The Daily Signal - Best of 2023: Dr. Aaron Kheriaty on How Governments Abused COVID-19 to Gain Power

Episode Date: December 27, 2023

Between Christmas and New Years, The Daily Signal is looking back at the most popular interviews from the year. Enjoy episode two of our "Best of 2023" series! Many COVID-19 restrictions and mandates have been rolled back, but the infrastructure remains in place, “ready and waiting for the next declared public health crisis,” Dr. Aaron Kheriaty says.  Kheriaty, a psychiatrist who directs the Bioethics and American Democracy program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, chose to speak out against the COVID-19 vaccine mandates, That decision cost him his job at the University of California, Irvine, School of Medicine. Kheriaty says he is concerned that the "pretext of public health and safety has proven to be a good fulcrum, a good lever to get people to do things that otherwise they would be very reluctant to do." "It's also been an occasion for the accumulation of power, mostly by the executive branch of government," he says. In his new book "The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State,” Kheriaty details the ways in which governments past and present have used public health crises to gain power. Kheriaty joins "The Daily Signal Podcast" to discuss how, unless placed in check, the government will use public health orders to further its own agenda, whether about COVID-19, climate change, or abortion.  Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, December 27th. I'm Virginia Allen and welcome back to the Daily Signal's best of 2020 podcast series. This week, we are bringing you the best of the Daily Signal podcast from the year. If you missed the conversation with Detransitioner Chloe Cole yesterday, make sure to go back and give it a listen. All this week, we are bringing you our favorite and your favorite Daily Signal podcast interviews from the year. And today we are bringing you a conversation with Dr. Aaron Kariati. Dr. Kariotti is a psychiatrist who directs the bioethics and American democracy program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. And I was honored to sit down with him earlier this year to discuss his book, The New Abnormal, the Rise of the Biomedical Security State. He explains that the powers the government granted itself during the COVID-19 pandemic.

pose a concerning threat to the nation. Dr. Kariati joins the show to discuss how, unless placed in check, the government will use public health orders to further its own agenda, whether about COVID-19, climate change, or abortion. Stay tuned for our conversation up next. But before we get to that, I do want to take a minute as we near the end of the year to explain how you can be even more so a part of our Daily Signal family and a part of our Heritage Foundation family. As many of you are aware of, the Daily Signal is the news outlet of the Heritage Foundation. And the Daily Signal podcast is a product of the Heritage Foundation, which is one of the world's most influential and trusted think tanks.

We've been operating since 1973. Heritage Works in Washington, D.C., and across the country to develop conservative policy solutions to the most critical issues facing America today. And those are issues that we then often talk about right here on the Daily Signal podcast, sometimes with Heritage Foundation experts. And Heritage is fighting every day in a war against failed leftist policies that threaten to destroy our country. And we need your help to keep on doing just that.

So please consider making a tax-deductible gift in support of the Heritage Foundation and the Daily Signal before December 13th. first. If you want to give, just go to heritage.org. Again, that's heritage.org. Together, we can take back America. Dr. Carriotti, welcome to the show. Thanks, Virginia. Great to be with you. Well, your new book was written in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The title is The New Abnormal, the Rise of the Biomedical Security State. I want to begin by asking you to just define that. term, biomedical security state. What do you mean by that? So the biomedical security state is the public health infrastructure that we saw rolled out during COVID. It was 20 years, 25 years in the

makings, but at first was deployed and sort of manifested publicly starting in March of 2020. And the biomedical security state is essentially the welding together of three things that used to more or less distinct. The first is an increasingly militarized public health apparatus. And I can talk more later about what I mean by a militarized public health apparatus. And that was welded to the use of digital technologies of surveillance and control. This is the first epidemic or pandemic of the digital age. The first time we've had a major outbreak like this in a population, where we had the technological ability to monitor the movements and the location and all kinds of other data and information about each individual in the population through smartphone technology.

So the first iPhone was released in 2007. And in 2020, we saw the deployment of digital technologies for surveillance and control of entire populations as a novel method of trying to control a respiratory virus. So we can think of things like the vaccine passport, the QR code on your phone that you have to show to get on a plane, get on a train, go to a restaurant or public event, or even get back into your own country of origin. That's an obvious use of these technologies. Less well known is the fact that many Western supposedly free democratic societies utilized a, unauthorized surveillance, basically extracting track and trace data from smartphones without the

knowledge or consent of the population. So this happened legislatively in Israel during the Omicron wave where they passed emergency legislation to allow the shin bet, basically their version of the FBI, to do this. And that was at least done publicly by people who could be voted out of office. we found out a couple of months after that that Canada had been doing the same thing, even though Justin Trudeau had promised the Canadian people that this would not be done. And the Canadian Public Health Agency admitted that it was going to continue extracting data from smartphones to monitor movements and, you know, who was associating with whom on into at least 2026 and to use this for public health applications beyond COVID. And then in May of last year, Vice broke the story that the C. CDC had been doing the same thing, again, without the public's notification or consent, monitoring

