Latest / The Lila Rose Show / E43: Should Vaccines be Mandated? w/ Dr. Aaron Kheriaty

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E43: Should Vaccines be Mandated? w/ Dr. Aaron Kheriaty · The Lila Rose Show

0:00
So I ended up trying to challenge the vaccine policy in
0:03
federal court. So I filed A lawsuit against the
0:05
university. So the university very quickly
0:07
placed me on suspension and then on unpaid leave and then fired
0:11
me. I just wanted a conversation
0:12
about it because it was clear to me that this was going to be by
0:16
far the most ethically controversial of all the
0:18
policies that we had dealt with from the very beginning.
0:22
We lacked any clinical trials evidence the vaccine stopped
0:25
infection or transmission, and we now know that it doesn't.
0:28
Whoa. Hey guys, welcome back to the
0:31
Lila Rose podcast. Today we're going to talk to,
0:34
yes, Doctor Aaron Kariati. He's been on the show before.
0:36
He's fantastic. He is a psychiatrist.
0:39
He also has an amazing story. We actually haven't deep dive
0:42
his story on the podcast before and some very important things
0:44
to say about vaccines and medical freedom.
0:48
So we're going to hear that from Doctor Kariati in a minute.
0:50
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in the App Store. So we're sitting down now with
2:53
Doctor Cariotti. We've called him Doctor Cans in
2:55
past episodes. First of all, I'm going to try
2:57
not to interrupt you, Aaron, because.
2:59
Watch out, I'll talk right over you if you try to interrupt me.
3:02
No, I'm just kidding. No, I I this is.
3:04
Something I was guilty of that in our last episode as well, so.
3:08
I was guilty more, I was guilty more.
3:12
So I want to hear you have to share because COVID happened, a
3:16
lot of people were really concerned with the infringements
3:20
that people perceived as to be on their medical freedom.
3:24
You have an incredible story. You know, we haven't shared your
3:27
story in the podcast before. We've interviewed you on
3:28
depression, on Elizabeth Holmes, on anxiety and all these
3:31
interesting topics, which you're an expert on many, but we
3:34
haven't heard your story. So I'd love to hear how you got
3:37
into psychiatry and then what brought you to be the director
3:41
of medical ethics at UC Irvine, and then the fight that you got
3:47
into with UC Irvine during COVID.
3:50
So my interest in medical ethics actually predates my interest in
3:54
psychiatry and even in medicine. I study philosophy as an
3:57
undergraduate at Notre Dame and had some wonderful teachers
4:00
there, including David Solomon, who taught me history of ethics
4:03
and many other good people in the philosophy department.
4:06
And I was going back and forth actually between going to grad
4:10
school in philosophy and becoming an academic researcher,
4:14
ethicist or going to medical school.
4:17
And my then girlfriend, now wife gently suggested at that point,
4:22
Well, if you if you study academic philosophy, you're only
4:26
going to sort of be able to pursue a career in academia in,
4:30
in this, you know, very narrow specialty where there may not be
4:33
a lot of jobs. And we'll have to go sort of
4:35
live wherever you happen to get work.
4:39
If you get a job at the University of Southern Alabama,
4:41
then we're going to live in southern Alabama.
4:43
But if you do medicine, you can sort of keep a feat in both
4:46
worlds. You could study medical ethics,
4:48
you could do clinical medicine. You could have probably a lot
4:51
more flexibility professionally. And so that that might be more
4:56
of a sort of both and proposition.
4:58
And she was right. So that's what I did.
4:59
I ended up going to Med school, but continued to study medical
5:03
ethics in Med school and residency.
5:05
Did some research with Edmund Pellegrino at Georgetown.
5:10
Edmund Pellegrino was sort of one of the founding fathers of
5:13
American bioethics. He died a few years ago, Very,
5:16
very fine Catholic layman. And he, he was actually the
5:22
chairman of the President's Council, US President's Council
5:25
on Bioethics for a number of years before he died.
5:29
And so unfortunately, I was, I was exposed to a lot of great
5:33
people that helped me maintain and continue my interest in
5:39
bioethics. And then combine that with my
5:41
work as a clinician and my career path after residency kind
5:46
of continued to move on that direction where I was spending
5:50
roughly half of my time doing work in psychiatry.
5:53
So I went to the University of California, Irvine for residency
5:57
and stayed on there as a faculty member Once I finished
6:01
residency. And from the very beginning of
6:04
my time there on faculty, I was involved in the Ethics
6:08
Committee. After a few years, I took over
6:10
as chairman of the Ethics Committee.
6:13
And then there was an opportune moment a few years into my
6:15
career where I submitted a proposal to the university to
6:19
really sort of develop and grow their medical ethics program.
6:22
So I was appointed director of the medical ethics program and
6:26
I, I built it up in, in ways that, you know, the university
6:30
hadn't had that kind of programming before.
6:32
So that involved teaching the required ethics course to
6:35
medical students. So I developed this course from
6:38
scratch and it was implemented in the 1st and 2nd year of the
6:41
Med student curriculum. Continued to chair the Ethics
6:44
Committee and direct the ethics consultation process, but also
6:48
brought in more scholarship and more activities to, to train
6:51
other clinicians in doing ethics consultations and, you know,
6:57
continue doing research and publishing and so forth.
7:00
So my career has always sort of grown up on those two parallel
7:05
but intersecting tracks of working on mental health as a
7:10
physician specializing in psychiatry on the one hand, and
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I, I love that work. I'm very passionate about that,
7:17
but also maintaining my interest in ethics and philosophy and
7:21
philosophy of medicine and some of the the bigger sort of ethics
7:25
and public policy issues that medicine and biomedical science
7:30
intersects with. And Long story short about what
7:34
happened to me at at the university was my career was
7:38
humming along. I'd been there almost 20 years
7:41
and I was happy in academic medicine for the most part.
