“I’m 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.
