Published October 2, 2023
Aaron Kheriaty didn’t set out to be a plaintiff in a potentially historic First Amendment case. He was happy being a physician and professor of psychiatry at the University of California. He was an expert in medical ethics. Then he lost his job for refusing a Covid vaccine. And one day he got a call from a lawyer for Missouri, about a lawsuit against the Biden administration over censorship.
Dr. Kheriaty had already sued his employer, “the largest educational system in the world,” because it had fired him, he notes. He’d sued California and Governor Newsom. “I guess they can take me out and shoot me,” he thought. “But at that point, I wasn’t too worried about what was going to happen or my public reputation. I just wanted to try to fight to do the right thing here.”
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Aaron Kheriaty, MD, is a Fellow & Director of the Program in Bioethics and American Democracy at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is a physician specializing in psychiatry and author of three books, including most recently, The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State (2022).