7:45
I planned on retiring at the university, so I didn't have in
7:49
my mind that I'm about to embark on another career trajectory.
7:53
COVID hits, I continue working at the hospital every day.
7:57
During the pandemic, I actually put together a team of people at
8:01
the university and then worked with representatives of all five
8:06
of the UC hospitals at the Office of the President so that
8:10
the UC system, not just UCI but UCLAUCSF, is overseen by the UC
8:17
Office of the President. They put together a committee of
8:20
experts in critical care and bioethics basically to draft all
8:24
of the pandemic policies for the university.
8:27
So we drafted A ventilator triage policy.
8:30
There was worry early on, what if we run out of ventilators?
8:34
What do we do? How do we allocate this scarce
8:36
resource if they're the demand for ventilators outstrips the
8:41
supply. Fortunately, we never got to the
8:43
point where we had to implement that policy, but it's obviously
8:47
a very charged and fraught sort of proposal.
8:53
You know, what do we do in those situations?
8:55
So I was working around the clock with the UC Office of the
8:58
President drafting that policy, drafting policies related to
9:02
allocating other scarce resources.
9:04
So for a period of time, monoclonal antibodies and other
9:08
treatments for COVID were, you know, similarly kind of we were
9:13
in a situation where the demand for these things might outstrip
9:17
supplies. How do we allocate them?
9:19
How do we use them responsibly to try to save as many lives as
9:22
we can? I was actually part of the
9:26
drafting the vaccine allocation policy at the university as
9:29
well. So early on in the vaccine
9:31
rollout, there was questions about who should get in line
9:34
first, who, who should be prioritized first.
9:37
And there was a policy here in Orange County that I worked on
9:41
with the county Department of Health and there was a policy at
9:44
the university in terms of the universities allocation of
9:47
vaccines, who was going to get it first among the students and
9:50
the faculty and what sort of consideration should we take
9:53
into account. So all that was keeping me very
9:56
busy and very obviously engaged with the university and
10:00
universities leadership until the vaccine mandate policy was
10:06
proposed. And what the first thing that
10:08
struck me about the vaccine mandate policy at the university
10:11
is that our group that had done all these other COVID policies
10:15
that were ethically sensitive was not consulted at all.
10:18
So the vaccine mandate policy just came down from on high at
10:21
the office of the president and there was no discussion or
10:24
debate about it the way there had been on all all of these
10:28
other ethically sensitive COVID related policies.
10:31
Now, was that, was that vaccine mandate policy coming?
10:35
You said the offices of the president, but was he getting it
10:38
from someone? Well, that's that's a very good
10:41
question. If it wasn't coming from our
10:43
advisory group, where was it coming from?
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I don't have a clear answer to that question.
10:49
I don't really want to speculate on that question.
10:51
I have my own ideas about why universities were among the
10:55
first institutions to mandate vaccines.
10:58
Lots of other institutions followed suit after that, but
11:02
the vaccine mandate started at some key universities and then
11:06
most colleges and universities got on board.
11:10
Universities rely enormously on especially large research.
11:14
Universities like University of California rely on federal
11:18
funding for 85% of their biomedical research comes from
11:22
the NIH. So there's a lot of money at
11:26
stake if the government is recommending or proposing a
11:30
policy position and the universities feel like they have
11:33
to fall in line. Otherwise, you know, they may be
11:37
deep de prioritized or subtly punished in in various ways, you
11:43
know, because the government feeding through is maybe not as
11:46
available as it used to be. So again, I don't want to
11:50
speculate, but what I can say is that that policy didn't follow
11:55
the usual process that we had used for developing all of the
12:00
other policy. So I found that puzzling and I I
12:03
just wanted a conversation about it because it was clear to me
12:06
that this was going to be by far the most ethically controversial
12:10
of all the policies that we had dealt with, and so we ought to
12:14
at least try to hash it out. So I tried to get a conversation
12:18
going among the committee and that sort of dropped like a lead
12:22
balloon. Meaning no one responded.
12:24
What happened? No one responded.
12:26
It was shut down very quickly by a few kind of just off the cuff
12:30
responses and remarks that, you know, basically we're not going
12:33
to talk about this. So then I tried to get a
12:35
conversation going by publishing an article in The Wall Street
12:38
Journal. So I published a piece.
12:40
This was before the policy was finalized.
12:42
It had been proposed but not finalized, arguing that
12:45
university vaccine mandates were unethical.
12:49
And then I sent that around to the committee.
12:50
Hey, can we talk about this? Radio silence.
12:55
And then the policy was finalized shortly after I
12:57
published that piece. And I started looking around and
13:00
seeing students being steam rolled, right, being kicked out
13:04
of school because they had concerns about the vaccine,
13:09
didn't want to take it. I had a student reach out to me,
13:12
for example, because I had gone public with the article in the
13:15
newspaper. People started reaching out to
13:18
me about what do I do now? I remember one student reaching
13:22
out and saying I'm not a religious person, so I can't in
13:26
good conscience submit a religious exemption, which some
13:30
people might have done right. And I wouldn't, you know,
13:34
wouldn't necessarily fault people who who suddenly found a
13:39
strong religious convictions where they had maybe maybe been
13:43
dormant for a while. But this particular person
13:47
didn't want wanted to be scrupulously honest in that
13:50
regard. But she had moral or conscience
13:54
based concerns about the vaccine and she had no recourse.
13:58
She couldn't get a medical exemption and she couldn't
14:00
submit a religious exemption and there was nothing else for her
14:05
to do. The policy was very draconian.
