‘I Had to Stand up and Try to Do Something:’ Professor of Medicine on Suing School...

[IceWizard]

Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, a professor of psychiatry at
UC Irvine's School of Medicine, is seen in Irvine, Calif.,
on Oct. 27, 2021.
(Zhen Wang/The Epoch Times)




‘I Had to Stand up and Try to Do Something:’
Professor of Medicine on Suing School Over Vaccine Mandate


BY JAN JEKIELEK AND ZACHARY STIEBER
October 28, 2021
Updated: October 30, 2021


Dr. Aaron Kheriaty reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic like many other medical experts.
He worked long hours as the United States tried to grapple with the new disease.
He had too many conversations with family members whose loved ones were dying from it.

But as time wore on, he started noticing a pattern in public health decisions that seemed
to diverge from traditional medical ethics, including an insistence that people at little risk
from COVID-19 get a vaccine.

Kheriaty is now on suspension from the University of California, Irvine, (UCI) and
challenging the school’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate in court.

“I had to stand up and try to do something about it,” the professor of psychiatry and director
of the UCI Health’s Medical Ethics Program said on The Epoch Times’ “American Thought Leaders.”




Deep-dive w/ medical ethics prof @akheriaty who filed
a lawsuit challenging his university's #VaccineMandate.
He was suspended & put on "investigatory leave."
part 1




UCI spokespeople declined to comment for this story.


‘Liberating’

Kheriaty contracted COVID-19, the disease caused by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party)
virus, in mid-2020. His infection was confirmed by two different tests from two independent
labs. His five children and wife also contracted the disease.
They all recovered, with none requiring hospital care.

“It was, for me, actually a very liberating experience afterward, because I didn’t have to
worry about the illness anymore. I knew the science on natural immunity,” Kheriaty said.

Natural immunity refers to when people contract COVID-19 and recover. Dozens of studies
have documented that these individuals enjoy strong immunity against CCP virus re-infection.
Some of the studies suggest the immunity is superior to that provided by COVID-19 vaccines,
particularly the Johnson & Johnson one.

“I knew that at that point, I was among the safest people to be around, I didn’t have to worry
about transmitting the infection to my patients,” Kheriaty said.


He continued taking precautions, wearing personal protective equipment like masks as required
at the hospital. But he was confident he didn’t pose a risk to others, which served as a relief.

That relief turned into disbelief when, around a year later, the University of California system,
which includes UCI, imposed a COVID-19 vaccine mandate.


Opt-Out is Temporary

The mandate (pdf) included a natural immunity opt-out, but only temporarily. People who recovered
from COVID-19 were told they would only be exempt from the mandate for up to 90 days
after their diagnosis.

University officials cited the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which alleges that the antibody tests
it has authorized “are not validated to evaluate specific immunity or protection from SARS-CoV-2 infection.”


SARS-CoV-2 is another name for the CCP virus.



“For this reason, individuals who have been diagnosed with COVID-19 or had an antibody test are
not permanently exempt from vaccination,” officials said.

The mandate violated rights outlined in the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment,
including equal protection and substantive due process, Kheriaty’s lawsuit asserts.

“Plaintiff is naturally immune to SARS-CoV-2. Therefore, plaintiff is at least as equally situated
as those who are fully vaccinated with a COVID-19 vaccine, yet defendants deny plaintiff equal
treatment and seek to burden Plaintiff with an unnecessary violation of bodily integrity to which
plaintiff does not consent in order to be allowed to continue to work at UCI,” it states.

The situation creates two classes, vaccinated and unvaccinated, when a more reasonable division
would be those who are immune and those who are not, Kheriaty believes.

“What kind of discriminatory policies do we have in place that are excluding someone like me
from the workplace when I’m 99.8 percent protected against reinfection whereas someone who
got the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, by the company’s own data that they submitted to the FDA,
is 67 percent protective against COVID infection?” he said.


Whose Burden?

Kheriaty initially planned to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Now he’s working to change the narrative
around mandates.

Some say proposed natural immunity opt-outs for the mandates would be make it much more
difficult to ascertain who meets the threshold, versus a vaccine mandate with no lasting provision
for post-infection.

Most mandates across the country don’t have alternatives for people who had COVID-19 and recovered.

Kheriaty proposes putting the burden of proof on people who want to opt out.

“Just have them go get the testing on their own time. You don’t have to administer the T-cell
test or the antibody test. You don’t have to go dig up their old medical record establishing that
they’ve already had COVID,” he said.


“Just ask them to bring that in and sign off on that as a kind of immunity passport.”


Side Effects

The population of those who recovered and still got a vaccine is known as having
“hybrid immunity.”

A large part of the medical health establishment, including all federal public health agencies,
downplay natural immunity. They say it exists but that hybrid immunity is better.

“I’m not denying at all that people who get infected and recover have a considerable
degree of immunity,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the longtime director of the
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said last month.
“We also know—and I think we should not let this pass without saying it—that when
you get infected and recover, a) you get a good degree of immunity, but b) when you
get vaccinated, you dramatically increase that protection, which is something that’s
really quite good.”

A spokesman for Fauci’s agency told The Epoch Times in an email that he sourced from
several studies, including one from researchers at the
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. They found that a COVID-19 vaccine
based on messenger RNA given following COVID-19 infection boosted neutralizing antibodies.

Many studies, however, show the immunity post-infection is already sky-high for many,
leading to questions about why the recovered would then go get a vaccine that,
like every jab, has side effects.

Kheriaty worries about other research that seems to show vaccine recipients with
natural immunity experience side effects at a higher frequency than those who are
not immune who get a shot.

“There are now about five independent studies that strongly suggest that individuals
that already have natural immunity, when you vaccinate them, the risk of vaccine
adverse events or vaccine side effects is higher for that group,” the professor said.
“They have higher risk of side effects from the vaccine. It’s not going to help the people
around them because natural immunity already is sterilizing, [yet] we don’t yet have
any COVID vaccines that offer sterilizing immunity.”

Jan Jekielek
SENIOR EDITOR

Jan Jekielek is a senior editor with The Epoch Times and host of the show,
"American Thought Leaders." Jan’s career has spanned academia, media,
and international human rights work. In 2009 he joined
The Epoch Times full time and has served in a variety of roles,
including as website chief editor. He is the producer of the award-winning
Holocaust documentary film "Finding Manny."