“The government’s excessive COVID response did not begin with the 2020 pandemic,” wrote Catholic psychiatrist Aaron Kheriaty, M.D. in a recent review of a book about the War on Terror.
The book’s vivid description of the destructive effects of the War on Terror should “appall both liberals and conservatives who care about living in a free society,” according to Kheriaty, who went on to draw a strong connection between that earlier attack on freedom and the government’s later COVID policies.
Kheriaty’s review of Richard Beck’s “Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life” appeared in the Spring 2025 issue of The Claremont Review of Books and was followed up in an episode of Claremont’s podcast “A Close Read.”
Kheriaty, a scholar with the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, acknowledges that Beck’s leftist ideology – revealed, in one example, in his praise for the radical Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street – might discourage conservative readers. But the book, he says, “nevertheless usefully chronicles our misadventures in fighting terrorism at home and abroad.”
The psychiatrist particularly pointed to Beck’s “shocking chapter on the rise of mass domestic surveillance, facilitated by ‘public-private partnerships’ between government and Big Tech (i.e., corporatism)” – issues in the news today as Congress finally addresses what occurred during the pandemic.
But “[b]eyond the familiar themes of mass surveillance, trampling of civil liberties, endless foreign wars, and other standard critiques of the War on Terror, Beck also explores lesser-known effects on our civic culture,” Kheriaty describes. “He chronicles how, for example, we have destroyed many urban public spaces by closing them off to pedestrians and effectively militarizing them. This has done nothing to make people safer, or even to make them feel safer.”
While the suppression of voices opposed to the Biden administration’s views and pandemic mandates – including those of Catholics and public school parents – is well-documented at this point, Kheriaty specifically revisited the Biden Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) move in February 2022 to condemn “those spreading ‘misinformation’ about the pandemic.”
These individuals were warned such actions would be considered as “undermining ‘public trust in the U.S. government institutions’ and could be considered a ‘domestic threat actor’ or a ‘primary terrorism-related threat,’” Kheriaty explained.
“How did government vigilance against lethal attacks like 9/11 culminate in the claim that critics of public health measures were terrorists?” poses Kheriaty, “The bulletin ignored the possibility that one reason trust in our governing institutions had been undermined was not denunciations of our pandemic policies but the policies themselves, along with the government’s manipulative public messaging about them.”
“For DHS—a federal department that did not exist 20 years ago but today has a $103 billion budget—the real problem was anyone so rude as to call attention to such failings,” he observes.
Beck, Kheriaty explained, is highly critical of both the Bush and Obama administrations’ War on Terror policies, detailing “the massive, wasted resources spent on useless high-tech equipment to protect soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, which failed to save lives, recalling similar wasteful spending on ineffective pandemic measures—from cloth masks to school closures to mRNA vaccines for children—that likewise did more harm than good, squandering trust in the government’s ability to ‘keep us safe.’”
During his podcast interview with Claremont’s Spencer Klavan, Kheriaty highlights further that the “war on viruses actually started about 10 years before COVID … and I think there are a lot of significant parallels between the War on Terror and the war against invisible viruses, or what I call the rise of the biomedical security state.”
Kheriaty asserts the “biomedical security state” refers to three elements, the first being an “increasingly militarized public health response,” with mandatory lockdowns, school closures, and isolation.
“COVID was the first time in human history that we isolated non-symptomatic people,” he noted, adding that “even just setting aside the financial strain of society-wide lockdowns, just looking at the health- related effects, we should have rejected lockdowns and prolonged school closures and other things that were done during COVID.”
“But COVID,” he continued, “became an occasion to test out some of these novel technologies and see to what extent could entire populations across the globe be controlled, supposedly for the purposes of our health and safety – an increasingly militarized public health response.”
“And interestingly,” Kheriaty continued, “our public health response was not run by the Department of Health and Human Services, where our public health agencies like the CDC, NIH and FDA are housed.”
“The government agency that was quarterbacking our pandemic response was not HHS, it was the Department of Defense, and the vaccines were commissioned and funded as quote, unquote, countermeasures,” he noted.
“This is not a public health term,” he pointed out. “This is a term derived from military and intelligence services,” adding the example of “Operation Warp Speed.”
The second element of the “biomedical security state,” is “digital technologies of surveillance and control,” Kheriaty explained, noting “things like digital vaccine passports and the VAX pass in Europe to travel from one EU country to the next.”
“If you told people in 2018 that in a year or two, you guys are going to have to show a QR code in order to get on a plane, get on a train, and get back into your own country of origin,” he said, one would have been labeled a “conspiracy theorist.”
The third prong of the “biomedical security state,” according to Kheriaty, is “the police powers of the state.”
“This pandemic response didn’t sort of grow up out of nowhere, you know, starting at the beginning of January of 2020 … there was a kind of convergence of interest between many of the things that were deployed during the War on Terror and then many of the things that were deployed during the war on this virus that have interesting parallels,” he observed.
“And I think what should be of concern to all Americans, you know, the idea that under a state of emergency we can do things that otherwise would not be permitted under the Constitution, I think, is a really dangerous precedent,” he warned. “Even though many of the particular policies that were employed during the pandemic have been rolled back, the underlying legal mechanisms that allow them to happen are still in place.”
Dr. Aaron Kheriaty is the author of “The New Abnormal: The Rise of the Biomedical Security State,” the soon-to-be released “Making the Cut: How to Heal Modern Medicine,” and his column “Human Flourishing.”