14:07
I saw nurses that had worked every day during the pandemic
14:11
treating COVID patients in the hospital, had served at UCI as
14:16
nurses for decades. I'd worked with many of these
14:19
people as chair of the Ethics Committee, you know, wonderful,
14:23
wonderful people who were being fired because they wouldn't take
14:28
the vaccine. And they, and, and I want to
14:31
pause there to understand why some people were so concerned.
14:37
And yes, there's a, there's the question of this was a emergency
14:42
use vaccine. So it didn't go through the
14:45
typical protocols and testing that vaccines do go through.
14:50
But I think it was more than that.
14:52
What were some of the concerns that you were hearing from that
14:55
nurse who was in risking her life?
14:57
I mean, everyone was calling the nurses the frontline heroes and
15:01
risking her life, you can say for patients and maybe she had
15:04
COVID and had, you know, healed from it, had a natural immunity
15:08
and she didn't want to take the shots.
15:10
What was what were you seeing and hearing?
15:12
So I was, I was seeing and hearing people who understood
15:15
biology one O 1 and recognized that once I recovered from this
15:19
virus, I had the best protection that I could get.
15:22
Vaccines attempt without ever fully being quite as effective,
15:27
attempt to mimic the body's response to the virus or
15:30
stimulate the body's response to the virus and basically attempt
15:33
to mimic natural immunity. So immunity after recovery is
15:37
the gold standard for an immune response to a virus that a
15:40
vaccine tries to approximate but never actually reaches.
15:43
And so people who knew that basic piece of biological
15:47
information about viruses said there's no reason for me to take
15:51
on the risk of a vaccine, however low that risk might be
15:55
of any risk seems unnecessary if I already have protection that's
16:02
actually superior to the vaccine.
16:05
And there was, there were early studies as well suggesting
16:08
things like that people with natural immunity had higher
16:10
rates of adverse effects from the vaccines, right?
16:14
Because basically you have a strong immune response already
16:16
that's being further stimulated, stimulated and you can get, you
16:22
know, the, the immune system can get excessively revved up as
16:25
well. And that can create problems.
16:27
The immune system is always held in a delicate balance between a,
16:32
a strong response to pathogens on the one hand, but also the
16:36
ability to sort of down regulate so that you don't get problems
16:40
like autoimmune diseases or chronic inflammation or you
16:44
don't tip the balance within the within the immune response.
16:49
There's a delicate balance between different aspects of the
16:53
immune response that can be thrown off by medications and
16:58
vaccines. And, you know, the excessive use
17:01
of various medical interventions can upset the delicate, what we
17:06
call the homeostasis, the delicate balance that our body
17:09
has, has learned and adapted over, you know, millennia.
17:15
So what was the explanation, Aaron, for those people who had
17:20
a natural immunity, what explanation were they given?
17:23
Because, you know, they're like, well, I have natural immunity.
17:25
The vaccines trying to get mimic that.
17:27
I've got it. Why don't you need the vaccine?
17:29
I heard some different rationalizations from folks who
17:32
were saying, well if you get the the a dose or you get the
17:37
vaccine in addition to your natural immunity, then it is
17:40
better explain that for people. Yeah.
17:42
So there was speculation. It wasn't established with any
17:46
level of evidence that so-called hybrid immunity would be better
17:50
than natural immunity. So the vaccine could improve
17:53
your immunity a little bit more. I looked at the data back then
17:57
on natural immunity and saw that it was basically so effective
18:01
that any improvement in natural immunity with a vaccine would
18:05
have been statistically impossible.
18:08
So I didn't buy that argument, both because there was no
18:10
evidence in favor of it and the evidence we had suggested that,
18:13
you know, if you're already 99.8% effective against a virus,
18:21
there's no reason to take a vaccine.
18:23
A lot of people also recognize the age gradient.
18:26
This was another thing that was well known, well established in
18:30
the medical research literature, but that nobody seem to want to
18:34
talk about, right? Because it it cut against the
18:36
narrative that everyone has to take the vaccine in order for us
18:40
to get out of this pandemic. But most of the deaths, most of
18:45
the bad morbidity, mortality from COVID was in people over
18:48
the age of 75. And for healthy people under the
18:51
age of 50, the the COVID virus was no more deadly than the
18:56
seasonal influenza virus, right? That's that's a piece of
18:59
information that was basically sidelined, right, So.
19:03
Well the argument was they could get the elderly person sick, so
19:08
they needed the vaccine to prevent the elderly person from
19:11
getting sick or the OR the immunocompromised family member.
19:14
That was the argument that was put forward, but never should
19:18
have been put forward because from the very beginning we
19:22
lacked any clinical or clinical trials evidence the vaccine
19:26
stopped infection or transmission.
19:29
And we now know that it doesn't, right.
19:32
So the the Pfizer clinical trials data that the initial
19:36
clinical trials, the only double-blind, placebo-controlled
19:38
trial that's ever going to be done on the mRNA vaccines was
19:45
clearly designed so that it could not answer that question
19:49
because it would have had to enroll far, far more people in
19:55
the study to even assess infection and transmission
19:59
capabilities. So the only outcome that they
20:01
actually published and and assessed was does this reduce
20:06
the severity of disease in people who actually get the
20:09
virus? So I was told, so I had, you
20:12
know, as an example, someone said, said, said to me, well, me
20:16
taking the vaccine would reduce the severity of me getting the
20:21
virus even by a little bit, which would mean that I would be
20:24
less able to give you the virus. So it's if that makes sense.
20:29
But that was all hypothetical. That had never been established,
20:33
that had never been tested. That was a hypothesis that was a
20:37
conjecture masquerading as a justification for a public
20:43
health intervention. And that that really bothered
20:46
me. There was this sort of
20:47
conflation of just so conjectures and hypotheses with
20:52
actual established scientific fact where in fact there was no
20:56
evidence that that was true. And we now know that it's not
20:59
true. We now have definitive evidence
21:01
that it's in fact false. The vaccines did not stop or
21:05
even slow infection and transmission in any measurable
21:09
or statistically significant way.
