University of California, Irvine fired Aaron Kheriaty, the director of their Medical Ethics program, after his refusal to comply with the UC vaccine mandate and his direct challenge to the policy with a lawsuit, Campus Reform reported.
Kheriaty was also a professor of psychiatry at the UCI School of Medicine.
The professor filed a lawsuit against the vaccination mandate on the basis that natural immunity “following COVID infection is equal to… vaccine-mediated immunity.”
A witness from the UC School of Medicine supports this premise. They also suggest that those with natural immunity “may suffer worse adverse effects after vaccination.”
In the lawsuit, Kheriaty also suggests that forcing vaccination among the naturally immunized violates the 14th amendment.
Kheriaty announced his dismissal on Dec. 17, which followed a two month investigatory leave wherein he was unable to go on campus, forbidden to teach, given half pay and barred from contacting students or patients.
Speaking to Campus Reform, Zephyr Institute Executive Director Matt Bowman said, “in forming and defending his medical and ethical positions, Dr. Kheriaty exercised his professional obligation with robust academic deliberation, courage, and moral responsibility.”
“Instead of protecting the academic freedom of this leading medical ethicist and one of UC’s most respected medical teachers, UC fired him,” Bowman continued.
At the beginning of the pandemic, Kheriaty reportedly worked with the UC Office of the President to put together policies and act as a spokesperson for the ventilator triage policy. He also assisted in the handling of PPE shortages and addressing medical students.
In a June 2021 opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, Kheriaty wrote, “coercive mandates violate basic principles of medical ethics.”
“Requiring the naturally immune to be vaccinated doesn’t make anyone actually safer. It is wrong to risk harming healthy people so that college can peddle a psychological placebo to those who don’t care enough to consider basic scientific facts.”
Kheriaty has announced his plan to continue pursuing the lawsuit, working with the Zephyr Institute and the Ethics & Public Policy Center to challenge The UC system’s mandates.
