The Muzzling of Doctors with Dr. Aaron Kheriaty

if you question the consensus, you could lose your license. Now, we've all been paying attention during COVID and we've seen how the consensus has been wrong about everything. The consensus has been wrong about masks, the consensus has been wrong about lockdowns, the consensus has been wrong about vaccines. Essentially, this is just government censorship, the silencing of dissidents, and isn't the point of science to question the broader narrative,

to question the consensus. We're going to talk to one doctor who is part of a small group who's suing the state. Now so far they've successful. California judge issued a preliminary injunction against the law, so their case will continue to proceed. That doctor's name is Dr Aaron Karyat. He graduated from the University of Order Dame in philosophy and pre medical sciences. He earned his medical degree from Georgetown University and he completed his residency training in psychiatry

at the University of California, Irvine. He he taught there for many many years, something like fifteen years before getting fired for speaking out against the quote unquote consensus, for not getting vaccinated, for questioning the authority, and now he's leading the charge on this lawsuit as well. So we're going to talk to Dr Aaron Karyati about why he's suing, what it means, and where this lawsuit is heading. He's next, Dr Aaron Karyati. I appreciate you coming on the show, sir,

thank you for making the time. Oh. Absolutely, it's great to be with you. Losing. So, you're one of the five physicians who have filed a lawsuit against the state of California over a new law assembly built. What exactly does this law do? This law, which was introduced in the California state legislature last year, passed by the state legislatures, signed by the governor, is more or less a gag

order on physicians. It specifies that a that a physician who contradicts what the law calls the quote unquote current scientific consensus, which is never defined in the law. Very difficult thing to define legally. Any doctor who contradicts this supposed consensus on things related to COVID may have hiss or medical license subject to disciplinary action by the medcal Board.

So especially the law empowers the medical board to discipline physicians in California who contradict the really the preferred public health narrative on COVID. And I say that it's a gag order on physicians for a couple of reasons. One is it tries to control the speech that doctors engage in with their patients in the privacy of the consulting room. And they shouldn't be a political issue. That should not

be a sort of left right liberal conservative debate. And the reason for that is I explained when I testified against this bill at the California State said it is that I don't know anyone in California left right, progressive conservative who wants to go to their doctor and ask our doctor a question about COVID treatment or COVID intervention and not have their doctor give them the doctor's honest opinion. Right nobody wants their doctor reading from a government approved

script written by the California Department of Public Health. Otherwise you would just go on the government's website and read what the government wanted you to know about COVID. The reason you ask your physicians you want your physicians opinion. Now, you may decline to follow the physicians recommendation, you may be skeptical of the physicians judgment, go seek a second opinion whatever. As a patient, obviously you're free in that regard as well. But I don't know anyone who doesn't

want to hear what their doctor actually thinks. And so as soon as you intervene in that and try to control with physicians, say the patients, you've undermined the trust that's necessary for the doctor patient relationship to work in the first place. And ultimately this this is a problem for physicians who may be unjustly disciplined or unjustly constrained

from practicing medicine according to their best judgment. But more importantly, at least it's harmful to patients who need to be able to trust that what their physician is telling them is actually in the in accord with the doctor's own clinical judgment and the doctor's own personalized and individualized recommendation for the patients. So this is a very serious, um and egregious sort of insertion of the government into the private realm of the doctor patient relationship where the government

does not belong. But it's also harmful to the practice of medicine as a whole that is sort of institutional level, because it's going to undermine the trust that patients in general have of medical professionals if they think that, you know, the medical professionals are constrained by laws like this. Um. I think one of one of the reasons that the law is vague and its definitions. This is one of

the constantitutional problems with the law that we're challenging. Is even if the medical board only takes disciplinary action against one or two physicians, or maybe it never, it never applies to this law to specific cases. Nevertheless, the law is going to have a chilling effect on this speech of physicians right because precisely because it's difficult to know whether or not whatever I'm saying may run a foul of the law, or may run a foul of the

medical boards interpretational law. I'm just not going to say anything, or I'm just going to air on the side of only uh, you know, saying what has been approved again by some government agency or some public health bureaucrat because the potential consequences for me as a physician or so severe. Right, it's I mean, it's one thing to lose your job, it's another thing to lose your license, which is your ability to practice medicine at all. When did science become

