BY CAROLE H. BROWNER ET AL.

A group of senior professors at the University of California was denied free speech and academic freedom by the administration and its nine student newspapers during the COVID-19 pandemic in furtherance of the university’s abominable policy of silencing all dissent, questioning, and criticisms of its draconian COVID policies. The system’s failure to allow public access to numerous highly credentialed critiques of its scientifically unsubstantiated adoption of public health policies was blatant censorship causing immense mental, emotional, ethical, and physical suffering and harms.

In December 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported a novel type of pneumonia circulating in Wuhan. Just one month later, the WHO named it the “2019 Novel Coronavirus” (SARS CoV-2) and declared it a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC, i.e., a pandemic), the strongest global alert they can issue. This PHEIC quickly led to cataclysmic global economic and social disruption.

The media immediately stoked public fears of the virus’s massive lethality and lack of effective treatment. By March 2020, lockdowns, social distancing, and mandatory masking were haphazardly imposed despite a glaring lack of empirical evidence of their effectiveness, resulting in nationwide confusion, chaos, and anger. Ferocious and vindictive actions were taken against individuals deemed out-of-compliance, including job terminations, arrests, fines, and prison sentences.

In December 2020, the FDA granted Emergency Use Authorization status for mRNA injections dubbed “vaccines.” The long-standing dictionary definition of a vaccine was itself changed to facilitate public acceptance of hastily tested genetic mRNA technology. An intensely unremitting hourly global media campaign urged, cajoled, and coerced universal uptake for all ages, including pregnant women and young children, despite no reports of serious illness or death from COVID-19 in children under 18.

Government agencies and mass media became proxy advertisers/promoters for vaccine manufacturer claims that the shots were ninety-five percent “safe and effective” at protecting oneself and preventing transmission to others. Simultaneously, a media campaign censored and suppressed all questions and concerns about the products, including testing data, safety records, the speed and scale with which shots were deployed, selective reporting of adverse events, and the absence of explicit procedures for informed consent.

The WHO ended the PHEIC declaration on May 5, 2023, after billions worldwide had received one or more COVID shots, as reports of adverse events on both VAERS (the US vaccine adverse events reporting system) and Great Britain’s Yellow Card Vaccine Reporting Site skyrocketed. Likewise, excess deaths among working age populations in the most vaccinated countries rose by as much as forty percent.

On December 15, 2021, University of California president Michael V. Drake (also a director of pharmaceutical giant Amgen) issued a mandate requiring all students, staff, and faculty be fully vaccinated against COVID-19, including boosters, if they wanted to set foot on campus during the 2022–2023 academic year.

We soon thereafter petitioned university administrators to reverse the mandate, or at least provide an exemption option as was the case for all other vaccines. We presented substantial medical and scientific expertise disputing the need to vaccinate the naturally immune who had previously contracted and recovered from COVID-19—and were chagrined not to receive any reply whatsoever. Because the matter was literally one of life or death, we sought to publicize our findings via a guest editorial which, throughout March 2022, we sent to each of California’s major daily newspapers. With no response from any of them, we finally wrote to the university’s nine student-managed newspapers but received expressions of interest only from UCLA’s Daily Bruin and UC Berkeley’s Daily Cal. Ultimately, neither published the editorial.

The information we sought to convey to the public was supported by highly authoritative sources including JAMA Cardiology, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Our editorial would have reached a diverse audience of more than half a million Californians and possibly motived otherwise intimidated and silenced scientific, medical, and academic communities to ask tough questions.

Our editorial made it known that despite the university’s claim that the booster would protect against COVID-19 infection and prevent transmission, a mountain of studies proved otherwise. A major article in Vaccine lamented the lack of “full transparency of the COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial data” and called for a thorough harm-benefit analysis. A long list of serious potentially deadly adverse events had already been acknowledged by the CDC, the FDA, the HHS, the WHO, health ministries and medical researchers around the world, and even by principal manufacturer Pfizer. Prior to this pandemic, vaccine manufacturers sought to develop shots that mimicked natural immunity. Yet in the case of COVID-19 and in complete disregard of basic science and immunology, natural immunity was not recognized despite abundant evidence that recovering from a SARS-CoV-2 infection was equal to if not superior to vaccination. Moreover, multiple data sources showed that young healthy people who contracted SARS-CoV-2 had a recovery rate of 99.995%.

