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Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on

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Speaker 1: iHeartRadio and welcome back to Coast to Coast George Norri

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Speaker 1: with you. Let me introduce our guest, Aaron Karriati, doctor

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Speaker 1: as a psychiatrist and the director of the Program in

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Speaker 1: bio Ethics and American Democracy at the Ethics and Public

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Speaker 1: Policy Center in Washington, d C. And also the director

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Speaker 1: of the Health and Human Flourishing Program at the Zephyr

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Speaker 1: Institute in Palo Alto, California. He taught psychiatry previously at

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Speaker 1: the UCI School of Medicine, where he was the director

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Speaker 1: of the Medical Ethics Program at UCI Health and the

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Speaker 1: chairperson of the Ethics Committee of the California Department of

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Speaker 1: State Hospitals. Doctor Karyati's work has appeared in The Wall

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Speaker 1: Street Journal, The Washington Post, New Atlantis, Archdigital Public Discourse,

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Speaker 1: City Journal, and First Things. His book is called The

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Speaker 1: New Abnormal, and I gotta tell you, Aaron, it is

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Speaker 1: one scary book, my friend. Thanks for joining us. Thanks

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Speaker 1: or it's good to be with you tonight. Give us

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Speaker 1: the definition biomedical security. So the biomedical security state, which

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Speaker 1: I describe in the book, one way to think about

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Speaker 1: it is it's kind of the unholy welding of three

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Speaker 1: different things. First of all, a public health it's become militarized,

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Speaker 1: and I can talk a little bit more about what

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Speaker 1: I mean by that militarized public health. And then the

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Speaker 1: second element is digital technologies of surveillance and control, and

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Speaker 1: the third element is the police powers of the state.

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Speaker 1: So one kind of concrete example of this that people

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Speaker 1: will be familiar with is the vaccine passports that were

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Speaker 1: rolled out during COVID. Right, this practice of having to

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Speaker 1: show a QR code on your phone to get on

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Speaker 1: a train, get on a plane, go to a restaurant,

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Speaker 1: go to a public event, get back into your own

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Speaker 1: home country of origin. And what this QR code demonstrated

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Speaker 1: is that you had on what the public health authorities

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Speaker 1: had mandated you to do. So, if we think back

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Speaker 1: to prior to the pandemic, prior to all the fear

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Speaker 1: that it created, if you would have told someone in

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Speaker 1: let's say twenty eighteen, that you would have to do

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Speaker 1: this in order to just participate in public life in

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Speaker 1: the United States, they would have thought that you were crazy,

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Speaker 1: you know, especially if the thing that you were being

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Speaker 1: required to do involved injecting a novel pharmaceutical, the first

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Speaker 1: of its kind, into your body. I mean, a real

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Speaker 1: invasion on your medical privacy, a total bypassing of the

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Speaker 1: informed consent process. And what I try to show in

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Speaker 1: the book is that COVID was actually only the beginning

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Speaker 1: of these kinds of trends. Right, So for many of us,

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Speaker 1: we like to think of the pandemic is being mostly

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Speaker 1: behind this, right, A lot of these policies, whether it's

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Speaker 1: society wide lockdowns or school closures, or vaccine mandates or

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Speaker 1: vaccine passports, a lot of these have been rolled back

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Speaker 1: in recent months, which is a good thing. And so people,

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Speaker 1: I think mistakenly believe that we can put all of

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Speaker 1: this in the rear view mirror. But what I show

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Speaker 1: in the book is that the infrastructure that was put

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Speaker 1: in place during the pandemic is still in place and

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Speaker 1: ready to be used for the next declared public health

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Speaker 1: emergency or the next declared crisis. And in fact, the

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Speaker 1: ruling powers right now are very motivated to find the

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Speaker 1: next declared public health emergency or the next declared crisis.

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Speaker 1: We've seen efforts already to characterize new viruses like the

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Speaker 1: monkey pocks as though they were to all of society

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Speaker 1: rather than just to a risk to a very specific

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Speaker 1: population of people engaged in very specific kinds of behaviors.

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Speaker 1: So these things that we saw and that manifested over

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Speaker 1: the last three years are not going to go away.

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Speaker 1: There's going to be another public health to crisis declared

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Speaker 1: very soon. You know, there's been an effort in the

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Speaker 1: last couple of years, for example, to reframe climate change

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Speaker 1: from an environmental issue to a public health issue, and

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Speaker 1: the next step will be an attempt to declare climate

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Speaker 1: change as a public health crisis so that more extreme

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Speaker 1: measures and more extreme authoritarian controls over people's movements, over

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Speaker 1: people's behaviors can be initiated in order to deal with

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Speaker 1: the climate crisis. And you know, regardless of what you

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Speaker 1: think about climate change or climate policy, where you stand

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Speaker 1: on that issue, the idea that a declared state of

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Speaker 1: emergency requiring things like rolling lockdowns to deal with climate change,

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Speaker 1: I think that's a proposal that should be of concern

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Speaker 1: to anyone who cares about human flourishing, to anyone who

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Speaker 1: cares about basic freedoms and constitutional rights. You just heard

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Speaker 1: the story of the lockdown in Huhan eight hundred thousand people.

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Speaker 1: Would you say at this point erin that China is

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Speaker 1: the worst defender of the biomedical security states without a doubt.

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Speaker 1: I mean, the lockdowns that we've seen in Shanghai are

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Speaker 1: nothing short of horrifying for anyone who's familiar with the

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Speaker 1: details of what the state has done in that region.

