Review: The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State
Senator Rand Paul mentions Aaron Kheriaty’s The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical State in his book Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up. Dr. Kheriaty’s online biography includes the following information:
Dr. Kheriaty is a plaintiff in the landmark free speech case Missouri v. Biden challenging government censorship on social media. . .. Dr. Kheriaty also serves in teaching and advisory roles at the Brownstone Institute, the Zephyr Institute, the Paul Ramsey Institute, and the Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy.
For many years he was Professor of Psychiatry at UCI [University of California—Irvine] School of Medicine and Director of the Medical Ethics Program at UCI Health, where he chaired the ethics committee. He also chaired the ethics committee at the California Department of State Hospitals for several years. He was fired from the University of California after challenging the University’s covid vaccine mandate in federal court.
The New Abnormal’s Prologue
Dr. Kheriaty’s prologue is titled “Nuremberg, 1947.” It is the right place to begin in understanding the COVID-19 control program. Following the more famous 1946 trial of the top Nazis, the trial of Nazi doctors led to prison sentences for nine and death sentences for seven defendants. As part of the opinion of the tribunal, the Nuremberg Code was published, which contained ten items that established the criteria for conducting ethical human experimentation.
Dr. Kheriaty’s prologue only explores the first item of the Code, but it is the foundation, addressing informed, noncoerced consent. Those interested in reading an analysis of all ten items of the Code are directed to Dr. Nicholas Bednarski’s series Violations of Nuremberg Code in COVID-19 Control Program. Dr. Bednarski concludes that all ten items of the Nuremberg Code have been violated.
The New Abnormal’s prologue identifies the connection between the work of the Nazi doctors and the eugenics movement, which is disturbing for Americans initiated in the United States. The New Abnormal reveals, “Eugenics programs received funding from major foundations, including those of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, and Kellogg. Intellectuals at Stanford, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton endorsed the movement’s aims and participated enthusiastically.”
Pursuit of eugenics was not restricted to the private sector but extended to state governments and the federal government:
In the 1920s an impoverished young woman from Virginia, Carrie Buck, was diagnosed with “congenital feeblemindedness” and slated for forced sterilization. She challenged the state of Virginia’s law in federal court, and her case, Buck v. Bell, went to the Supreme Court in 1927. The court upheld the state’s eugenic sterilization law, resulting in Carrie’s forced tubal ligation.
The New Abnormal continues, “Hitler himself remarked, ‘I have studied with interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would . . . be of no value, or injurious to the racial stock.’”
The New Abnormal’s prologue concludes, “While the Nuremberg Code did not enjoy the binding force of international law, its principles did inform the laws of most nations, including the United States. The principle of free and informed consent was further developed in the influential World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki in 1964.”
Subsequent Chapters
The New Abnormal focuses on the role of declared emergencies in establishing invasive government policies that destroy our personal freedoms:
[Government policy] . . . from lockdowns and school closures to mask and vaccine mandates or passports—received its supposed legal justification from the declared state of emergency. But tellingly, the threshold for what constitutes a public health emergency—how many cases, hospitalizations, deaths, et cetera—was deliberately never defined.
Who has this power?
At the federal level, with the backing of the president, that person is now Xavier Becerra, the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which oversees the NIH, the FDA, and the CDC, among other divisions. Becerra, a lawyer and former attorney general of California, has no medical training and zero public health experience.
How extensive are these powers? Dr. Kheriaty reveals that in a state of emergency the president gains access to an additional 136 statutory powers. He summarizes the implications of this concentration of power:
The full significance of what transpired in March 2020 may have escaped our attention. Without realizing it we lived through the design and implementation of not just a novel pandemic strategy but a new political paradigm—a system far more effective at controlling the population than anything previously attempted by Western nations. Under the biosecurity model, “the total cessation of every form of political activity and social relationship [under lockdowns and social distancing became] the ultimate act of civic participation.” Neither the pre-war Fascist government in Italy nor the Communist states of the Soviet Union ever dreamed of implementing such restrictions.
We have encountered new terminology that was not medical according to Dr. Kheriaty:
It is instructive to reflect on the chosen phrase, “social distancing,” which is not a medical term but a political one. A medical or scientific model would have deployed a phrase like physical or personal distancing, but not social distancing. The term suggests not a new model for health but for organizing society, one that limits human interactions by six feet of space and by masks that cover the face—our locus of interpersonal connection and communication.
According to Dr. Kheriaty, “To see where this biomedical security state will lead, many point to the Chinese social credit system—and this is a useful shorthand for the dystopian future this regime portends.”
He continues, “University biomedical security systems were also sustained by a near constant stream of propaganda generated by administrators, with catchphrases that would make even bureaucrats at Orwell’s Ministry of Truth cringe. For example, administrators constantly admonished students, faculty and staff to ‘hold one another accountable.’”
That is Orwellian, of course, but it is a good description of how people were encouraged to betray each other to the gestapo and the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Neither of these infamous security organizations had access to the digital technology that is so pervasive today. How was this used to surveil citizens during the COVID-19 control program?
“In May of 2022, Vice broke the story that during the previous two years the ‘CDC tracked millions of phones to see if Americans followed COVID lockdown orders.’ . . . What descended on us was not just a novel virus but a novel method of social organization and control.”
Dr. Kheriaty identifies two influences on his thinking—Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. Although it would be imprudent to do so, one might dismiss Brave New World as fantasy. But Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago describes a seventy-four-year experiment in real social organization and control in the Soviet Union. Dr. Kheriaty makes a compelling case that we in the United States are on the road to a similar kind of tyranny.
Dr. Kheriaty’s The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State should be read if it is the only book on the COVID-19 control program one reads. But for a broader view, begin with Dr. Bednarski’s series Violations of Nuremberg Code in COVID-19 Control Program, and then read Senator Rand Paul’s Deception: The Great Covid Cover-Up. The COVID-19 control program is a many-tentacled monster. It is easy to surrender to information overload.
Dr. Bednarski’s series describes an internationally recognized set of ten criteria for human experimentation by which COVID-19 control measures might be measured. He concludes that all ten were violated in the COVID-19 control program. Senator Paul explores the source of the COVID-19 organism and the efforts made within government, in particular, to cover up the facts through propaganda. But if there is any belief that the COVID-19 control program was a one-time phenomenon, Dr. Kheriaty dispels that delusion. That is a perspective we need in order to fully understand the implications of the COVID-19 control program.
