Ask Dr. Drew
Censored Doctors: Race Hoax Exposes Dark Side Of Mandated Speech In Medicine w/ Dr. Azadeh Khatibi – Ask Dr. Drew – Ep 471
Thu, 03 Apr 2025
Censoring doctors leads to mandated speech, racism hoaxes, and death. Dr. Azadeh Khatibi has had enough of California’s silencing. So she sued the state and its Medical Board, and was a driving force behind the repeal of CA’s “medical misinformation” AB2098 law. But the fight isn’t over. Now she’s taking on AB241, yet another CA law mandating speech in continuing medical education. “Why does California keep passing laws that mandate and censor doctors? California is not home of the free,” writes Dr. Khatibi. Dr. Azadeh Khatibi is a board-certified ophthalmologist, filmmaker, and activist. She hosts the Within podcast and has testified before Congress on physician autonomy. She completed her MD and MPH at UCSF and UC Berkeley, and led lawsuits challenging California laws restricting medical speech. Her film credits include Window Horses and Sinjar. More at https://x.com/AzadehKhatibiMD and https://substack.com/@azadehkhatibi 「 SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS 」 Find out more about the brands that make this show possible and get special discounts on Dr. Drew's favorite products at https://drdrew.com/sponsors • ACTIVE SKIN REPAIR - Repair skin faster with more of the molecule your body creates naturally! Hypochlorous (HOCl) is produced by white blood cells to support healing – and no sting. Get 20% off at https://drdrew.com/skinrepair • FATTY15 – The future of essential fatty acids is here! Strengthen your cells against age-related breakdown with Fatty15. Get 15% off a 90-day Starter Kit Subscription at https://drdrew.com/fatty15 • PALEOVALLEY - "Paleovalley has a wide variety of extraordinary products that are both healthful and delicious,” says Dr. Drew. "I am a huge fan of this brand and know you'll love it too!” Get 15% off your first order at https://drdrew.com/paleovalley • THE WELLNESS COMPANY - Counteract harmful spike proteins with TWC's Signature Series Spike Support Formula containing nattokinase and selenium. Learn more about TWC's supplements at https://twc.health/drew 「 MEDICAL NOTE 」 Portions of this program may examine countervailing views on important medical issues. Always consult your physician before making any decisions about your health. 「 ABOUT THE SHOW 」 Ask Dr. Drew is produced by Kaleb Nation (https://kalebnation.com) and Susan Pinsky (https://twitter.com/firstladyoflove). This show is for entertainment and/or informational purposes only, and is not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Who is Dr. Azadeh Khatibi and what is her background?
Very pleased to welcome today Zadeh Khatibi, I think I got that right. She's gonna hold my hand to the fire on that one. She amongst other things has an MPH, she's an MD, she's an ophthalmologist, she's a performer as well. And she has been fighting against physician censorship and fighting for medical freedom and physician autonomy.
I saw some of her videos on, I think it was on X and I thought I need to speak to my peer here. This is somebody who is doing God's work. And she's a lot younger than I am. So I'm very interested in her perspective on how this has affected her career and her peers career. And we will get right to it after this. Our laws as it pertain to substances are draconian and bizarre. Psychopaths start this.
He was an alcoholic because of social media and pornography, PTSD, love addiction, fentanyl and heroin. Ridiculous. I'm a doctor for, where the hell do you think I learned that? I'm just saying, you go to treatment before you kill people. I am a clinician. I observe things about these chemicals. Let's just deal with what's real. We used to get these calls on Loveline all the time.
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So in addition to being a physician, Dr. Khatibi is a filmmaker and an actress. She actually acted and helped produce a feature called Window Horses with Sandra Oh, a shortlist for Academy Award nomination. She's done a lot of work, but she's an ophthalmologist. She's a physician from UCSF, which those of you who don't know is one of the top medical schools in the country.
She has a master's in public health, which fascinates me because the public health world seems to have lost its mind. And so we should be able to get a good perspective from her. And most recently, she's become an advocate, vocal advocate for medical freedom. She particularly
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Chapter 2: Why did Dr. Khatibi pursue a Master’s in Public Health (MPH)?
But so let's get down to business here. So what happened here? What happened to you? First of all, I want to get kind of a setup here because one of the things I noticed that was confusing to me was how many young physicians were getting MPHs. And I couldn't understand why they were doing that. It made no sense to me.
And then now we find ourselves in the middle of COVID where public health goes sideways. So why did you get an MPH? And then what do you think about your public health peers and their behavior during COVID?
Well, I mean, I got an MPH because I went to medical school and I realized, oh, I'm learning about individual health, but I really want to learn about, you know, just always been a very curious, knowledge-seeking person. So I said, okay, well, I want to learn about health from a public perspective. How do we actually shift change instead of dealing with a heart attack here?
How do we prevent heart attacks on a population scale? So that was interesting to me. I was also in a five-year program that only accepted 12 people a year at that point, the joint medical program between UC Berkeley, UCSF. And so I was like, okay, I'm here for five years. Might as well learn more. And so I got my MPH. I was also getting a master's at that time too.