21:11
We know that now, there's some evidence now that with repeated
21:16
boosters, the more vaccines you have, the more likely you are to
21:21
get infected with COVID. so-called negative vaccine
21:24
efficacy is starting to show up. So this is another efficacy
21:28
issue that I recognize. After the first few months, it
21:30
was clear the vaccine efficacy started to decline very quickly,
21:36
right? So a lot of people were asking
21:38
why would I take a vaccine for a virus that's going to be
21:43
circulating for literally forever, right?
21:47
Which COVID will be? It's endemic, meaning meaning
21:49
it's never going to go away. We can't eradicate it
21:51
completely. If every single person on the
21:53
planet was vaccinated and boosted five times, COVID would
21:57
still be circulating in a dozen or more animal species and it
22:02
would be circulating in human beings cause the the vaccines
22:05
don't stop that from happening. It's never going away ever.
22:10
So why would I take a vaccine for something that's never going
22:12
away ever? That only works for basically
22:16
less than six months. So the initial 2 doses of the
22:19
vaccine, the efficacy by 6 months was basically below the
22:24
FDA threshold for approval is below 50%, which is already a
22:28
pretty low threshold, something that works only half the time.
22:31
It's not it's not a great vaccine, right?
22:35
But it you know it, it works better than that for only a few
22:39
months and then you're right back where you started, which is
22:42
why after about six months they started recommending boosters.
22:46
But if you look at the data on boosters, with each shot you get
22:49
diminishing returns. So the first two shots last
22:53
about six months. The third shot, the efficacy
22:57
temporary boost that you get lasted about three to four
23:00
months. The fourth shot, it lasted about
23:04
8 weeks, right? So you it became clear.
23:08
As soon as the. Booster started rolling.
23:10
Yeah. No, it became.
23:11
It became ridiculous. Yeah, I just get them.
23:13
Every day to the point where the, the, the CDC was
23:15
recommending that if it had been a month or more since your last
23:19
vaccination, you, you get another shot.
23:21
And this, this obviously, you know, to many people just seemed
23:24
like a, like a failed policy, right?
23:27
And that's, that's setting aside all the concerns about safety
23:31
that have now emerged. That's just the question of is
23:33
this actually going to work? So one of the reasons that I
23:39
oppose vaccine mandates in this case was that that the whole
23:43
argument that you should do it for the sake of others fell
23:47
apart as soon as you understood anything about these particular
23:50
products. So I never, I never thought that
23:55
argument should carry basically any weight because that might be
23:59
true if we had what's called the sterilizing A vaccine, A vaccine
24:02
that is both highly effective. If you get this, you're not
24:05
going to get the measles, but also if you get this, you're not
24:08
going to be able to transmit the measles virus to anyone else.
24:11
So I, I use measles because that's an example of a vaccine
24:14
that we have that's pretty close to sterilizing, meaning it stops
24:18
both infection and transmission. And that and thereby may have a
24:22
benefit for other people if you get it.
24:25
But that that didn't apply to any of the COVID related
24:28
vaccines. And so I thought that was a
24:30
dishonest argument right up front.
24:35
And where there's risk and where the benefits accrue to the
24:39
individual making the decision about whether or not to
24:41
vaccinate, you can't take the decision out of that person's
24:45
hands. This is the traditional medical
24:47
ethics doctrine of informed consent.
24:50
Are there ever acceptable mandatory vaccines, both for
24:57
kids and in a public health pandemic?
25:00
My my view on this is that if you have a product that is so
25:05
obviously good and so obviously effective, you don't need to
25:10
coerce people into taking it. Most parents want to do the best
25:15
thing for their children. We do not mandate or coerce that
25:20
parents brush their children's teeth or bathe their children
25:26
or, you know, do the basic things that any decent parent is
25:32
going to do for the sake of their Children's Health.
25:36
Once we get into the territory of, you know, a parent raises
25:39
concerns about whether or not this is actually good for my
25:42
child. And our response is, no, shut
25:44
up. You're going to do this or else.
25:47
That automatically, to me, raises the question of why do we
25:50
have to force it? If it's such an obvious and
25:53
unalloyed good that it's impossible for any sensible
25:58
person to ask questions about it or to have any hesitancy about
26:01
it, then we have a product that people will be falling all over
26:05
themselves to take and to give to their children.
26:08
So as a practical matter, I don't think vaccine mandates are
26:12
ever necessary. You know, people can concoct
26:15
just so scenarios where we have a highly contagious, highly
26:18
deadly virus that affects young and old, you know, rich and poor
26:22
alike. And we have a highly safe and
26:25
highly effective product that, you know, is is going to protect
26:33
you and maybe provide some degree of protection for your
26:36
for your family. That's not a situation at which
26:38
a mandate is going to be required.
26:40
But let's say we'll play devil's advocate because I think what
26:45
you're saying is very compelling.
26:46
You know, if you want to protect yourself from a disease, go get
26:49
vaccinated. But the devil's advocate would
26:51
say, like, let's say the bubonic, the bubonic plague
26:54
strikes America, right? And everyone's running to get
26:58
vaccinated. But there's that one guy, you
27:01
know, or just the guys that are just like, I don't care.
27:05
I don't care. I'm going to go cough all over
27:07
you with my black plague. Do you have the right to say get
27:12
that guy away from me? I mean, you can't cough on
27:14
someone's face legally. I mean, you can be around
27:16
someone though. That's the thing.
27:18
What's the you notice? You see what I'm saying?
27:20
Where where does Where do? There are, there are
27:23
circumstances, I think these should be very narrowly defined
27:27
and there should be a process of, you know, judicial review
27:30
and, you know, you need, there's the right, the right of habeas
27:36
corpus in our Constitution, meaning you can't seize and
27:38
detain my body without probable cause.