about the consensus? Isn't the whole point of science to be able to challenge the consensus? You get new data, you do new research, you come up with different you know, a set of facts. So when has it ever been about the consensus to begin with? Precisely right, it's never been about the consensus. In fact, the the idea of that the science capital key capitals, delivers ready made conclusions that are unassailable and can never be challenged. This is

a this is a totally mistaken view of science. Sciences is a method or it's a set of methods, or trying to answer really difficult, really complicated questions about the natural world, about the workings of the human body, about a rapidly evolving virus, whatever, and science advances precisely by hypothesis, by conjecture, by the gay aring of evidence, by refutation, by argumentation. If you take a group of credible scientists that that actually practice science, you put them in a

room together, they're going to argue endlessly. I mean, that's what scientists do. That they're going to debate about, you know, the nuances of this or that study, or that, you know, the upshot of the research as a whole, or you know, this theory versus that theory of viral evolution or of treatment of a respiratory illness. That's a good thing, and that's precisely how science advances. So if you actually understand how medical science works, it's very clear immediately that science

and censorship are totally incompatible. So that that's precisely another problem with the laws, not just what it does to the doctor patient relationship in a consulting room, but what it does to the advance of medical science. Trying to fix a any conclusion that any given point of time as the final truth and it cannot be challenged and it's you know, it's unassailable. That will guarantee that you're going to bring the scientific enterprise to a grinding halt um.

So it's it's clearly a misguided law and unjust law in terms of suppressing the physicians free speech rights uh and the patient's rights to receive certain forms of information, which is another key aspect of free speech. But it will also have this downstream consequence of halting the progress of medical science and of you know, chasing out of the state good physician scientists who are on the front lines asking good questions, um, exploring novel treatments, trying to

improve treatment protocols. Doctors like that precisely the kind of doctors that tend to advance the field. They're they're not going to want to practice medicine in California. They're gonna they're gonna jump ship. And you know, the physician shortage shortage that we already have in this state is only going to get worse, and in fact, it will be some of the some of the best, most forward thinking, most most creative or innovative physicians that will be the

first to leave well. And it's also what's scary about this is, you know, if thunder the interpretation of the Medical Board of California, we've seen how the CDC has gotten things wrong how the you know FDC, how all these are CDC rather f d A, How all these public health organizations have gotten things wrong consistently throughout COVID.

So then you have the people who are essentially setting the precedent setting you know what the consensus is that have been wrong throughout all of It's exactly right about our public health agencies. And by comparison, I mean at least the public health agencies are populated by people with pH d s and people with supposedly some level of expertise. Um. There may be a bunch of incompetent pH d s, or they may have become politicized or weaponized in various ways.

But if you look at the Medical Board, UM, less than half of the members of the Medical Board are physicians. Most of the non physicians are lawyers. The the chair of the Medical Board is a professional life coach, um, you know, not someone that is competent at judging the current state of science on any given medical question. And the members of the Medical Board are directly appointed by the governor. So this is a This is an entity that can very easily and I would argue, has become

weaponized and politicized. UM and tasked with doing things that the Medical Board was never set up to do. The Medical Board was set up to, you know, basically get rid of physician cracks and quacks and cranks who are clearly doing engaged in unethical, fraudulent, harmful behavior, you know, abusing the doctor patient relationship in various ways, or defrauding

the insurance companies this sort of thing. Um, you know, what to do about those doctors who received multiple complaints from from patients about clearly substandard care, clearly unethical or illegal practices. That's that's what the Medical Board was set up for. The Medical Board is should never be empowered to a judy adjudicate complicated scientific questions. Um, they don't

possess the competence to do that. And they will be operating under pressure from the state, which sets them up and empowers them to do the state's bidding and to become the long arm of a kind of state censorship regime.

And that's a that's very very dangerous for UH, an agency that had, you know, had really modest task of you know, monitoring the most egregious violations that you know, a few bad apples within the profession which are always going to have you know, are are engaged in and you know now they're being asked to take sides in complicated debates about you know, a novel virus, and you know, the the idea that they would they would do any better than our public health agencies have done. Um is

you know it's very far fetched. You obviously you've eloquently laid out the justification against this law. I wholeheartedly agree with you. Quick commercial break more with Dr Aaron Karyat why did you decide that, you know what, I'm stepping up, I'm going to be a part of this lawsuit. I've got to do more here. Number One, I thought that I could be among the physicians that was targeted by such a law. So if I wanted to continue to live and practice medicine in California, I ought to do

something about this uma. From from early on in the pandemic, I was one of the doctors that would publicly challenge the current scientific consensus, and very often I was. I was smeared or punished simply for being six months nine ahead of the curve and for seeing what was coming down the pike before it was widely acknowledged by the public.

