The Post & Email 2/6/2023
In the video above, I interview Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, author of “The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State.” Kheriaty is a medical doctor and psychiatrist and worked as a professor in the School of Medicine at the University of California Irvine for 15 years before getting fired for his objections to mandatory COVID shots.
He also directs the Bioethics and American Democracy Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and is a senior scholar and fellow of the Brownstone Institute.
“As ethics program director and ethics community chair, I was involved in basically all of the pandemic policy drafting, right up until the vaccine mandate,” Kheriaty says.
“Our committee at the Office of the President had done the ventilator triage policy, the vaccine allocation policy. But when it came to the vaccine mandate, it came down from on high and there was no discussion debate. Our committee was not involved in drafting the policy.
I was very concerned about the lack of open discussion and debate. Because of all the sensitive policies that we had developed during the pandemic, this one I thought was going to be the most ethically controversial, problematic and the most publicly fraught.
So, I was puzzled by the fact that we didn’t really have a conversation about it. I published a piece in The Wall Street Journal last year, arguing that vaccine mandates are unethical based on the principle of informed consent, which I teach to all the medical students every year.
This is the principle that an adult of sound mind has the right to decide: what medications or interventions to accept or decline, and they have the right to make this decision on behalf of their children who are not yet old enough to give consent.
I was very concerned that vaccine mandates were just tossing this principle overboard under the guise of, ‘We’re in emergency and so the regular rules don’t apply.’ I think it’s precisely in wartime and crises that it’s all the more important to stand fast and hold onto our ethical principles, because those are the times where we’re most tempted to abandon them. And when you do that, you can often invite disaster.”
Doctors Were Bullied Into Not Writing Medical ExemptionsDespite a number of efforts, the university refused to engage in a debate, and instead put the mandatory COVID jab policy in place. As students started to be steamrolled, many reached out to him for help. They’d day things like, “I’m not a religious person, and so, in good conscience, I don’t want to submit a dishonest religious exemption, but I have other moral or ethical concerns about this vaccine.”
Others were unable to get an appropriate medical exemption. The reason they couldn’t get one was because the California Medical Board sent a letter threatening to revoke the medical license of any physician who wrote “inappropriate exemptions.” They, of course, never defined what was appropriate or inappropriate, but it had the intended effect. Doctors were incredibly hesitant to write medical exemptions at all, for fear of the repercussions.
More:
https://www.thepostemail.com/2023/02/05/260736/
