Proud to be Sacked by His University: A Badge of Covid Plandemic Resistance, By Brian Simpson

Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, formerly of the University of California, Irvine (UCI), had served for almost 15 years as Professor of Psychiatry at UCI School of Medicine and Director of the Medical Ethics Programme at UCI Health, where he chaired the ethics committee. But come the Covid plandemic and compulsory vaccination by the university, he stood his ground seeing this as a violation of the principle of informed consent. He took the university to court and he was sacked:

"I'm glad that I can tell my children and grandchildren that during this crisis, when many people were losing their heads and throwing common sense out the window, I tried to stand up and say, 'no'. It is not right to coerce people in this way, to violate their freedom, to violate their bodily autonomy in this way. It is a violation of human dignity and their human rights," he says. "I think a lot of folks have come around now to realise that forcing a novel, mostly untested product that lacked efficacy and has serious safety concerns on an entire population and then running an experiment where you vaccinate billions of people with a totally new technology was probably a bad idea."

As detailed below, Dr Kheriaty sees this threat to careers as one reason why the academics did not speak up about the most serios violation of civil liberties in modern times.There is also the censorship factor, that even those that did object got cancelled by the Covid New World Order. But beyond all this is the fact of social conformity, that the Covid mandates were enforced by the majority of the ordinary people, those who stopped unvaxxed family members from coming to family gatherings such as Christmas, for example. They were gripped by irrational fear, and most of these vaxxed got Covid anyway, irony of ironies.

Dr Kheriaty is right in observing that: "The people who did this to them probably are either going to be out of power or dead and gone before we get a real reckoning." As usual, in this world, the crooks get away with it. But in the next world things will be a little different.

https://dailysceptic.org/2024/10/05/im-glad-i-stood-up-and-said-no-the-medical-ethics-professor-sacked-for-standing-up-to-vaccine-mandates/

"December 17th 2021 was the last day for Dr. Aaron Kheriaty to be a faculty member of the University of California, Irvine (UCI). He had served for almost 15 years as Professor of Psychiatry at UCI School of Medicine and Director of the Medical Ethics Programme at UCI Health, where he chaired the ethics committee. He was – and, of course, still is – a renowned and respected expert in his field. As a specialist, his comments were welcome in national newspapers and on television. He also chaired the ethics committee at the California Department of State Hospitals for several years.

Ethics, or more specifically, blatant violations of medical ethics, were the direct cause of Dr. Kheriaty's dismissal. However, Kheriaty was not the violator. Like many other institutions during that extraordinarily hysterical time three years ago, UCI itself violated the basic principles of medical ethics. In the summer of 2021, the university imposed the Covid vaccine mandate for all its students, faculty members and staff. Kheriaty, who was also a lecturer of the medical ethics course, mandatory for medical students, could not stand by and watch this happen. "We talk about the Nuremberg Code that was developed in the wake of the Nazi doctors' atrocities in World War II to prevent those kinds of atrocities from ever happening again," he says. "And the very first principle articulated in the Nuremberg Code is the principle of informed consent, which means that an adult of sound mind has the right to accept or refuse to either participate in research or to accept or refuse a medical intervention after being given adequate information about the risks, the benefits and the alternatives," Kheriaty explains.

Took the university to court because of vaccine coercion

There was no such information on the benefits and risks associated with Covid vaccines available back then, nor is there now. Those who followed the issue closely realised this in the immediate aftermath of the vaccines' introduction in 2021. "We were lied to about the risks and benefits and the unknowns of the vaccine. And we were forced to take them on penalty of losing our jobs or being kicked out of school or not being able to travel. And I thought this was just egregiously wrong," Kheriaty says, adding he would not have been able to stand up in front of his students and talk to them about medical ethics, the virtues of moral conduct and the courage to act ethically even under pressure, while at the same time not confronting such a gross breach of ethics himself. Initially, he spoke out publicly against mandatory vaccination and wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal in which he explained that the introduction of vaccine mandates in universities was a violation of medical ethics.

