A physician who was fired from his job as a professor of psychiatry at the University of California-Irvine School of Medicine for refusing COVID-19 inoculation is vowing to appeal a federal court’s dismissal of his lawsuit.
“Unfortunately, at the district court level, we weren't able to dig into the science of natural immunity,” said Dr. Aaron Kheriaty who sued in the Central District of California over the university’s vaccine mandate.
Kheriaty, who survived COVID-19 infection in July 2020, alleges in his Aug. 18 complaint that he is naturally immune to the coronavirus, and not allowing exemptions for natural immunity is unconstitutional.
“We thought Judge Selna should have applied what's called a strict scrutiny analysis to the case but instead he applied what's called a rational basis review, which allows the court to ignore all the empirical science as long as the university has a plausible claim that this is for a public health purpose,” he said. “They don't have to show that it's narrowly tailored.”
The father of five, who announced the university’s Dec. 16 decision to terminate him in a Substack blog post, says paying his mortgage and tuition bills is a source of stress and concern.
“I think I’ll land on my feet hopefully in a few months and feel a bit more settled when I know where the next paycheck is going to come from,” Kheriaty told the Southern California Record. “I'm in a transition period right now. I've got my five boys to support. One is in college now and I'll have a second in college next year. So, four are still at home.”
Kheriaty argues that despite humanity’s best efforts at mimicking the immune system’s protection, the immunity generated after infection with a virus creates a more robust and durable form of immunity than any vaccine can create.
“The efficacy of natural immunity remains very high and clearly better than what the vaccines offer actually,” he said. “A lot of folks now who have been vaccinated and maybe even got a booster shot are still getting infected and fortunately most of them are not getting terribly sick. People are now realizing that the vaccine's ability to prevent infection might have been oversold.”
Kheriaty is represented locally by Los Angeles attorney Caroline Tucker.
"People are going to have to build up natural immunity to it one way or the other and that's ultimately going to be our way out of this pandemic," he added. "Sure, the vaccines can help folks that are high risk to reduce their chance of more severe symptoms. I don't deny the usefulness of vaccines at all but, in my case, my physician wrote me a medical exemption letter stating that there is no need for me to take the vaccine and that there's evidence that people who have had COVID-19 can have side effects from the vaccine."