So I got three degrees and had a baby in like six years. It was a lot.
Oh, my God, that is a lot.
I did it, and I'm so grateful now because of having that background of all those degrees really helped me analyze things, I think, in a way that maybe some of my peers didn't. As for why people are getting multiple degrees now, I kind of...
Part of me wishes for the good old Donna Reed days where you just got your MD and then you establish yourself in your practice and you became part of the community and you saw patients. But I think now people get their JDs, people get their MBAs. A lot of physicians get their MBAs because they saw the corporatization of medicine.
They wanted to understand it better and take leadership in those roles. For me, the MPH seemed like a natural thing to do. It's an intuitive thing. And I love knowledge, so it just made sense. And it was convenient to get to.
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Chapter 3: How did public health practices fail during COVID-19?
Because I don't agree with them on other stuff, so the conservatives are against me, and so I must, since I don't like conservative media, I must be on the right path. And there's also something I think deeper, too, in terms of reactivity. One of the things I've really worked on
on myself is like, in my mindfulness practice especially, is to reduce the reactivity and instead have a responsiveness and an open-mindedness about things, which I generally tend to be an open person.
But like, I remember, you know, when I was listening to you on K-Rock all those years ago, I thought all doctors, you know, I looked up to you because I thought, oh, all doctors are like, are open and they're open-minded and they're humble and they're wise and they're... You know, and the open-mindedness and, like, being able to say you're wrong.
But then I went to med school and realized a lot of people aren't like that, even in the medical field. So the risk-benefit analysis that you talk about, just to bring it back to the public health thing that you talked about, I was—
So frustrated and then flabbergasted and then just completely overwhelmed by the fact that the people in public health were not looking at following the basic public health principles that I've been taught in public health school. Basic stuff. That's right. What is going on with the people? What do the people want? You don't just push an intervention on people.
And this was a public health ethics thing that we learned in medical school, an issue of coming in and just pushing what you think is best on the populace is not the right thing to do. You have to understand their... their understanding, their culture, their desires, and incorporate that into a positive public health plan. That's number one. And then ethics, right?
It's not just a Machiavellian ends justify the means, right? That's like the opposite of what we learned in public health school. The means through which you achieve your end is very important. It has to be ethical. It has to... take into account what's going on on the ground and what the people's desires are and what their cultural understandings are. And so that wasn't being considered at all.
And the mandates with the vaccinations that came, there was no public health uproar about, hey, what about the Geneva Convention? How about all these Documents that we have that in times of emergencies, right? When things are like chill and no problem and there's no pandemic, although we can discuss the definition of pandemic and how that changed over time and how that was used incorrectly.
But if there's an emergency going on, that's the time when these documents, these ethics and medical ethics documents and agreements that you guys have throughout the years and decades of experience, especially people in World War II who saw the horrors, of what happened, especially us in California, which were the leaders, the leaders of the eugenics movement that fed the Holocaust.
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Chapter 4: What is the problem with mandated speech and censorship laws for doctors in California?
Fifth vital sign. Fifth vital sign. Don't even go there. So everybody had
to make everybody's pain zero or else, you know, if you didn't make their pain zero, it became bad. So then everybody was getting over-medicated. Now with these surveys, you want to get a good survey result. So you're just going to appease the patient. And that's just, it's just terrible. It doesn't make sense. Yeah, that's right.
All right, so before we go to break, give us a sketch on how you got involved in the California circumstance. And you started really speaking up for medical freedom. What was the evolution there? And then we'll get into the weeds of it. People are criticizing how are you going to get into the weeds. We're going to get into the thicket of it after the break.
But tell us, sketch it for us what happened.
I was initially super overwhelmed, in shock, couldn't believe it. And I started following the public health training and medical training I got. And I was like, what I'm hearing on the news, and it really COVID woke me up to how much the news was teaching me things that, or was trying to tell me things and indoctrinating me in things that were not reality.
And as I awoke, I decided to work on myself, strengthen myself, and then I started speaking out. California made these terrible laws, one after another, or bills. And then I started advocating, and As I grew more strong in my voice, as I grew more strong in my confidence and took steps, I started speaking out more and more and got involved in fighting some of these censorship laws against doctors.
And they keep writing them, so we have to keep fighting them.
So which one was the first one up?
So the one I'm currently fighting right now was actually written before the first one up. But the first one up was AB 2098, which was a law that was authored by members of the vaccine working group, especially Evan Lowe was the bill's primary author. And so these people kind of wrote a slew of bills during the COVID times in California as a reaction, right? Not thinking, as a reactionary.
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Chapter 5: What was California law AB 2098 and why was it challenged?
Children's Health Defense Fund was one of them. We had individual doctors. I was also suing in the capacity of a patient because I, you know, as a patient, I also said I want to be able to hear my doctor's speech because the First Amendment not only affects the speaker, the First Amendment is also supposed to protect the rights of the listener to hear that speech.
