UCSF Fired Me for My Protected Speech

I am fighting back for our Collective Voice.

Today, the Intercept broke the news of my firing in May and my lawsuits my legal team filed this week. Please read the full article by Jonah Valdez who did an excellent job condensing a wild scenario into a story that flows. We are living through unprecedented times. We must actively engage in the struggle for our ability to speak, practice, exist and care in the ways we know we need to. Below is the speech I gave at a press conference held outside of UCSF’s hospital.

Please support our legal fund here. My legal team is all working pro bono. These funds will go to all the court fees for depositions and filings. We need all hands on deck for this landmark case. If doctors cannot speak freely, people die. Thank you.

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I came to UCSF 24 years ago, and have served my community with dedication and love. I have always been a doctor who speaks up for the health for all people. I have spoken up countless times as our community members have faced harm inside and outside these hospitals walls. Throughout my career here, UCSF has harassed and intimidated me multiple times for my advocacy. But what they have done now is a shocking betrayal of the institution’s mission and sets a dangerous precedent in medicine.

Advocating for the right to health is my passion and my practice. Every patient under my care has always known they have the best advocate they can get. And advocacy requires a free and unrestricted voice. Because when doctors are silenced, people die.

I am a scholar who studies the health impact of power. I study how certain structures create health for some people and create illness for others. In the US, who gets to be healthy and who gets to be sick is determined by power. Power cuts across every other determinant: race, socioeconomic status, immigration status, gender. Those with power have more health than those who don’t have power. People who are marginalized will find health impossible if we are not allowed to speak up when they are being harmed. So it’s critical that we understand and study the distribution of power.

And this situation here where I have been fired for speaking out against what countless experts have determined is a genocide in Gaza is a remarkable demonstration of the abuse of power. My firing was motivated by people with tremendous power–billionaries here in the Bay Area whose real estate business puts working people on the streets. We must liberate our public institutions from these billionaires. Our public schools belong to the people.

I am being attacked because I’m a woman.

Because I’m a woman of color.

Because I’m a woman of color with a voice.

And I used that voice to say Stop Bombing Hospitals.

When I saw the Israeli military bombing hospitals and abducting, torturing and killing healthcare workers in Gaza, like Dr Adnan Al-Bursch, professor of orthopedic surgery– I could not stay silent. And my speaking up led UCSF to attack me. UCSF has harassed, intimidated, suspended and fired dozens of faculty, students and staff in wide-scale violation of our Constitutional and civil rights.

We must ask, whose health does UCSF stand for if it will not allow us speak for the health of Palestinian people as they face genocide? What kind of doctor does not speak up when any child is burned alive in their hospital bed? Our hearts have been broken by Israel’s US-backed genocide in Gaza. And we have been robbed in the process. Instead of our tax dollars going to healthcare here, the wealth we generate through our work is going to destroy healthcare and commit war crimes there.

But this story about my firing and our lawsuits to fight back is actually not about me. It is about the genocide in Gaza and how our collective voice as healthcare workers is being silenced by precisely the same forces committing the genocide. The silencing of healthcare workers across the West has been an instrument in enabling the genocide, which has destroyed Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure and targeted and killed over 1400 healthcare workers.

They kill us there and silence us here. This accelerates the annihilation of the Palestinian people. There are few left to care for them there and few left to speak for them here. This is how my silencing and the silencing of healthcare workers enables genocide. And enabling genocide is against our legal commitments to uphold the Geneva Conventions. It is also against the very tenets of our profession which mandate that we speak up for the health of all people. When doctors are silenced, people die. We must be courageous and speak.

If UCSF wants to fire me for saying ‘Stop Bombing Hospitals,’ then they cannot claim to be a place where medicine is truly practiced. If a job requires me to stay quiet as children are killed, that’s not a job worth having. We have an obligation to speak up–now more than ever. We must not be silent when our words and actions together can resist the erasure of the people of Palestine. To deny healthcare workers the right to speech is to deny our very humanity, as Israel and the US grotesquely deny Palestinians theirs.

When institutions slide towards authoritarianism, we must fight to build ones that can be resilient and strong to work for all people. I am committed to the health for all and that requires we fight for our collective voice as health care worker and we struggle for the very heart of our profession. Thank you.