This Doctor Witnessed The Worst Of COVID And Still Refused The Jab. So UC Irvine Fired Him.

The following is an exclusive excerpt from the new book The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State, by Aaron Kheriaty, M.D. (Regnery Publishing, November 1, 2022).

Shortly after I published the Wall Street Journal piece arguing that university vaccine mandates were unethical, the University of California, my employer, promulgated its vaccine mandate. I decided then it was time to put a stake in the ground: I filed lawsuit in federal court challenging the constitutionality of the university’s vaccine mandate on behalf of COVID-recovered individuals. It was already clear from many robust studies that natural immunity following infection was superior to vaccine-mediated immunity in terms of efficacy and duration of immunity.

At the time I was an unlikely candidate to challenge the prevailing vaccination policies. I was deeply embedded in the academic medical establishment, where I had spent my entire career. In my capacity as a psychiatric consultant on the medical wards and in the emergency department, I had suited up in PPE (personal protective equipment) to see hundreds of hospitalized COVID patients, witnessing the worst that this illness can do. Nobody needed to explain to me how bad this virus could be for some individuals, especially the elderly with co-occurring medical conditions who were at significant risk of bad outcomes when infected.

I contracted the virus in July 2020, and despite my efforts to self-isolate, passed it to my wife and five children. Living and breathing COVID for a year, I eagerly awaited a safe and effective vaccine for those that were still not immune to this virus. I happily served on the Orange County COVID-19 Vaccine Task Force, and I advocated in the Los Angeles Times that the elderly and sick be prioritized for vaccination, and that the poor, disabled, and underserved be given ready access to vaccines.

I had worked every day for over a year to develop and advance the university’s and state’s pandemic mitigation measures. But as the prevailing COVID policies unfolded, I became increasingly concerned, and eventually disillusioned. Our one-size-fits-all coercive mandates failed to take account of individualized risks and benefits, particularly age-stratified risks, which are central to the practice of good medicine. We ignored foundational principles of public health, like transparency and the health of the entire population. With little resistance we abandoned foundational ethical principles.

Among the most glaring failures of our response to COVID was the refusal to acknowledge the natural immunity of COVID-recovered patients in our mitigation strategies, herd-immunity estimates, and vaccine-rollout plans. The CDC estimated that by May 2021, more than 120 million Americans (36 percent) had been infected with COVID. Following the delta-variant wave later that year, many epidemiologists estimated the number was close to half of all Americans. By the end of omicron wave in early 2022, that number was north of 70 percent. The good news — almost never mentioned — was that those with previous infection had more durable and longer lasting immunity than the vaccinated. Yet the focus remained exclusively on vaccines.

As I argued in a coauthored article, medical exemptions for most vaccine mandates were too narrowly tailored, constraining physician’s discretionary judgment and seriously compromising individualized patient care. Most mandates only allowed medical exemptions for conditions included on the CDC’s list of contraindications to the vaccines — a list that was never meant to be comprehensive. CDC recommendations should never have been taken as sound medical advice applicable to every patient.

Further exacerbating this problem, on August 17, 2021, all licensed physicians in California received a notification from the state medical board with the heading “Inappropriate Exemptions May Subject Physicians to Discipline.” Physicians were informed that any doctor granting an inappropriate mask exemption or other COVID-related exemptions “may be subjecting their license to disciplinary action.” In what was perhaps a deliberate omission, the “standard of care” criteria for vaccine exemptions was never defined by the medical board. In my eighteen years as a licensed physician, I had never previously received any such notice, nor had my colleagues.

The effect was chilling: since physicians naturally interpreted “other exemptions” to include vaccines, it became de facto impossible to find a doctor in California willing to write a medical exemption, even if the patient had a legitimate contraindication to the COVID vaccines. One of my patients was told by his rheumatologist he should not get the COVID vaccine, since he was at low risk from COVID and in this physician’s judgment his autoimmune condition elevated his risks of vaccine adverse effects. This patient, who was subjected to a vaccine mandate at work, immediately asked this same physician for a medical exemption. The doctor replied, “I’m sorry, I cannot write you an exemption because I’m afraid I might lose my license.” I heard many stories of similar egregious violations of medical ethics under these repressive mandates and the enforcement regime that bolstered them.

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