Kheriaty is a medical doctor and psychiatrist and worked as a professor in the School of Medicine at the University of California Irvine for 15 years before getting fired for his objections to mandatory COVID shots.

He also directs the Bioethics and American Democracy Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and is a senior scholar and fellow of the Brownstone Institute.

"As ethics program director and ethics community chair, I was involved in basically all of the pandemic policy drafting, right up until the vaccine mandate," Kheriaty says.

"Our committee at the Office of the President had done the ventilator triage policy, the vaccine allocation policy. But when it came to the vaccine mandate, it came down from on high and there was no discussion debate. Our committee was not involved in drafting the policy.

I was very concerned about the lack of open discussion and debate. Because of all the sensitive policies that we had developed during the pandemic, this one I thought was going to be the most ethically controversial, problematic and the most publicly fraught.

So, I was puzzled by the fact that we didn't really have a conversation about it. I published a piece in The Wall Street Journal last year, arguing that vaccine mandates are unethical based on the principle of informed consent, which I teach to all the medical students every year.

This is the principle that an adult of sound mind has the right to decide: what medications or interventions to accept or decline, and they have the right to make this decision on behalf of their children who are not yet old enough to give consent.