A physician who was fired from a California university last year for refusing to get vaccinated is speaking out about the unscientific, tyrannical groupthink that has infested the medical community.
Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, a psychiatrist and director of bioethics at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, was fired from the University of California, Irvine, School of Medicine in December after refusing to get vaccinated, even after he had recovered from COVID-19.
Kheriaty has written about his experience in a new book, “The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State,” set to be published next month by Regnery.
In an excerpt published by The Daily Wire, he recalled how his former employer’s utter hypocrisy was spotlighted.
“As I drove away from campus for the last time that day, I glanced at the sign on the corner near the hospital,” he recounted. “The sign, which had been up for months, read in large block letters, HEROES WORK HERE.”
That no longer included Kheriaty, who had toiled day after day at the UCI Medical Center during the worst days of the pandemic.
Before his firing, he argued that the natural immunity he had acquired from surviving the coronavirus trumped any protections the vaccine could have given him. Kheriaty also raised concerns about the vaccine’s safety and efficacy.
Based on all the alarming deaths from heart attacks in young, seemingly healthy, vaccinated individuals, these safety concerns might be seen as prescient.
After months of denial, even the pro-vaccine Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has acknowledged that surviving COVID provides natural immunity.
Should this doctor be reinstated in his old job?
In a December Substack post, Kheriaty said administrators who had praised him during his 15-year tenure as a professor at UCI medical school suddenly turned on him.
“Everyone at the University seemed to be a fan of my work until suddenly they were not,” he recounted. “Once I challenged one of their policies, I immediately became a ‘threat to the health and safety of the community.’
“No amount of empirical evidence about natural immunity or vaccine safety and efficacy mattered at all. The University’s leadership was not interested in scientific debate or ethical deliberation.”
In the months preceding his dismissal, Kheriaty had worked in person at the UCI Medical Center “every day during the pandemic, seeing patients in our clinic, psychiatric wards, emergency room, and hospital wards — including Covid patients in the ER, ICU, and medicine wards.”
In other words, this doctor endangered his own life to help COVID patients at a time when we had far less knowledge of the risks associated with the disease.
Despite this, he was fired for refusing to get vaccinated, even after he had recovered from the virus and cited both ethical and scientific reasons for his objections.
In his forthcoming book, Kheriaty said he struggled with the moral dilemma of either submitting to an unethical mandate or challenging it on principle.
“In my position as Director of Medical Ethics at UCI, I had a duty to represent those whose voices were silenced and to insist upon the right of informed consent and informed refusal,” he wrote.
Kheriaty said many of his colleagues also wanted to speak out against the vaccine mandates but were bullied into silence.
“They felt intimidated, disempowered, and vulnerable in the face of immense pressure to go along. Many physicians and nurses were afraid to speak up in the climate of coercion,” he wrote.
“Public health officials ignored inconvenient scientific findings, suppressed reasonable questions, and bullied into silence any skeptical physicians or scientists,” Kheriaty said. “Institutions promulgating mandates stigmatized and punished those who refused to comply.
“I had never seen anything like this in medicine.”
In June 2021, he wrote a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed with constitutional law expert Gerard Bradley, an ethics professor at the University of Notre Dame.
In their commentary, Kheriaty and Bradley said university vaccine mandates violate medical ethics and ignore scientific data.
They wrote that “college students aren’t guinea pigs” and should not be forced to get vaccinated, given their low risk of infection and the FDA’s own warning about the “excess risk for heart inflammation, especially in men 30 and younger.”
Kheriaty and Bradley also pointed out that colleges’ vaccine mandates ignored the large number of students who had recovered from COVID and who thus “possess natural immunity, which studies have suggested is more robust and durable than vaccine immunity.”
In his book, Kheriaty said one of the most heartbreaking consequences of his firing was that “I was given no opportunity to contact my patients, students, residents, or colleagues and let them know I would suddenly disappear.”
Let this horror sink in: A psychiatrist was suddenly cut off from his patients, many of whom suffered severe mental health problems that he was helping them navigate.
This abrupt disconnection can be extremely traumatic to a psychiatric patient.
Now that numerous Americans have been vaccinated under duress or fired for refusing the jab, the dust has settled a bit, and the truth is beginning to emerge about the vaccine’s potential safety hazards.
Many physicians and other scientists who pointed out these risks were abruptly kicked off social media, fired or otherwise silenced during the past two years.
Internet searches also have been censored so it’s difficult (or impossible) to research anything without partisan Big Tech manipulation.
Hopefully, the pendulum will one day swing toward the elevation of free speech and open inquiry.
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