Health agencies or by the profession as a whole. And so, you know, I could imagine that once a lot like this was in place, that you know, it may they have a chilling effect on my own ability to continue to comment on public health policy related to COVID. So my own personal story. I was at the University of California, Irvine for fifteen years, where I was a full professor in the School of Medicine and directed the medical ethics

program there. And when the university institute of their vaccine mandate, I had already published a piece in the Wall Street Journal arguing that the university of a university of actually mandates were unethical. They violated the principle of informed consent, enshrined first into Nuremberg Code and then throughout twentieth century medical ethics and federal law. And so I challenged the vaccine mandate in federal court, and the university fired me

as a consequence of that. About a year after I was fired, the CDC finally came around and publicly acknowledged the central argument that I was making in that case, which was that, uh, you know, we shouldn't be discriminated between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated. CDC gave two reasons, which were first articulated in my lawsuit a year prior. Number one, natural immunity after infection, which I had, was at least as robust, indeed more robust than the vaccine

induced community. And number two, um, the vaccines did not stop in fact and and transmission um. And both of these facts were known if you were paying close attention to the research literature. We're known when I was trying to make this case publicly end in the federal courts, But it took the CDC a year to publicly acknowledge them.

Didn't happen until So, I mean, that's just one example I could I could name others, other examples where I and other quote unquote dissident physicians who are challenging the COVID narrative that was being pushed were censored or silenced, were punished simply for articulating things that that you know, a year later, six months later, we're widely acknowledged by everyone to be true. So that that's just that's isn't

you know? My own personal story which you could be repeated many many times over by other doctors and nurses and citizens. Just paying close attention is a good illustration of precisely what we talked about a few minutes ago with how science proceeds. You you challenge science advance is precisely when it when a consensus, when what everyone thinks they know is challenged, and then uh, you know, subjected to critical scrutiny and um and subjected to further investigation

and the gathering of evidence and so forth. UM. And so you know, the law like this is in my view, essentially a power grab, right because it's if there if there are public health officials or if there are medical institutions who simply don't like the or supposed authority questioned, um, and that if they declare something to be the case, and you know, mandate that everyone fall in line, that

people should just shut up and listen. Um. Well, you know these are people that um, that may realize, look, my my arguments may not succeed on their own merits. They may not succeed if they're subjected to scientific scrutiny. And you know, for a real doctor, real scientist, that's okay, you welcome that. You know, I'm open to revising my opinion in the face of new evidence. There's nothing wrong

with that. In fact, that's a good thing. But for people who will who will never publicly admit that they may have been wrong. Uh, the censorship option, or to punish my adversaries option seems like a you know, a good way, maybe a shortcut, to maintain their power and maintain their stance of a kind of authority that can't be questioned. And this, you know, this is this is uh, you know, this starts to smell of a of a

kind of Orwellian sort of totalitarian flavor to it. I faced this and in the media a little bit because I was very outspoken about not getting the vaccine. But I can't imagine someone like you, who you know, as you you talked about you were at the University of California, Irvine for for fifteen years. My understanding is that the school Medicine deans had asked you at one point to give the white coat ceremony keynote addressed incoming medical students.

They told you that you're the best lecture in the medical school. You're leaned on heavily for a variety of leadership roles at the school. So how crazy, because I can't imagine experiencing what I did in the media, which

isn't even close to to what you went through. And then also being a medical professional that you are, how wild has this been to see probably people that you know, you previously respected, you, you thought were critical thinkers, to just turn into you know, like these programmed bots almost yeah, programmed bots and informants, uh, you know, on their colleagues. It was surreal. It was demoralizing. Medicine at its best has a tradition of self scrutiny and internal criticism can

try to make ourselves better. There's a there's a tradition in academic medicine. We call it the eminem conference Morbidity and Mortality conference. It's, you know, I take a case that I've treated where maybe the outcome wasn't as good as I would have hoped for, maybe there was a bad outcome in the case the patient diet or something like that, and I present the case in detail to