So if the government is interfering with the First Amendment rights of the doctor, then the patient's First Amendment rights to hear that speech are also being interfered with. So I sued in both capacities as a doctor and a physician. And there were several other doctors. There was... Another legal nonprofit that was also fighting.
So it's nice to have different groups fighting the same law, because it gives you more opportunity for the nuance in the discussion, the arguments to get better as well. And so we got a preliminary injunction when we were fighting the physician consensus law, and that's very rare to get. And our judge had come and He was like, what? This law doesn't make grammatical sense.
This law doesn't make it clear on what a doctor can say and what they can't say. Who's deciding what they can say and what they can't say? And he was asking these questions. of the state's lawyer. By the way, the state's lawyer is the same lawyer in this current case. So at both lawsuits, the state's lawyer is the same person. And so she really couldn't answer some of these questions.
She did her best in that first case. And she, I mean, he just pointed out how ridiculous the state's arguments were. He's called the law nonsense. And when he said that, I felt so much better. It's like finally someone can see how nonsense is. Gavin Newsom didn't see the nonsense. Rob Bunta, the Attorney General, didn't see the nonsense.
All those Democrats who voted for this bill didn't see the nonsense, didn't see the gross ethical First Amendment rights violations in it. But he gave us the preliminary injunction, which meant that they couldn't come after us if we broke the law. And then he decided to hold off on ruling. And in the meantime, one of the other groups of doctors that had lost went to the appellate level.
And in the appellate level, the three-judge panel was really cooking the— state attorney basically giving her lots of questions, like this doesn't make sense, and really questioning her. So it looked like they were gonna lose at the appellate level. And what happened, this is the back insider story, is that one of my friends had Gavin Newsom come up to him.
And what he did is he said, and this is actually after the fact, what ended up happening is they repealed the law very quietly. And Gavin Newsom went up to my friend and he said it was my idea to repeal the law. and he took credit for it. And I think what ended up happening is that he saw how grossly unethical and a violation of free speech this was, and he wanted to look good.
So he saw that it was gonna make him and the state look bad. And so he got the Democrats to push for the repeal.
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Chapter 6: How did the lawsuit against AB 2098 unfold and what was its outcome?
Chapter 7: What are Dr. Khatibi’s views on pharmaceutical interventions and medical risk?
And about like the importance of diet and exercise and sleep. This could have been- Fresh air. This could have been fresh air, sunshine, like the basic doctoring things that now we're realizing the reasons they said fresh air and sunshine is like an important thing. Why aren't they talking about this stuff?
Cuz they were so myopically focused and that lack of open mindedness, that myopic focus prevents you from seeing everything else. And this dependence also on medical intervention in the form of a pharmaceutical as opposed to all the other things that actually create a human thriving. It was hugely to our detriment. And it really was sad the way it played out.
I'm really happy that there were some doctors who stood up. I think there were a lot who were just scared and didn't stand up. You know, after I started speaking out, my friends, you know, who come from many different parts of the political spectrum who are doctors were like, oh, I really admire you. It's so great that you're speaking up, but I can't speak up because I'm hired by this organization.
Even the private practice ones were scared. Oh, don't say anything. You know, one of them told another friend of mine at a dinner party, he said, don't ever sign an exemption. It's just like saving your skin as opposed to actually following the ethics of what a doctor should do.
Yeah, and then they went into full psyop mode. Guys like Aaron Cariotti lost their job. The people reminding those, literally the medical ethicist who was reminding his institution of exactly what you're talking about, their response was to fire him. Genius, I'm telling you, genius. But embedded in what you were just saying was a really... You were tilting at something very interesting.
And we're going to get to the California law stuff. We got a lot to talk about. But there's two things that you said that was of a sort of a tone or a sort of a theme in what you just mentioned. And I want to pull them forward. One was that... Life is going to be better with a pharmaceutical agent. You called it a medical intervention. Well, let's just call it a medical intervention.
It can only make the hang up. But yeah, drugs. I was raised by an old family practitioner who told me meds are dangerous, dangerous, dangerous. Only when it's worth the risk do you think about it. And I didn't take an antibiotic until I was 15. My dad was a doctor. And so you just, medicines are dangerous in all situations, unless it's worth the risk.
If that's not taking it is more dangerous than you take it. But this was not the case for a 19 year old male or a 24 year old male. The vaccines were more dangerous. And the illness was not dangerous, so not worth it. So the issue A is, one, everything's going to be solved by medical intervention.
Let's use your terminology because as soon as you say pharmaceutical, it gets sort of front-loaded as pharma. But let's just say medical intervention, number one. Number two, on the back of that is some weird notion that human thriving is bad. predicated on safety. Safety, safe, safe, got to be safe, safe. Can't go to the Palisades, so it's safe.
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Chapter 8: What challenges do physicians face regarding free speech and medical ethics today?
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We were talking about Governor Newsom. We were talking about the Attorney General. Yeah. And neither of them seem to understand the concept of free speech or evidently not even the Bill of Rights, which is odd. That used to be, as someone who I thought I was a liberal, I thought that was one of my
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