This is not a prohibition on testing to protect the egos of politicians, this is a refusal of authorization for a specific medical practice, because of bureaucracy. They are not being reprimanded for speaking their mind, they are literally being published in the New York Times.

There is no moral equivalence between these two things. Nobody is barred from expressing whatever knowledge they have of the outbreak by anything except their own professional agreements.

No reasonable parallel is drawn between the total suppression of independent expression about an outbreak, and a regulator inflexibly deciding that a clinical professional is not qualified to practice some field.