how many people were gathering at a church or how many people were gathering at a school. And supposedly this data was anonymized, but there were some researchers from Princeton that showed that with only four data points very easily, you know, the particular number in that data set could be linked to a specific identifiable individual. So those are just a few examples. I have many more in the book of the deployment of technologies of mass surveillance in order to monitor and nudge and control people's behavior at a very micro level. And then these two elements, the increasingly militarized public health apparatus, the digital technologies of surveillance and control, are backed up by the third element, which is the police powers of the state. that were used to enforce public health directives passed non-legislatively on an emergency basis,

more or less using emergency executive powers by governors or by the president and their appointees, the unelected public health bureaucrats. And we could think, for example, of the invocation of the Emergencies Act in Canada by Trudeau for the first time in Canadian history, which, under which he, not only, removed the truckers protest in Ottawa, a peaceable protest, forcibly removed them from the city using a militarized police force that went in and roughed up the truckers on their way out. But even more than that, he used that to freeze the bank accounts of the truckers with the cooperation of private banks that willingly acceded to this demand.

and even freeze the bank accounts of people who had given money to the truckers. So imagine giving 50 bucks to the Freedom Convoy, you know, in Canada and then going to the ATM the next day and not being able to withdraw money from your bank account because you were supporting a peaceful public gathering, protesting the government's preferred pandemic policies. What I argue in the book, and the book is primarily not a retrospective on what, happened during COVID. It's a forward-looking book saying, even though a lot of these individual policies, a vaccine mandate here or social distancing rules there have been rolled back at this point, the entire infrastructure that I just described is still in place and ready and waiting for

the next declared public health crisis. And so in a sense, if we do not start to recognize the way in which emergency powers were deployed and this biomedical security model of governance was deployed during the pandemic. We're going to see more of this in the future. With the implementation of lockdowns in March of 2020, I argue that we saw not just the rollout of a novel method for trying to control a respiratory virus that had never been tried before and had no empirical data supporting its use. We saw, in fact, a new paradigm of governance, one that sort of entails jumping from one declared crisis to the next, which is why the plausibility of the COVID crisis has waned in, you know, the public's consciousness. We've seen efforts to create a new public health

crisis out of a novel virus. The monkeypox scare is an example of that or the the triple Demic with, you know, we're going to have influenza and COVID and RSV this winter, which turned out to be a nothing burger. But we've also seen efforts to reframe other issues as public health issues. We've seen really over the last five years, even before the pandemic started, efforts to frame climate change from what used to be considered an environmental or an ecological issue to now it's framed in terms of its harms to population, It's a public health issue. If you look at all the headlines on climate change over the last four or five years, you'll see this pattern. And now we have voices calling for rolling lockdowns and other sort of biosecurity measures to deal with the climate crisis. So the biomedical security state is, I argue in the book, is a threat to liberal democracies and a threat to the freedoms that we have enjoyed. constitutional freedoms that we've enjoyed in the United States and in other Western nations.

And that's why I think we have to recognize that COVID in a sense was just the beginning. And we need to look forward and see, okay, what are the next steps in the process of kind of implementing this new paradigm of governance? And how do we stand up against those so we don't continue unwittingly to relinquish our freedoms and our liberties. Because what it sounds like you're saying is that when the government sort of finds a way to fit an issue into the medical box, there's a lot of powers that come with that. And maybe even the American people or just people in general, they're a little bit more

willing to maybe seed some of those freedoms because obviously we all want to be healthy. We all want to protect our neighbor. Exactly. And so there's that willingness. And I would even be curious to get your thoughts on, you know, just this week. We've seen that, you know, the Biden administration announced a possible public health emergency order related to abortion. Is this sort of the kind of thing that you're talking about moving forward that maybe after COVID we could see an increase of? I think that's exactly right.

The pretext of public health and safety has proven to, be a good fulcrum, a good lever to get people to do things that otherwise they would be very reluctant to do. And it's also been an occasion for the accumulation of power, mostly by the executive branch of government. So the president gains 128 additional extra-constitutional powers during a declared state of emergency. And one of the reasons that the Biden administration has been reluctant to declare the pandemic over is they know that if the pandemic is over, then the public health emergency that's been declared at the federal level also has to be sundowned. I think they announced the other day that that's going to happen in 100 days or something like that.

