 What do you think should be the COVID policies for pirate? Yeah, so I'm completely opposed to the vaccine mandates. I sacrificed my career in academic medicine to challenge the University of California's vaccine mandate policy. These vaccines we knew from the very beginning did not stop infection or transmission of the virus. Therefore, whatever risks or benefits of the vaccines there are accrued to the individual who's accepting or declining vaccination. So the whole argument of get vaccinated for the sake of others, even if you're not worried, even if you're not gonna benefit, even if you're at an age bracket that's not high risk for problems with COVID, that argument falls apart. It doesn't apply to these vaccines. And so we have to apply the traditional medical ethics doctrine of informed consent, right? Where there's risk. And we can argue about how risky these vaccines are. Where there's any degree of risk, there must be choice. There must be the ability to voluntarily accept those risks for the sake of potential benefits or to decline them. So on a purely ethical grounds, setting aside issues of safety and efficacy of these vaccines, vaccine mandates are unethical. And the, I mean, why are you paying tuition at a school with a policy like this? Where again, when you're healthy, you have to isolate. Now, look, if you have symptomatic illness of any kind, if you have any respiratory virus and you're really sort of symptomatic and you're coughing and sneezing, you got a fever, yeah, stay home, right? And maybe the campus could find a way to, if you have roommates or another situation that makes it more difficult to isolate, maybe they could facilitate a way to give you a single room for the people who are sick or something like that, fine, fine. But again, let's indiscriminately test people and then anyone who comes back with a positive test, kick them off campus. I mean, this is just insane. This is totally insane. Why would you pay money to go to an institution like this? I just, you know, I just can't, it amazes me that people subject themselves to this kind of treatment and fork over tons of money for the privilege of being treated like that. It's crazy. You were an early dissenter from the tyrannical COVID regime. I mean, you were fired from UC Irvine because of your refusal to comply with the vaccine mandate. Could you tell us your personal story, how you made that decision? I mean, you stuck by your principles at tremendous personal cost. Yeah. So I was the director of the medical ethics program, which means that I did all the ethics consults in the hospital, directed the ethics consult service, I taught the required ethics course to medical students. And I was actually on a committee at the UC office of the president, which oversaw not just my branch campus, UC Irvine, but all the UCs, UCLA, UCSF. And we had a committee with representation from all five of the UC hospitals, bioethicists and critical care doctors. And we vetted basically all of the, and wrote many of the COVID policies up until the vaccine mandate policy, which puzzled me because it was clear to me this was going to be the most ethically controversial of any of the policies that we had developed. And so why hadn't it gone through our committee? It just came down from the top, came down from on high. And there was no discussion or debate about it. I tried to get a conversation going at the office of the president about this policy because I knew it was going to be publicly controversial. And I had serious concerns about it and was just met with radio silence. So I ended up in, I think it was June of 21 publishing an article in the Wall Street Journal with the title, university vaccine mandates are unethical. And as I mentioned before, those were the first institutions mandating vaccines. That's why sort of focused on universities. And I made the case that I just made to you regarding informed consent. And then I passed that around to the committee to try to stir the pot and get some discussion. And again, no discussion, no debate. We're not talking about this. And a week or two later, the proposed policy was finalized. And then once the policy went into effect- So nobody engaged with it? Nobody engaged with that Wall Street Journal article that you wrote? Not at all, not at all. Yeah, which I found, because these were people that we, I was on the phone with the UC general counsel like every night hammering out all these other COVID policies with the ventilator triage policy, the vaccine allocation policy who should get it first when it first rolls out, all that kind of stuff. And then suddenly, nope, this is not under discussion. It was just very bizarre. And then once they instituted it, I started seeing my colleagues getting steamrolled. So I, because I had written the piece in the journal, I was publicly known as an opponent of the policy. I had students and faculty and staff reaching out to me, students saying things like, I'm not a religious person, so I can in good conscience, submit a religious exemption to their credit. They're trying to be ethically scrupulous. But I have conscience-based objections to this vaccines or I have medical concerns about safety and efficacy. And it became virtually impossible to get a medical exemption, even in circumstances where that might've been appropriate in California because the California Medical Board was threatening physicians who wrote any exemptions basically. So it was a really terrible situation. I was seeing students getting kicked out. I was seeing nurses that worked every day during the pandemic and had worked at the University Hospital, alongside me for 15 years, getting fired. And I just got to the point where it was like, okay, I can be an ivory tower intellectual. And I've said my piece, I've made my case. It actually hasn't had an effect or I can actually try to do something to change this policy. And I think that the final decision came down to just trying to project ahead a few months to where I would start teaching the annual ethics course to the med students and just feeling like I couldn't stand up with any credibility and talk about informed consent, talk about moral courage and integrity if I hadn't tried to do something. So I made the fatal decision to challenge that mandate in federal court and the University immediately moved to get rid of me on the pretense of alleged non-compliance with the same policy that I was challenging in federal court. I say alleged because the University also twice denied my medical exemption that was signed by my physician. So that's what happened to me. Did you have the opportunity to appeal that denial of medical exemption? I did and they denied it again on. Wow. So. Thanks for watching that clip from our conversation with Aaron Cariotti about the return of COVID mandates and his book, The New Abnormal. You can watch another clip from that conversation right here or the full conversation over here.