As no major debate followed at the university, he decided to take the university to court in August 2021 over these mandates. "The university very quickly retaliated and put me on administrative leave and then unpaid suspension and then fired me basically as quickly as possible," Kheriaty says. He adds, however, that he has no regrets. "I'm glad that I can tell my children and grandchildren that during this crisis, when many people were losing their heads and throwing common sense out the window, I tried to stand up and say, 'no'. It is not right to coerce people in this way, to violate their freedom, to violate their bodily autonomy in this way. It is a violation of human dignity and their human rights," he says. "I think a lot of folks have come around now to realise that forcing a novel, mostly untested product that lacked efficacy and has serious safety concerns on an entire population and then running an experiment where you vaccinate billions of people with a totally new technology was probably a bad idea," Kheriaty adds, noting that such vaccine mandates for healthy people had never been implemented before.

Failure of science and medical system

Of course, alongside this global vaccination experiment involving billions of people, there were also a lot of other unscientific measures introduced during the Covid crisis, which were implemented by the authorities with the backing of the apparatus of coercion. What this means, according to Kheriaty, is that both the medical system and science were failing people. "We threw out the traditional rulebook for public health, which involved quarantining and isolating people who are symptomatic and sick. Never before in human history had we isolated and separated and locked down people who were healthy," he explains. As all can remember, in the case of Covid, this was done on a large scale, systematically, and with coercion – a healthy person had to sit in 'self-isolation' for days after exposure to a person who had tested positive for Covid. "I think a lot of folks have come around now to realize the folly of much of what was done," Kheriaty says. "There's really no evidence for universal masking, we know that lockdowns did more harm than good, the school closures damaged an entire generation, and the effects of that are actually going to be felt for decades," he says, citing just a few examples.

The reason why most doctors and scientists remained silent about all this, Kheriaty says, can be explained in part by the fact that science was rapidly becoming politicised. Soon it was no longer science but ideology, which simply had to be accepted. Whereas the scientific method means constantly testing hypotheses and refuting previous knowledge when new evidence-based information comes along to disprove it, this was no longer the case with Covid. There were certain people who were appointed by the authorities to represent science, and who therefore represented what science said. For example, Anthony Fauci, the influential White House Covid policy coordinator, who became the Covid-era 'science figure' in the U.S., said in an interview in 2021 that to criticise him was in fact to criticise science.

This situation meant that any scientist or doctor who criticised or doubted the effectiveness of the coercive measures or Covid vaccines was cancelled and could potentially end up losing his or her job. "Look what happened to me. Here is the answer why more doctors did not speak out," Kheriaty says. So many remained silent, fearing for their careers.

Propaganda and censorship

But Kheriaty says the impact of propaganda and censorship cannot be underestimated as well. All the major media outlets and television broadcasts talked about the highly dangerous virus, the need for lockdown policies and mask mandates, the safety and efficacy of vaccines, the need to achieve herd immunity through vaccination, etc. While all of this and more was constantly propagated, there were numbers always running in the background showing how many people were dying everyday from the disease. Yet COVID-19 was not as deadly a disease as it was portrayed to be – a comprehensive study led by John P. A. Ioannidis, a renowned Stanford University Professor of Medicine, found in October 2022 that the pre-vaccine infection fatality rate (IFR, indicating deaths among all infected) in the 0-69 age group was 0.095%. In the 0-59 age group it was 0.035%, and of course in the still younger age group, still lower. "Fear was deliberately weaponised. There were revelations in the U.K. and Canada about Government agencies and Government actors that were deliberately trying to increase the level of fear in the population in order to get an increased level of compliance with the Government's dictates," Kheriaty comments.

At the same time, voices that criticised the coercive measures or otherwise sought to approach the situation in a healthy way were not given a platform. In such a situation, a general consensus on the need for official action emerged, and the majority of doctors and scientists probably believed it. Governments also went to great lengths to ensure that voices on social media criticising their Covid policies were labelled as spreading misinformation and silenced. "Covid was an opportunity for things like censorship and propaganda to manifest and to advance in ways that would have probably taken several decades if they hadn't occurred during a crisis like that," Kheriaty says.