Our editorial also highlighted mounting evidence of serious risks associated with mRNA vaccination, including myocarditis, pericarditis, cardiac arrest, and a higher risk of death in vaccinated individuals. Data from CDC’s VAERS released on July 15, 2022, showed a whopping 1,350,950 reports of adverse events for all age groups, more than 135 times the reporting rate for flu vaccines. It also included 29,635 deaths and 246,676 serious injuries.

We explicitly stated that while we were not against vaccination for those who chose it, we were deeply concerned by the coercive nature of these mandates. We emphasized that never before in medical history had an entire population been required to receive a “vaccine” approved only for emergency use, for which there were no long-term data, and no informed consent which, as a matter of law and ethics, requires that no one be coerced into a medical treatment. We protested that no exceptions were granted even for those who suffered serious adverse events from earlier shots, and that COVID-related deaths appeared around on par with annual deaths from influenza, contrasted with the sharp increase in sudden, unexpected, and unexplained deaths since the since the vaccines’ rollout.

The failure of the UC system and its student publications to allow public access to our editorial’s vitally important information was blatant censorship, cynically mocking free speech, academic freedom, and scientific integrity, let alone human decency. Sadly, it showed that university leadership was far more concerned with maintaining funding from Big Pharma and the government than in the actual health, welfare, and well-being of its own students, faculty, and staff. The academic community should marshal its resolve to better resist the silencing of scientific dissent and critique for future global emergencies.

Full author list and bios below.

Carole H. Browner is a distinguished research professor at UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, the Department of Anthropology, and the Department of Gender Studies. Her research interests lie principally at the intersections of gender politics, reproduction, and health.

Dr. Aditi Bhargava is a molecular neuroendocrinologist with a research focus on sex differences in stress biology and immunology. She is professor emeritus in the Center for Reproductive Sciences and the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology in the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.

László G. Boros is an adjunct professor of pediatrics, endocrinology, and metabolism (retired) at UCLA. His principal investigations involve stable isotope labeled substrate metabolism research with their medical biochemistry-related interpretations. He is also an inventor of deutenomics, the study of heavy hydrogen’s biological distribution and behavior.

Aaron Kheriaty is a scholar and director of the Bioethics and American Democracy Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. For many years he was a professor of psychiatry and director of the Medical Ethics Program at the University of California Irvine School of Medicine. In 2022 he published The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State.

Hugo Loaiciga studies hydrology, especially groundwater hydrology, hydrogeology, water resources systems, and applied mathematics by applying numerical, statistical, and field methods to answer complex problems involving interactions between surface water, groundwater, and human activities. He is a distinguished professor in the Geography Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

William I. Robinson is a distinguished professor of sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He specializes in global political economy and global political sociology. His most recent books include The Global Police State (2020) and Global Civil War: Capitalism Post-Pandemic (2022).

Roberto Strongman is an associate professor in the Department of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Strongman’s interdisciplinary approach encompasses the fields of religion, history, and sexuality to further his main area of research and teaching in comparative Caribbean cultural studies.

Arvind Thomas publishes and teaches in the areas of medieval literature, medieval church law, and Latin rhetoric as an associate professor of English at UCLA. He studies texts written in Middle English, Latin, and German and more recently has also worked in critical animal studies and animal ethics.

Anton Van der Ven is a professor of materials engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Professor Van der Ven’s research seeks to develop first-principles descriptions of non-equilibrium processes in the solid state with a particular goal of goal of generating an understanding of the mechanisms of phase transformations that couple diffusion and structural changes. 

Gabe Vorobiof is a cardiologist and cardiac imager involved in multi-modality imaging technology to evaluate cardiovascular and neurological disorders. He is a former director of non-invasive cardiology laboratories and clinical professor of medicine/cardiology at the UCLA Cardiovascular Center and David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. 

Patrick Whelan is a pediatric rheumatologist who coordinates care at UCLA for children with autoimmune encephalopathy and other neuroimmune disorders. Professor Whelan also lectures in virology at USC and teaches a Harvard undergraduate psychology course on the evolutionary origins of musicality and the role of auditory processing in health and disease. He is an associate professor of pediatrics at UCLA, adjunct faculty in molecular microbiology and immunology at USC, and a lecturer in pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.