27:41
So like with all of that in place and some mechanism of
27:45
judicial review, the state does have certain quarantine powers.
27:49
So the idea of isolating someone who's symptomatic and thereby
27:52
potentially a threat to other people, that's something that
27:56
that we can, I think, and in in certain circumstances should be
28:01
able to do. So it's not as though the state
28:03
can never intervene to protect people's health during a
28:07
pandemic, but the idea of forcibly injecting someone with
28:12
something that they may or may not want, I think that's where
28:16
we have to, that's where we have to draw the line.
28:19
And in fact, we, we, we do this all the time in medicine.
28:23
I mean, as a physician, I have to get informed if, if the, if
28:27
the patient is a competent adult, meaning they don't have a
28:30
mental health condition that impairs their ability to reason
28:33
clearly. You know, it might be a
28:36
different story if the patient's delusional and, you know,
28:40
believes the vaccine was created by aliens and you know, it
28:43
contains arsenic or something like that.
28:46
OK, then you can go to court and you can get a judge to say no,
28:49
You can, you can give the medication or the vaccine to
28:51
this person because this isn't really informed consent if their
28:55
if their mind isn't capable of, you know, understanding reality.
29:02
So aside from people who are mentally incompetent and
29:05
declared to be mentally incompetent by a court, a
29:08
competent adult should have the right to decide what medications
29:13
or vaccines that they take. And even in the face of people
29:17
making bad medical decisions, this happens routinely in
29:21
hospitals. We'll be in a situation, I get
29:23
ethics consults on these kinds of cases all the time.
29:26
Someone has something that seems readily treatable.
29:30
You know, all medical interventions have risks.
29:31
But you know, to all the doctors, to all the nurses
29:33
involved, maybe even to the family members, it seems like
29:37
any sensible person would accept, you know, I don't taking
29:40
this IV antibiotic to get rid of the infection because if you
29:43
don't, you're going to die, right?
29:45
And yet we still allow patients to make ill advised medical
29:51
decisions that sometimes compromise their health and in
29:53
certain circumstances can actually result in their death.
29:57
We do that because the alternative is basically
30:01
irrigating the power to ourselves to force interventions
30:07
and force treatment on patients. And once we cross that line,
30:12
the, the potential for abuse, the potential for sort of
30:16
steamrolling the integrity of the body and the dignity of the
30:20
individual is, is very great. And there's historical examples
30:26
of that happening in medicine that are very egregious.
30:30
And the kinds of things that we never, ever would want repeat it
30:34
again, right? That the doctors experimenting
30:36
on death camp prisoners, the Nazi doctors experimenting on
30:40
death camp prisoners during World War 2 is, is a prime
30:44
example of that. But there's examples from our
30:47
history in the United States as well.
30:49
The Tuskegee syphilis experiments, the Guatemalan
30:55
experiments on related to gonorrhea that were in part
31:02
funded and run by our National Health Service in the United
31:04
States. The history of medicine is rife
31:09
with situations in which the doctors or the experimenters
31:13
thought that they knew better and ended up harming people or
31:18
using people instrumentally to achieve some other purpose.
31:21
So that's why informed consent, I think it's so important.
31:26
And, you know, concocting some extreme pandemic scenario which
31:30
didn't actually apply to COVID to try to defend vaccine
31:35
mandates. I, I I think is an attempt to do
31:40
an end run around the realities on the ground right now, right.
31:45
But also you can use an extreme case like that to then justify
31:50
practices and ordinary times. And in other circumstances that
31:54
would be, that would be abusive and and clearly, clearly
32:00
unethical. And that was your latest book,
32:03
The New Abnormal, which is the Rise of the Biomedical Security
32:07
State. I think it's a subtitle.
32:09
And it's about what ended up happening to you when you were
32:12
the conscientious objector to say, wait a second, why are we
32:16
forcing these students that are at low risk and medical staff
32:19
that make their own decisions to get this experimental vaccine?
32:23
What happened to you? So I ended up trying to
32:26
challenge the vaccine policy in federal court on constitutional
32:29
grounds. So I filed A lawsuit against the
32:32
university, and I did so because I was trying to imagine myself
32:37
teaching the required ethics course in a few months and
32:40
standing up in front of the students in lecture 2 where I
32:44
talk about informed consent and talking about informed consent.
32:49
You know, lecture 5 or 6 when I talk about moral integrity and
32:53
trying to do the right thing, even, you know, even if it's
32:55
going to cost you something. I just couldn't imagine waking
33:01
up in the morning with a clear conscience if in my position I
33:05
hadn't not just sort of written an article arguing that this is
33:09
a bad policy, but hadn't actually tried to change the
33:11
policy. So yeah, I took that fateful
33:15
step knowing that it would very likely cost me.
33:17
I mean, if you want to go sideways with your employer
33:20
really quickly, a good way to do that is sue them in federal
33:23
court, right? So the university very quickly
33:26
placed me on suspension and then on unpaid leave and then fired
33:31
me. Basically, they they ran me
33:32
through the paces as quickly as they could for alleged non
33:35
compliance with the very policy that I was challenging in
33:39
federal court. So I ended up losing my job and
33:43
starting a private practice and now I'm continuing to do, you
33:47
know, the work that I was doing in ethics and public policy,
33:50
working on medical freedom issues now working on censorship
33:54
related issues at the Ethics Public Policy Center in DC and
33:59
the Brownstone Institute and some other independent think
34:02
tanks that I've been working with.
34:03
So, so my, my career trajectory shifted in December of 2021 when
34:08
the university fired me. And yeah, the book is in part an
34:15
attempt to figure out what happened to me and why these
34:17
policies during the pandemic became so draconian that, you
34:21
know, people lost their jobs, they lost their businesses, they
34:24
lost their livelihood. And what I what I came to in
34:28
researching that book is if you try to look at our COVID
34:31
response just as a kind of argument about data and argument
34:35
about public health, our response doesn't make any sense
34:39
because it just, it just doesn't add up.