On censorship, Kheriaty again speaks from personal experience – he is one of the plaintiffs in a landmark U.S. free speech case Murthy v Missouri (originally Missouri v Biden). In May 2022, the Attorneys General of the states of Missouri and Louisiana filed a lawsuit against President Joe Biden and his administration officials, alleging that the Biden administration, through pressuring the social media companies, was engaging in censorship and thereby suppressing free speech protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The plaintiffs pointed out that the dissemination of information has been restricted on a variety of topics under the guise of combating 'misinformation', including censorship of truthful information related to COVID-19, vaccines, elections, foreign policy and other topics. "The advocates of censorship of course never use the word censorship," Kheriaty says. "They talk about 'misinformation', which is false information that is delivered mistakenly. Disinformation is supposedly when the person intends to deceive and knows that what they're saying is wrong. But then they had to invent a third term because they were censoring so much true information. They had to invent a term called 'malinformation', which is basically true information, but they don't like its context or it doesn't support the narrative that they want to support and so they're going to censor it," Kheriaty says, explaining the logic of Government censors. In some cases, even satire was censored. Freedom Research has written extensively on this issue on several occasions – e.g. here, here and here. The censorship of truthful information has also been acknowledged by the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, and he regrets it.

Five individuals were added as plaintiffs to the same lawsuit – Stanford University Medical Professor Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya, the then Harvard Medical School Professr Dr. Martin Kulldorff, founder of the Gateway Pundit Jim Hoft, leader of the consumer and human rights group Health Freedom Louisiana Jill Hines, and Dr. Kheriaty. They all had been censored by social media companies at the Government's request. "In my case, I was a critic of vaccine mandates for ethical and legal reasons. These criticisms were censored in many cases, not because we were wrong, not because we were spreading so-called misinformation, but precisely because we were right and we were making compelling arguments that were threatening to the Government's interests and threatening to the regime's interests," Kheriaty says.

In July 2023, Federal Judge Terry A. Doughty issued an unprecedented injunction on the case, restricting officials from the Biden administration and an entire line of agencies, including the security agencies that had requested censorship, from interacting with social media platforms. "During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterised by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian 'Ministry of Truth'," Doughty wrote in a 155-page memorandum ruling accompanying the judgment. "If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States' history," he added.

Censorship for financial and political gain

"Censorship was used as a tool of power and to control the flow of information online, which is the new public square. And to try to manage public opinion, not through open debate, dialogue, and discussion, but through operating behind the scenes to control basically the mechanisms that allow information to get out there," Kheriaty says, explaining that the case is not just about these particular plaintiffs, but millions of people around the world who have suffered because of such censorship decisions. For example, the U.S. authorities may have sent a message to a social media platform about a particular post, saying that they thought it should be taken down. In many cases, the platform – such as Facebook or Twitter – said that the particular post did not break their rules or their 'community guidelines'.The Government would then say that it thought companies should change their guidelines so that the posts they wanted to be taken down would break the rules of the platforms and could still be taken down. "It truly was Orwellian, as Judge Doughty said, because it was clear that this was not about finding the truth. This was not about getting truthful scientific information or public health information out there. It was about supporting a particular regime's policy demands and supporting a particular narrative and supporting particular groups that were benefiting financially or politically or in other ways from these policies," Kheriaty adds.

The Government appealed Judge Doughty's initial injunction, and last September the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit also said that Biden's White House, top health-care decision-makers and the FBI had likely violated the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The three-judge unanimous decision stated that the White House "coerced the platforms to make their moderation decisions by way of intimidating messages and threats of adverse consequences". In other words, undue influence was used to get tech companies to remove or restrict the circulation of posts about, for example, the coronavirus or the election. The ruling still limited the scope of the injunction issued by Judge Doughty by removing the ban on some of the agencies that were included in the original injunction.