So how you can predict three or four months in advance that an emergency will be over at that point is an interesting epistemological question. But, you know, Biden announced coming into the midterms that the pandemic was over, which was, of course, true. It's been over for quite some time. The virus is endemic. You're going to get a seasonal rise and fall of cases. But the criteria for an epidemic or a pandemic has long since passed. And obviously, it would have been politically advantageous for him to announce that going into the midterms, you know, sort of victory over COVID while he was in power.

But immediately his advisors panicked and said, no, no, no, you can't say that. And the reason they panicked was precisely this. They knew that if his administration admitted the truth about COVID, that they would have to relinquish those emergency powers, which have been, which have allowed for access to access to spending money, access to, you know, deploying the military infrastructure, the intelligence infrastructure, communications, and so forth. all in the service of supposedly of public health and safety. And the same thing has happened at the state level.

So we have a situation in which governors and presidents can unilaterally declare an emergency, accrue the powers under that emergency declaration, and then unilaterally decide when to relinquish those powers. This is a bad setup if there are no judicial or legislative checks or balances on that system. And this is precisely why I think we're seeing these efforts, like the one that you just mentioned, to declare other issues, whether it's abortion or climate change or, you know, racism was declared a public health crisis. During the lockdowns of 2020, you might remember, right? when there was the large public protests that in many cities turned into violent riots associated with the BLM movement and the George Floyd killing.

And there was a group of about 1,200 public health academics, I guess, and bureaucrats that wrote a letter declaring that these gatherings were okay, even though everyone else was supposed to be staying at home and socially distancing. because racism was a public health crisis that apparently trumped at that point the public health crisis of COVID that was requiring emergency lockdowns and school closures. So this pattern has been happening for at least three years, and I think in the case of climate change for about five years. And we're going to continue to see the pretext of public health and safety that supposedly requires a state of

emergency in order to advance policies that would have been impossible to do through the usual, you know, legislative mechanisms. Yeah. You do such a nice job in the book of looking back at history and some of the roots, really, of this kind of thinking where it's come from. And you also discuss the Nuremberg Code. What is that first, if you would, just lay that out for us. And then why is it significant for us today to be considering that and remembering it for this moment in history?

So the Nuremberg Code is a document that I actually encourage our listeners to go look up and read. It's a short document. It's not complicated. It's about a page or two long. And the Nuremberg Code was developed following the Nuremberg trials after World War II, where an international tribunal led by the United States, but including. other allied powers, tried the Nazi war criminals, which included, of course, military war criminals and government officials, but also included a dozen Nazi physicians who had conducted gruesome

experiments on death camp prisoners without those prisoners consent. And half of those doctors were convicted and sentenced, in fact, to death, and a handful of them actually hanged for those crimes against humanity. And following that, the Nuremberg Code was developed to try to prevent those kinds of abuses and atrocities of patients and research subjects in the future. And the very first principle of the Nuremberg Code is the doctrine of informed consent. that in order to intervene on an individual medically or in order to enroll an individual in a medical experiment, you can only do so with the individual's full knowledge of what they're agreeing to

and uncoerced consent. So every adult of sound mind has the right to decide what medical interventions they will accept or will decline after being given adequate information about the risks, the benefits and the alternatives to that treatment. And they have the right to make those decisions on behalf of their own children who are not yet old enough and cognitively mature enough to give consent. And that was the central doctrine of 20th century medical ethics. The Nuremberg Code doesn't have the binding force of law, but it influenced the laws in virtually every Western nation, certainly, when it comes to research on human subjects and when it comes to the ethical practice of medicine. And one of my concerns during the pandemic was precisely that this

idea of informed consent was being steamrolled by lack of adequate information about the interventions that were being proposed, first of all, but also about coercive measures like vaccine mandates that were deployed to force people who are hesitant to receive a particular medical intervention. And so that's sort of the hill that I ended up dying on and sacrificing my career in academic medicine on because I was opposing the University of California's vaccine mandate where I had been a full professor in the School of Medicine there for my entire career 15 years. And I also directed the medical ethics program there. And I challenged the university's vaccine mandate in federal court on constitutional grounds. And as a consequence of that, the university fired me. And essentially what I believed myself to be doing there was defending this idea of informed consent.