34:41
These policies not only did enormous collateral harms, but
34:45
didn't even achieve their intended purpose and.
34:49
I want to ask about that. And then with the time we have
34:51
left, I do want to talk about the current mandated vaccines,
34:56
you know, largely mandated for children, because if you are in
35:00
certain states, California is one of them and you want to send
35:02
your kid to school, your child to school, you need to fulfill
35:05
this vaccine schedule. That's pretty aggressive.
35:08
So I want to talk about that for a moment.
35:09
But first, you laid out in your book some of the harms of this
35:13
new, as you call it, biomedical security state.
35:16
What were just a couple of the what is some of the new data
35:20
coming out? A couple of the harms of the
35:23
COVID vaccines? So.
35:25
And I'm interested in pregnant women, especially 'cause I was
35:28
pregnant during COVID, I chose not to get the vaccine for
35:31
multiple reasons. And some of the data I'm seeing
35:34
about the, the risk to them, but also the risk to young men.
35:37
I mean, there's a lot of data and stories coming out.
35:39
And then the vaccine, sort of the pro vaccine folks are
35:42
saying, oh, it's misinformation. That's just one case, you know.
35:45
And then the other side is saying, no, this look at the
35:47
data. So give us the high level for
35:50
people listening what they should know.
35:52
So there there is considerable population level data suggesting
35:57
that birth rates declined starting about nine months after
36:01
the mass vaccination campaign began in many different
36:04
countries. It's it's doesn't seem to be
36:06
happening in every country. So the data is a little bit
36:08
mixed, but there's enough evidence there that suggestive
36:11
of population wide harms to fertility that I think it's more
36:16
than sufficient to raise concerns and clearly sufficient
36:21
enough that we should be doing further research to find out
36:25
what was going on there. There's been a lot of reports
36:28
about still births, about second and third trimester spontaneous
36:35
miscarriages, which tend to be very rare that there's, there's
36:41
a lot of people on the front lines, Jim Thorpe and an
36:43
obstetrician that is doing a lot of work on this and others have
36:48
come out and said we just haven't seen this kind of thing
36:50
before until we had this vaccine.
36:53
I remember when they were advising pregnant and nursing
36:57
mothers to take the vaccine and that the the spin that they put
37:01
on it was there's no evidence that this is going to be
37:05
harmful. I was pressured to take it.
37:08
Sure, most people were pressured to take it, but the problem with
37:11
there's no evidence that this is harmful was that, yeah, because
37:15
it hadn't been studied yet. So the absence of evidence is
37:19
not evidence of of absence. In other words, there could have
37:22
been harms, but we don't know. And the fact that we don't know
37:25
should be enough to tell people we don't know.
37:27
It's like we dropped the baby off the Cliff but we weren't at
37:29
the bottom to see the crash, so it could be fine just.
37:32
So if you don't look, you're not going to find it.
37:34
So pregnant women were excluded from the clinical trials.
37:37
Nursing women were excluded from the clinical trials.
37:41
The few pregnant women that didn't know they were pregnant
37:43
and ended up completing the clinical trial had a higher rate
37:46
of miscarriage than we would ordinarily see in the.
37:50
And this is second and third trimester miscarriage.
37:53
I don't know at what point in the pregnancy those occurred.
37:56
I'm just referring to the the specific phase three clinical
38:00
trial. But there's, yeah, there's other
38:03
at least anecdotal evidence of elevated rates of.
38:07
And what about for young men? What about the the reports of?
38:10
Well, yeah, there. I mean, so there's at least one
38:12
study showing diminished sperm counts in men after vaccination.
38:18
We now know that that that the mRNA in the vaccine is excreted
38:24
in breast milk. So the baby is getting the the
38:29
mRNA that creates the spike protein that now appears to be,
38:33
you know, potentially toxic in, in especially if you have too
38:38
much of it in your system. So the safety and efficacy
38:43
concerns in those particular populations were never studied,
38:47
in which case those populations should have been informed.
38:49
We haven't tested this in pregnancy.
38:51
We haven't tested this in nursing moms.
38:53
We haven't even done the basic research like seeing if it's
38:57
excreted in breast milk so that we can advise pregnant moms and
39:02
nursing moms about that. We haven't done the research to
39:04
see whether or not this sort of crosses the placenta and
39:07
creates, you know, spike protein related issues in in the unborn
39:12
child or the newborn infant. So that informed consent is
39:17
about giving people the information that we have.
39:19
And sometimes the answer in a rapidly evolving situation is we
39:22
don't know. But when that's the answer,
39:25
people deserve to know that then they can they can calculate
39:29
their own comfort level with various risks and with various
39:33
unknowns. I mean, the answer to what are
39:35
the long term side effects of vaccination is obviously we
39:38
don't know because it hasn't been around long term, but to
39:42
pretend like it's going to be safe and, and we know that, I
39:47
think it's fundamentally dishonest, but we saw a lot of
39:50
that early on. And that was an, I mean, there's
39:53
many reasons why I oppose vaccine mandates, but but the
39:56
behavior around messaging was another reason that I thought
39:59
there's, there's something really not right about what's
40:02
going on here. And people are fundamentally not
40:05
being informed of what we know, what we don't know.
40:09
You know what's still under investigation.
40:12
And that just struck me as totally antithetical to
40:16
everything that I try to teach about clinical medicine.
40:19
You would be shamed if as the unvaccinated during the pandemic
40:22
and family members were even told to not sit down with family
40:26
members who were not vaccinated. And there was this huge, I, I
40:31
mean, shame is one word, but it, it was remarkable how it created
40:36
two groups of people, the vaccinated, vaccinated and the
40:40
unvaccinated. And if you were not vaccinated,
40:42
you were somehow not loving, not part of the team.
