UC-Irvine Suspends Prof Who Filed Lawsuit Over Vaccine Mandate

“campus leaders also took away his ability to earn a living”

Posted by Mike LaChance Friday, October 8, 2021 at 08:00am 3 Comments

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This professor teaches psychiatry, which means he is a medical doctor. What are we doing here?

The College Fix reports:

UC Irvine suspends professor who filed lawsuit against vaccine mandate

UC Irvine has suspended the professor who filed a lawsuit against its COVID vaccine mandate.

Professor of psychiatry Dr. Aaron Kheriaty filed the lawsuit in late August on behalf of himself and other individuals in the UC system who have natural immunity to COVID-19 due to a previous infection of the coronavirus.

But on Oct. 1 the public university not only suspended him, putting him on “investigatory leave” for the next month for refusing to get the vaccine — but campus leaders also took away his ability to earn a living and refused to allow him to contact his patients, Kheriaty said in a written statement he posted on his substack.

“I was given no opportunity to contact my patients, students, residents, or colleagues and let them know I would disappear for a month,” he wrote.

“You might be thinking, a month of paid leave doesn’t sound so bad. But the language is misleading here, since half of my income from the University comes from clinical revenues generated from seeing my patients, supervising resident clinics, and engaging in weekend and holiday on-call duties,” Kheriaty wrote.

“So while on leave my salary is significantly cut. Furthermore, my contract stipulates that I am not able to conduct any patient care outside the University: to see my current patients, or to recoup my losses by moonlighting as a physician elsewhere, would violate the terms of my contract.”

The university may have been emboldened by its recent court victory.

U.S. District Court Judge James Selna ruled late last month that the university system “acted rationally to protect public health by mandating the vaccine and not exempting individuals with some level of immunity from an infection,” Reuters reported.