Free societies flourish best with free speech. Science is work in progress, not an encyclopaedia of facts. Although the long arc of Science bends towards Truth, scientific progress requires the full supporting intellectual infrastructure of critical research and findings. Science has the power to set us free of bondage to mass killer diseases, but only if science and scientists are themselves allowed to be free to question, to shine a harsh light on existing inadequacies and flaws, to pursue all promising leads and avenues of fresh discoveries. Thus science is not synonymous with the existing narrative and progress is neither linear nor irreversible. Scientists must be free the right to challenge the prevailing dominant narratives. They must have the right and responsibility to subject the existing consensus to searching scrutiny in line with empirical observations. Rejection of attempts to suppress dissenting voices and encouragement of diversity viewpoints on contested elements of knowledge provide necessary safeguards against reverses. The damage inflicted on the theory and practice of free societies by the creation of a censorship-industrial complex over the last three years, in the name of waging a total war on Covid, highlights the dangers of muzzling science to impose intellectual conformism.