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Speaker 1: And it's very clear that the biomedical security state as

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Speaker 1: it operates in China is a way of the Chinese

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Speaker 1: Communist Party exercise using unprecedented levels of control over the

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Speaker 1: movements of its citizens, over mechanisms to gather data on

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Speaker 1: its citizens financial transactions, on its citizens behavior. And so

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Speaker 1: that that's a very extreme example of where all of

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Speaker 1: this can take us. And I think, George, there's a

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Speaker 1: there's a tendency on the part of Americans to think that, well,

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Speaker 1: whatever's going on in China, that's China. That is, you know,

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Speaker 1: that's something that's happening in a far more repressive authoritarian

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Speaker 1: regime than what we have here. So while we can

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Speaker 1: sympathize with the folks that are suffering under that regime

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Speaker 1: or suffering the extreme lockdown measures that are happening there,

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Speaker 1: we don't have to worry about that here, you know,

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Speaker 1: because we're still living in a free and open society.

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Speaker 1: But I think it's important for us to realize that

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Speaker 1: many of our pandemic policies, starting with the lockdowns and

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Speaker 1: school closures, took their queue from the Chinese Communist Party,

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Speaker 1: and in fact, what can only be characterized as propaganda

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Speaker 1: that was put out by the Chinese Communist Party in

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Speaker 1: the earliest days of the pandemic. So people may forget,

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Speaker 1: but lockdowns originated in Wuhan. The first lockdown was done

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Speaker 1: where the virus originated, and the Chinese Communist Party announced

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Speaker 1: to the world that it had stamped out the virus

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Speaker 1: by engaging in these extreme measures that had never been

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Speaker 1: done before. Now that turned out to be propaganda that

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Speaker 1: turned out not to be true. If that was true,

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Speaker 1: we wouldn't still be seeing a couple of years later

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Speaker 1: these extreme lockdowns in China is still trying to stamp

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Speaker 1: out the virus, which is an impossible proposal, but the

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Speaker 1: rest of the world actually believed the Chinese Communist Party.

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Speaker 1: The World Health Organization leadership promulgated this idea. The public

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Speaker 1: health officials starting in Italy, some of whom had connections

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Speaker 1: to the Chinese Communist Party initiated lockdowns then in Italy

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Speaker 1: that was the first Western nation to institute lockdowns. The

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Speaker 1: United States followed suit. In February of twenty twenty, doctors

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Speaker 1: Faucian Burkes, who were working for the White House Coronavirus

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Speaker 1: Task Force, basically decided that lockdowns were the way to go.

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Speaker 1: It was announced in late February and the New York

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Speaker 1: Times that civil rights would have to be suspended in

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Speaker 1: order for us to manage the coronavirus that was headed

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Speaker 1: our way. And in March we locked down, and shortly thereafter,

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Speaker 1: the entire rest of the world more or less most

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Speaker 1: countries across the globe locked down, uh, you know, in

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Speaker 1: response to what the United States had decided to do.

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Speaker 1: But all of us ultimately took our cues from China,

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Speaker 1: which is a very very concerning fact that that shaped

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Speaker 1: the entire response to the pandemic around the world. By

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Speaker 1: coming out the way you have, have you opened yourself

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Speaker 1: up to any scrutiny from any agencies? Oh, I certainly imagined.

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Speaker 1: So you know, I believe that I have probably been

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Speaker 1: on the nsas read our screen really since the Trucker's

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Speaker 1: convoy that occurred earlier in uh, you know, in the

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Speaker 1: early months of this year. So folks may remember the

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Speaker 1: convoy that occurred in Canada where miles and miles or

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Speaker 1: I guess kilometers and kilometers up there of trunk drivers

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Speaker 1: made their way to Ottawa and parked their trucks in

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Speaker 1: the city for an extended stay. This is a really

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Speaker 1: sort of novel and new form of grassroots advocacy and

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Speaker 1: a grassroots movement where people were pushing back against authoritarian

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Speaker 1: and repressive COVID measures, particularly the vaccine passport system at

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Speaker 1: the US Canada border that Justin Trudeau's government had initiated.

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Speaker 1: While in the wake of that, the truckers in the

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Speaker 1: United States wanted to start a similar convoy. In fact,

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Speaker 1: I was on zoom calls with the leadership of the

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Speaker 1: People's Convoy in the United States helping to organize the

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Speaker 1: convoy that started in California and my home state and

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Speaker 1: made its way all the way to Washington, DC, where

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Speaker 1: they circled the Beltway around the nation's capital for several

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Speaker 1: days and very interestingly, only a day or two after

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Speaker 1: that zoom call where we were organizing the American Trucker's Convoy,

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Speaker 1: the Department of Homeland Security issued a bulletin, and the

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Speaker 1: bulletin was basically an announcement about what they called domestic

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Speaker 1: threat actors. And these domestic threat actors were not domestic

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Speaker 1: terrorists that were threatening to blow up a building or

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Speaker 1: instigate a mass shooting in a public area. No, these

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Speaker 1: were people that were publicly criticizing the nation's response the

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Speaker 1: nation's pandemic response to COVID. So people that were peacefully

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Speaker 1: protesting lockdowns were advocating online or in the media for

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Speaker 1: policies that contradicted the preferred policies of our federal government

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Speaker 1: were characterized by the Department of Homeland Security literally in

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Speaker 1: this bulletin as domestic terrorists or domestic threats. That bulletin

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Speaker 1: and the timing of that bulletin coinciding with the organization

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Speaker 1: of the trucker's convoy, I think was not an accident.

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