritical academic bloggers whose chains of re-publication become sourced for defamatory online profiles.