However, in June of this year, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the injunction by a vote of six to three. The majority of the Supreme Court based its decision not to uphold the injunction primarily on the fact that the plaintiffs did not, in their view, have standing. According to the majority of the court, companies such as Facebook and YouTube have long been engaged in content moderation, and in their view, the plaintiffs did not show that the companies decided to remove the posts because of Government pressure. "While the record reflects that the Government defendants played a role in at least some of the platforms' moderation choices, the evidence indicates that the platforms had independent incentives to moderate content and often exercised their own judgement," wrote Amy Coney Barrett, the judge who produced the majority opinion.

However, Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, who dissented, criticised their colleagues for failing to address the restriction on freedom of expression that Government coercion of content moderation poses in such a decision. Alito, who wrote the minority opinion, said that the court "shirks that duty and thus permits the successful campaign of coercion, in this case, to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think".

Kheriaty comments that the majority of the Supreme Court judges essentially took one technical detail – whether or not Government officials specifically mentioned their names in the censorship request – and rejected the injunction on that basis.

The case continues

However, the substantive dispute in the case continues. It has now been joined with another similar case brought against the U.S. Government by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a Kennedy family member who until recently ran for President and now supports the candidacy of Donald Trump. Kennedy has long been critical of vaccines, and in particular vaccine programmes for children, and given the commercial interests of Big Pharma it is not surprising that he is accused of spreading misinformation by interested parties and Government agencies that pressured social media to censor his posts also during the Covid crisis. While the other plaintiffs could be said not to have been named in the censorship requests by the Government, Kennedy has been explicitly mentioned along with the Children's Health Defence (CHD), an organisation he founded to promote children's health interests. In August, the same federal judge Doughty ruled that since the previous decision was made because the Government did not name the other plaintiffs while pushing social media towards censorship, both Kennedy and CHD, who were named, have a legal basis for an injunction. This dispute will now resume in the higher courts. "So even on the Supreme Court's very, very high standing threshold that it set in this particular case, we believe that the court's going to find that Kennedy has standing," Kheriaty says.

Government did not order the other plaintiffs censored due to not identifying them by name, RFK Jr. and his organisation, Children's Health Defence, were specifically named.

He also points out that it is very important that this case continues and that it continues to be talked about. People don't realise, he says, that what is happening is direct censorship by governments. "And certainly in the United States and in many other Western nations, they're doing so in ways that violate their own constitutions or violate their own laws that would prevent the Government from abridging people's free speech rights," he says.

Covid aftermath: a situation of great trauma

While the censorship hearings in the courts continue, many people will not want to look back on the Covid crisis as a whole and the damaging decisions taken by the authorities at the time. Still less can we talk about those who were in power or who recommended and made harmful decisions being held accountable in any way. According to Kheriaty, this is to be expected because, first of all, the people in power are largely the same as they were then. Moreover, it is worth reiterating that the majority of society not only supported the lockdown policies and coercion that was implemented during the crisis, but were active in it themselves. "There were just too many ordinary people who refused to allow family members to come to Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner because they weren't vaccinated. Or people who pressured their loved ones to get vaccinated. In some cases, those people were injured by the vaccines. I mean, that's just a really hard thing to reckon with," notes Kheriaty. "It takes a rare person of extraordinary courage to be able to admit that they were wrong on something like that," he adds.

So it is a situation of great trauma, according to Kheriaty. "I think we're in a state similar now to Germany following World War II, where atrocities were revealed, but the country as a whole is in shell shock and people don't want to think about their complicity with a regime," he says.

A new generation had to grow up in order to somehow make sense of the past and make peace with it. Kheriaty believes the case is similar with Covid. "Our children who were harmed by school closures, who had their adolescence or their young adulthood robbed from them for several years. I think they're going to want to ask questions about, hey, what the heck happened when I was 18 years old and was supposed to start my first year at the university? The next two years were just a bloody mess in my life and it's completely disruptive," he says. Kheriaty believes that from such a distance, society will finally be able to honestly assess what happened. But it will still be very difficult to find those responsible. "The people who did this to them probably are either going to be out of power or dead and gone before we get a real reckoning," he adds.