40:45
And you were crazy too. This is, and this is coming from
40:48
the highest levels of society, the president of the United
40:50
States saying it's going to be sort of a cold, deadly winter
40:54
for the unvaccinated. The the pandemic of the
40:57
unvaccinated meme that circulated until it no longer
41:00
became tenable because it was obvious.
41:02
Yeah, a few months after vaccination, the efficacy
41:04
declines and there's just as many vaccinated people in the
41:09
hospital, excuse me, in the hospitals and dying of COVID as
41:12
the unvaccinated. So, you know, people, I think
41:17
there was a deliberate pressure campaign to stigmatize people
41:21
that made that particular medical decision to blame the
41:24
problems related to the pandemic on them.
41:28
You know, the reason we're not getting back to normal, the
41:31
reason the kids are not going back to school is because of the
41:33
unvaccinated. No, the reason is because of the
41:36
lockdown policies and the school closure policies, which you are
41:39
responsible for, right Mr. Politician or whoever it is
41:44
that's, you know, trying to create a scapegoat and and blame
41:48
the problems that their own policies have created on a group
41:52
of people that are just trying to make informed medical
41:55
decisions. And what's the data on how those
41:57
lockdowns affected? Kids, it's terrible it's
42:01
terrible we my colleague at Stanford, Jay Bhattacharyya and
42:05
Martin Coaldorf, 2 of my Co plaintiffs in the Missouri V
42:09
Biden censorship case, have done a lot of work on the harms of
42:14
lockdowns and school closures. The harms just in a nutshell,
42:20
the harms are massive, some of them irreversible.
42:25
Many of them are things that were are going to be felt for
42:28
decades and in the, in the whole life trajectory of students that
42:33
that couldn't go to school, that I mean, the learning loss, the
42:37
behavioral and developmental losses during that time, the
42:42
increase in the economic harms, the increase in poverty, the
42:47
increase in child abuse, the food insecurity of many
42:53
families. You know many children who get 2
42:55
meals a day from the school no longer had access to.
42:59
And this has all been documented.
43:00
Oh, absolutely. And, and actually the more time
43:03
that goes on, the more the the more that evidence is
43:07
accumulating. And I think that evidence is
43:09
going to continue to accumulate probably for the next 10 to 15
43:12
years before we know the full extent of the harms of lockdowns
43:16
and school closures. So lockdowns and school closures
43:19
did not slow or stop the spread of the virus.
43:21
It's the first thing to be said about them.
43:23
They didn't work. They didn't achieve their stated
43:25
purpose, and the collateral harms of those policies are so
43:33
disastrous that it's actually really hard to wrap your head
43:35
around it. Wow.
43:38
These are scary bad policies. Really important that we don't
43:44
just say, let bygones be bygones.
43:46
You know, we're done. We're you know, we're open.
43:49
The masks are off. It's what's coming in the
43:51
future. And what how do we be prepared
43:53
and educated on this? Listen, we've got just a couple
43:56
more minutes. We're going to have to do this
43:57
again, Erin, and talk about the childhood vaccination schedule.
44:00
But let's just leave people. I know a lot of people listening
44:03
to this podcast are parents of young children and they're
44:07
facing vaccination decisions for their children.
44:10
And I'm going to call them decisions.
44:11
But in some ways I'm going to say they're coerce decisions
44:14
because if you go to your pediatrician, your typical
44:15
pediatrician, and you question the vaccine schedule, you're
44:19
looked at sideways, you're think thought of it as a weirdo.
44:21
It's the same COVID thing that happened during COVID.
44:23
Whoa, why wouldn't you vaccinate?
44:25
And then in addition, in certain states, you can't go to school.
44:28
I mean, you have a lot of difficulty getting an education
44:31
for your child. So there's tremendous pressure
44:34
on parents to do the CDC vaccination schedule.
44:39
Give us a couple thoughts on that.
44:40
I know I'm putting you in the hot seat on a can of worms here,
44:42
but we're going to address it more on the on the podcast in
44:44
the future. But give us your your high level
44:46
thoughts on that. My first thought is every parent
44:49
has the right to ask questions, and the right of parents to make
44:54
medical decisions on behalf of their own children should never
44:57
be taken away from them. So the states of California and
45:00
New York that have such draconian mandatory childhood
45:05
vaccination laws, in California, for example, the vaccination law
45:12
has no religious exemption provision.
45:16
It has no conscience exemption provision.
45:19
And it's become de facto impossible to get a medical
45:22
exemption to the vaccine because basically they punish any Doctor
45:26
Who's written more than five medical exemptions for vaccine.
45:30
They publish your name on a publicly available list of
45:34
doctors under investigation. There's I think close to 10,000
45:38
doctors now on that list. They're obviously not going to
45:41
investigate all of them. It's just a way of sort of
45:44
doxing you, if you will, and casting aspersion over you and
45:47
getting you to basically stop exercising, exercising your
45:51
clinical judgement about writing a medical exemption for a
45:54
vaccine if you think the vaccine is contraindicated in this or
45:58
that patient under your care. So this is, this is to me, this
46:03
is totally unacceptable, right? And basically they punish
46:07
parents by saying you can't go to private school, you can't go
46:10
to public school your own, you can't go to a charter school.
46:13
Your only option if you don't comply 100% with this vaccine
46:17
schedule with no exemptions allowed, is homeschooling, which
46:21
drives 10s of thousands of good families.
46:25
Well, homeschooling's awesome, but.
46:27
It's sure. No, it's.
46:27
Not. It's, it's also, it's also
46:32
depriving them of their right to public schooling, which they
46:34
paid for with their tax money, right.