my colleagues. You know, I stand up in front of the other doctors in my department and they then are permitted to play Monday morning quarterback and second, guess, you know, everything I did well, Maybe the case would have gone better if you did this or maybe you could have spotted that earlier, Maybe you should have run this test. It's hard to subject yourself to that kind of critical scrutiny, especially you know, from people who have the benefit of hindsight,

which is usually but doctors do that. We do that willingly, because, you know, because we had a huge responsibility, because we want to get better, and ultimately, you know, for the sake of our patients, so that you know, if we've made mistakes or done things that are suboptimal, we can we can try to avoid that in the future. All of that seemed to come to a grinding hall when it came to COVID. There was none of that um There was none of that self scrutiny and sort of

internal critique. There was none of the back and forth parsing out of data and arguing about data that that again is a central feature of academic medicine at its best. Another monthly conference we have his journal club. You just take one article and you've parted it out, and you talk about the strengths and weaknesses and the methods, and you know, just just one study can be subjected to

a lot of debate because science is complicated. But suddenly COVID comes out, and there are these sort of anointed public health talking heads on TV that we are supposed to take as infallible. And never mind that Anthony Fauci, for example, is probably not treated a patient since he was in residency many many decades ago. He has not run an experiment at the bench for many decades. Um.

You know, he's an administrator, he's a bureaucrat. But if you were to challenge his public health recommendations, who were immediately accused of killing Grandma or being selfish or you know, putting the economy ahead of saving the times or whatever. So in a climate of fear, we were suddenly subjected to a situation in which everyone was afraid to say what they actually thought. Um. Everyone was afraid even internally

to ask critical questions. UM. And it was it was shocking to me to see how quickly medicine fell in line with that UM, and how even when some doctors started asking questions and started to once again I think more critically, many of them did not feel empowered to speak out publicly out of fear of losing their jobs. So I had many doctors reaching out to me privately saying, hey, love what you're doing. Thanks for speaking out. You know, sorry you got sacked by the unit versity. But keep

doing what you're doing, you know, cheerleading. Um. Because I feel like I can't I feel like I can't speak out, or I can't ask questions, or all suffer the same thing that you suffer. Then you know, I understand that. I understand that it's kind of self protective um um uh strategy to try to maintain your career or your job. Those consequences are very real, and you know, doctors have

responsibilities to their family and so forth. But nevertheless, you know, at a certain point, uh, you know, I think any professional has to draw a line in the sand and say, you know, as a position, if I'm if I'm doing things that I think are harmful to patients, then you know, then I have to speak up, even if it's going to cost me as a journalist, if if I feel

like I'm just parenting lives that I'm being told to repeat. Um, you know, for the state of my own integrity, even if I may lose my position at the at the media, I have to speak out. I have to do something. I think all professionals should ask themselves. You know, where is my line? If you don't have one, you should probably ask yourself, you know, why you're doing what you're doing, and you know what, uh, what is it all about

for you? Professionally? Quick commercial breaks? Stay with us? Having these conversations with my parents and they're like, well, you could get fired, you know, have you thought about that? And I'm like, I just you know, I gotta do it and just see, you know, like pray to God. I don't. But you know, it's it's this is wrong, And what's the point of me in this role doing this job. If I don't speak out and I don't have conviction, you know, and I'm not rooted anything, then

why why am I? I don't deserve this job? Then, you know, to your to your point, uh, you know, a California judge issued a preliminary injunction against this law. Where do you think this case is heading? You know, what's the timeline? What should people look for as this moves forward? So the preliminary injunction is essentially the court saying that we are going to halt the implementation and application of the law while the case is being heard.

So the law went into effect January one, Unfortunately, we couldn't get our hearing scheduled before January one, but we managed a couple of weeks into January to get that hearing for the preliminary injunction and the court granted it. So the law went into effect for a few weeks. Um. It was never applied to my knowledge, to any specific cases. Uh. And now the law is is on hold until the court makes a final ruling. That's a very very good

first step for a couple of reasons. Number one, there were other physicians in California that high lawsuits to challenge this lawn federal court on constitutional grounds similar to what we did, and the court found that those physicians did not have legal standing to challenge the law or is technicalities. And you know, uh, reasons why the court did that. Um, I don't think those reasons were justified, but we certainly were worried that this judge might do the same thing.