And so I think the Nuremberg Code is a landmark document of 20th century political society and certainly 20th century medical ethics that we would do well not to forget. at. And, you know, anytime you make an analogy to the Third Reich, people, you know, people tend to freak out. So I want to be clear and just a caveat here. I'm not comparing either the current or the previous administration to, you know, Hitler's Nazi regime. But it also remains an undeniable historical fact, just to circle back to our earlier theme, that the Nazis governed for virtually their entirety of their time and power under Article 48 of the Constitution, which permitted the suspension of German laws during a time of emergency. And this supposed public and public health emergency lasted in that case for 12 years. So we can ask, how did Hitler go from the legitimately appointed chancellor of Germany to a totalitarian dictator of Germany? Well, that legal mechanism of the state of exception or state of emergency was deployed by his regime precisely in order to accrue total power. So there are historical analogies, you know, history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. And so there are

historical analogies. That's one from the 20th century. There are others that I cite in the book for this misuse of emergency powers to basically suspend constitutional rights. You know, the Nazis never overturned or did away with the, the Weimar Republic's constitution. They just bracketed it. They just held it in abeyance indefinitely and did an end run around it through this legal mechanism of a declared state of emergency. And so I think we have to be very, very careful about the use of emergency powers and the framing of all kinds of social.

and political and moral issues as public health issues, because we've seen where that can take us in the past when we allow an executive power to unilaterally accrue additional powers and keep those powers, you know, far longer than would be warranted by any, you know, objective analysis of the state of, whether it's a vice. virus or, you know, an external threat like the threat of war. It's precisely during these kinds of crises that we need to adhere more firmly to our constitutional principles of free speech and freedom of religion and freedom of association and a free press that's not subjected to government censorship.

Because those, it's crisis situations of war and epidemic and so forth that were most strongly tempted to make an exception and to do an end run around human rights and constitutional liberties. We're talking with Dr. Aaron Curiotti about his new book, The New Abnormal, the Rise of of the Biomedical Security State. And Dr. Curiotti, as you mentioned, your decision to really speak out on this issue and ultimately stand against the vaccine mandate at your. former employer, the University of California, ultimately ended up costing you your job.

Were there other colleagues in your profession in the field of medicine, the field of academia, who were raising the concerns that we're talking about right now, about really the abuses of power that were happening under COVID-19? Certainly there were quite a few doctors and other health professionals and scientists who were raising concerns about specific pandemic policies. You know, there are many doctors now, for example, raising concerns about the safety and efficacy of the mRNA vaccines that were deployed during the pandemic. I can think of my colleague, Dr. Assim Malhotra, a cardiologist in Great Britain, who's now very, very concerned calling for a halt to the mass vaccination program with these

vaccines out of concerns for the cardiac harms, which he believes are more common than our public health agencies have admitted. Others like my friend Dr. Peter McCullough and Dr. Robert Malone have raised questions about the use of these vaccines as well. There's been a lot of epidemiologists and public health experts who have raised questions about lockdowns and have pointed out that, number one, lockdowns failed to achieve their purpose, their public health purpose of slowing or stopping the spread of the virus, and that lockdowns and school closures have instead done enormous collateral harms. So I think of Jay Batacharya, my colleague at Stanford or Martin Koldorf, my colleague at the Brownstone Institute, two of the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration, who raised these concerns

starting back in 2020. And so I think we've seen a fair amount of critique of these policies. Unfortunately, we now know that many of those voices were suppressed or silenced through not only through social media censorship, but through social media censorship at the behest of the government. That's one of the reasons why Jay and Martin and I are among the private plaintiffs challenging the government censorship regime and the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit. But I don't see a lot of people.

There have been a few, but not as many, looking at some of the social and political issues that I'm talking about here. Giorgio Agamben, the philosopher from Italy, has written a lot about the issue of the state of emergency, state of exception. A scholar named Simon Elmer has written a book called The Road to Fascism, which digs into a lot of the same themes from a somewhat different angle, but a lot of the same themes that I raise in the new abnormal. So here and there, there are some critics of the sort of social political elements of what we've seen during the pandemic. Others have written about the economic forces that were at work during the pandemic, nudging us toward policies that were economically advantageous for big tech and other global elites,

but harmful to the working class and the middle class. But my book is really an attempt to kind of synthesize these concerns and paint a sort of big picture understanding of, first of all, what happened to us? And then second of all, where is this, where's this biomedical security regime going to take us next? What are the next steps in its implementation? On that understanding, I think, is so critical if we have hope of change and course correcting. That's right. Yeah. And I know that you wrote the book, obviously, not just to share a lot of bad news, but as really a signal to Americans and to society as a whole to say, hey, we need to be aware of what's really

happening here. So for all of our listeners, I encourage you to pick up a copy of the book, The New Abnormal, the Rise of the Biomedical Security State by Dr. Aaron Curiotti. And Dr. Curiati, I just really thank you for your time today for joining us. Thanks, Virginia. Thanks again for joining us here on the Daily Signal podcast for our best of 2023 series. We do not have any top news shows this week. We will be back with top news next week. But in the meantime, please give the Daily Signal a wonderful end of year Christmas gift. And take a minute to leave us a five-star rating and review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, wherever you like to listen here across all podcast platforms, and also make sure to hit the subscribe button.

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