46:38
And homeschooling is not for every family and not every
46:40
family isn't, is in a position to homeschooling.
46:44
You know, particularly a, a, a family at the lower end of the
46:47
socioeconomic spectrum that's going to rely on the public
46:50
school that doesn't have the resources to homeschool.
46:52
Maybe both parents have to work just to pay the bills, right.
46:56
So these kinds of policies always disproportionately impact
46:59
the poor, right, Because if you're a person of means, you
47:02
know, you can hire a tutor, you can put, you know, get together
47:04
a homeschooling Co-op, you have, you have the, the ability to
47:08
find workarounds, but there's, you know, lots of folks that
47:12
just don't have those kinds of resources.
47:15
And it's like, well, my option is the public school or I have
47:18
to quit my job and move to another state.
47:20
So any any state that does not have provisions for appropriate
47:26
discretionary latitude and given the ability to physicians to
47:31
write for exemptions, that doesn't have conscience
47:33
exemptions and that doesn't have religious exemptions, which is a
47:37
First Amendment fundamental right.
47:40
You know, those laws need to be changed.
47:42
Parents should have the right to make these medical decisions on
47:45
behalf of their children. The state can maybe try to
47:47
incentivize an intervention like a childhood vaccination that it
47:51
thinks is advisable, but I think it it should not.
47:54
It cannot take that fundamental right away from a physician to
47:58
help a family opt out or from a family to opt out for reasons of
48:02
conscience. That's not getting into all the
48:06
the science on each particular vaccine on the childhood
48:10
schedule. That's a very complex topic.
48:14
I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but my
48:18
advocacy for vaccine mandates has convinced me that the same
48:22
the same criteria should apply to childhood vaccinations.
48:26
And so just as a competent adult has the right to make informed
48:30
medical decisions, a competent adult has the right to make
48:33
those decisions on behalf of their own child who's under
48:36
their care and their responsibility.
48:38
And no one's, no one's going to love that child more than the
48:41
parents. Certainly not the state in the
48:44
rare exception where you have, you know, you have a case of
48:47
documented physical abuse or neglect or something like that.
48:51
Can the state intervene in intervene in those extreme
48:54
cases? Sure.
48:55
But you know the default has to be.
48:57
You have to trust the parents judgement with their children.
49:02
We will get into this more in the future on the podcast 'cause
49:04
I think it's so important, but OK, to close this out here,
49:07
we've got just a, a, a moment. Tell us where people can find
49:10
your book, The New Abnormal. And then do you have a book
49:14
recommendation for parents about childhood vaccines?
49:18
Yeah, so there's a book called Turtles All the Way Down that
49:21
was published by some vaccine scientists that I think is It's
49:26
worth looking at, It's worth reading.
49:27
It raises some interesting questions that a lot of people
49:31
are not aware of in relation to vaccine science.
49:34
Vaccine, their vaccine regulatory scheme is another
49:37
issue that we should probably talk about at some point.
49:41
The fact that. Part 2.
49:43
Yeah, Part 2 The fact that a drug company is liable for their
49:47
pharmaceutical products, for their drugs, but not liable for
49:50
harms from their vaccines. That sets up a very, I would
49:55
argue, problematic dynamic in regards to the the safety
49:59
testing of those vaccines in the clinical trials which are run by
50:03
the drug companies. So bracket that for a moment,
50:08
but parents should ask questions about the regulatory framework
50:12
about what happens if my child is injured by a vaccine.
50:15
What is the compensation scheme for that?
50:18
Do people realize that the federal government has set up a
50:21
payout system in exchange for you signing a non disclosure
50:25
agreement that you'll never mention that your.
50:26
Child was injured. By a vaccine, yeah.
50:29
It's it's this is not this is in federal law.
50:32
It's it's all publicly available information.
50:35
I'm not making this up. At the same time where they
50:38
passed the law basically indemnifying and protecting
50:42
companies from liability, they also set up this system where
50:46
you can petition the federal government to get some
50:49
restitution. But it basically means that they
50:52
they shut you up and you can't talk about the fact that my
50:54
child was injured by this vaccine.
50:58
So parents should ask questions. I The common feature of all
51:02
totalitarian systems is not concentration camps or mass
51:07
surveillance or secret police. The common feature of all
51:10
totalitarian systems is the prohibition of questions, the
51:13
inability to question the regime, the inability to raise
51:16
your hand and say, wait a minute, That just doesn't make
51:18
sense to me. I mean, I'm not a scientist.
51:20
I'm not an expert. But like, logic tells me that,
51:24
you know, wearing a mask when I stand up in a restaurant and
51:27
taking it off when I sit down kind of is just seems illogical
51:30
and like not good public health policy.
51:32
Shut up. Don't ask that question.
51:33
Just do what you're told, right? That's not how a free and open
51:37
society should operate. And as soon as you, as soon as
51:41
the regime starts monopolizing what counts as knowledge and
51:45
rationality, what's an acceptable question to ask?
51:48
And what's not an acceptable question to ask we've we're
51:51
moving in the direction of totalitarian systems, even if
51:57
you know the other apparatus is not yet in place.
52:01
So learn more by getting the new abnormal working people find.
52:04
Oh yeah, New Abnormal, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, anywhere where
52:08
fine books are sold. It's on audio book if you want
52:11
to get it on Audible. Thank you, Karen.
52:13
It's on Kindle. We gotta do this again and talk
52:15
about the childhood vaccine schedule, but this has been
52:18
really good. Thank you and thanks for your
52:20
courage and standing up for what is right and living by your
52:24
conscience even when it costs you a lot.
52:27
Although I will say I think you're doing much cooler stuff
52:29
now. I'm having fun now that you've
52:30
left UCI. Thanks so much, Aaron.
52:33
Thanks.