So we got past that hurdle. The judge in the preliminary injunction ruling found that all five of us physician plaintiffs did have standing to challenge the law, even if in our clinical practice we were not necessarily treating patients with COVID directly, we were engaged in other conversations related to COVID in my own case as a psychiatrist, for example, UM, I sometimes have to deal with the issue of masks with people that have anxiety disorders. Masks can actually increase

their anxiety. UM. If someone is subjected to panic attacks, did the rebreathing of the air with a mask can sometimes trigger panic symptoms. So, even though I'm not an infectious disease specialist, I am sometimes giving advice on COVID related matters. And the court recognized that, so that was good.

That's a big hurdle. The second really important aspect of this preliminary injunction is that for a court to grant this, it's essentially the judge saying that, even before you go to trial, the plaintiffs likelihood of prevailing, in other words, that the likelihood that the court is going to declare this law unconstitutional and strike it down is very plausible, just on the basis of the written documentation that we've submitted, in the written arguments that we've made in our complaint,

in our declaration so far, so not to get too far ahead of ourselves, Lisa, UM, we still need to win the case. But this is an indication from the court that the judge thinks we have a good chance of winning the case. So the next step is that we go we go to trial, and you know, we have the back and forth of the fact finding in the legal arguments and the testimony given by the plaintiffs if the court asked for that or requires that, and then the judge is going to have to make a ruling.

We don't have the date yet set for that trial to my knowledge, unless that happened today and I just haven't been notified. But the judge acted fairly swiftly in our case to issue the preliminary injunction, and I think the court will move pretty quickly to the next phase. So hopefully, hopefully we'll be able to get a ruling sometime in the next month or two. But at least in the meantime, we're not going to be subjected to

this bad law in California. I anticipate that will prevail, but um, you know, I'm also aware that I don't have the crystal ball. The two the two constitutional issues at stake in our case. Number one, free speech of physicians is the first Amendment right, but the other one, and actually the one that the court paid more attention to in its recent ruling, was we're arguing that our rights are being violated under the equal protection clause of

the fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. One of the one of the things that that that aspect of the Constitution requires is that the law itself, any law that's passed, be sufficiently clear in its wording, in its definitions, that a citizen can know whether or not they're violating the law right Otherwise you're you're subducted to an arbitrary law of taking over your head and you're not sure you know just what I'm doing right now constitute stealing or

fraud or whatever. Well, in this case, the judge said that the wording of the law first of all grammatically unintelligible, and second of all, the current scientific consensus was was too vaguely defined in the law. Precisely, are concerned that the law was going to have a chilling effect because doctors didn't know if you know, a piece of advice that they wanted to give would or would not get them into trouble with the medical board. So we may we may prevail on that issue alone. Aside from the

fact that this law also violates First Amendment free speech rights. Well, Dr Aaron Katty, before we go, where can people help out? Is our way for people to help out. So our case is being supported by the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Our lawyer there, Jennie Units, has been really excellent. So if you want to contribute to the case itself, you can.

You can give some money to the n c l A. If you want to follow the case, I post regularly on it and on some other legal cases that I'm involved in on free speech issues on my Substack newsletter, So Aaron karyat dot substack dot com. You can follow me on Twitter, and I've written about these issues as well in a recent book I published called The New Abnormal. That is a great title for where we are today for a book. Dr Aaron Karyati, You're a hero in

my book. We really I think we're going to look back and see folks like you as heroes and standing up against this because it's one thing for media types or anything else, it's another for people like you have earned your degrees and uh, you know, have a different

level of credibility on these issues. So I appreciate what you're doing, praying that you guys are successful in California, and just thank you, thank you, thank you for standing strong and for allowing voices like mine to to have a microphone and to speak uh, and to standing by your own convictions in this regard as well. Very much admire that. Thanksly so. That was Dr Aaron Karotti obviously leading the charge on this lawsuit in California. Good for him.

Really interesting conversation, Such a smart guy. Obviously. I sat there and all during most of the conversation, just really kind of taking in what he had to say. I appreciate you guys for listening to the show every Monday and Thursday, but you can listen throughout the week. Please leave us review, We leave us a rating on Apple Podcast. What make my producer John Cassio for putting the show together. Until next time,