Martin Kulldorff used to be a Professor at Harvard Medical School until COVID-19 destroyed his career.
Kulldorff wasn’t fired because he spread wacky theories, or even opposed the use of the vaccine. He was fired because he told the truth at a time when telling the truth was absolutely forbidden.
I am no longer a professor of medicine at @Harvard. Here is the story of my Harvard experience until I was fired for clinging to the truth.https://t.co/zSOQlNJTY2
— Martin Kulldorff (@MartinKulldorff) March 11, 2024
Kulldorff was one of too few who were willing to pay a high price to do the right thing. Far too few; in fact, people who knew he was right participated in the destruction of Kulldorff because failing to do so might cost them their jobs.
I am no longer a professor of medicine at Harvard. The Harvard motto is Veritas, Latin for truth. But, as I discovered, truth can get you fired. This is my story—a story of a Harvard biostatistician and infectious-disease epidemiologist, clinging to the truth as the world lost its way during the Covid pandemic.
On March 10, 2020, before any government prompting, Harvard declared that it would “suspend in-person classes and shift to online learning.” Across the country, universities, schools, and state governments followed Harvard’s lead.
Yet it was clear, from early 2020, that the virus would eventually spread across the globe, and that it would be futile to try to suppress it with lockdowns. It was also clear that lockdowns would inflict enormous collateral damage, not only on education but also on public health, including treatment for cancer, cardiovascular disease, and mental health. We will be dealing with the harm done for decades. Our children, the elderly, the middle class, the working class, and the poor around the world—all will suffer.
The premise behind the lockdowns was questionable from the beginning, but at least the first two weeks had the gloss of rationality. If you remember–and who doesn’t?–the initial claim had nothing to do with stopping the virus because everybody involved knew that this goal was impossible.
The idea was simple: dramatically reduce human interaction for a short period of time to give the medical system a bit of breathing room to adapt to the new circumstances. “Two weeks to slow the spread.” There was no claim that the spread could be halted, because doing so was always impossible. Not difficult. Not costly. It was impossible to stop the spread of a highly contagious respiratory virus.
Not only is this not a truly controversial proposition; it is self-evidently true. As long as you cannot stop any and all human interaction the virus will spread. It is not Ebola, which is too lethal and too difficult to infect others. It is a respiratory virus that breeds and spreads before illness sets in. In fact, it is likely that the majority of case spreads happen before anybody is symptomatic, and that many people never become symptomatic.
Experience shows that HOW we “prepared” the medical system was more disastrous than letting the virus rip during that time (we essentially closed down all medical care save absolute emergencies, emptying out hospitals and leading to the mass layoffs of medical professional, many who never came back), but the idea of preparing hospitals was not inherently stupid.
But closing down society for months on end and massively restricting civil rights, closing schools, separating children from dying parents, preventing parents from visiting dying children, and closing businesses for months on end added up to perhaps the worst man-made disaster outside of war in human history.
Lives are being lost daily due to these policies, and Kulldorff and his few brave colleagues like Jay Bhattacharya, Vinay Prasad, and Sunetra Gupta–and, of course, Sweden’s Anders Tegnell–were proven right in most ways.
The public health response to COVID-19 will, in our lifetimes, be deemed the most disastrous government policy ever implemented in the West. Trust in science was damaged, hopefully no irreparably.
Kulldorff was fired at Harvard, while Bhattacharya was shunned at Stanford and remains the target of derision today.
That spring, I supported the Swedish approach in op-eds published in my native Sweden, but despite being a Harvard professor, I was unable to publish my thoughts in American media. My attempts to disseminate the Swedish school report on Twitter (now X) put me on the platform’s Trends Blacklist. In August 2020, my op-ed on school closures and Sweden was finally published by CNN—but not the one you’re thinking of. I wrote it in Spanish, and CNN–Español ran it. CNN–English was not interested.
I was not the only public health scientist speaking out against school closures and other unscientific countermeasures. Scott Atlas, an especially brave voice, used scientific articles and facts to challenge the public health advisors in the Trump White House, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci, National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins, and Covid coordinator Deborah Birx, but to little avail. When 98 of his Stanford faculty colleagues unjustly attacked Atlas in an open letter that did not provide a single example of where he was wrong, I wrote a response in the student-run Stanford Daily to defend him. I ended the letter by pointing out that:
Among experts on infectious disease outbreaks, many of us have long advocated for an age-targeted strategy, and I would be delighted to debate this with any of the 98 signatories. Supporters include Professor Sunetra Gupta at Oxford University, the world’s preeminent infectious disease epidemiologist. Assuming no bias against women scientists of color, I urge Stanford faculty and students to read her thoughts.
None of the 98 signatories accepted my offer to debate. Instead, someone at Stanford sent complaints to my superiors at Harvard, who were not thrilled with me.
Obviously this is not how science is done, and what we saw during the COVID era was the utter rejection of science in favor of voodoo medicine. Not one randomized controlled trial was performed during the entire pandemic on any of the non-pharmaceutical interventions being mandated–NOT ONE, despite billions of dollars being spent and massive impositions on the civil liberties of citizens–because the public health officials simply did not want to know what the results would be.
And when Cochrane did a meta-analysis of the use of masks based on earlier studies done on other respiratory viruses they found that masks are ineffective, and the public health establishment turned on Cochrane, which literally is the source of data for evidence-based medicine.
Evidence was the enemy during the pandemic. And that made Kulldorff and his colleagues the enemy as well.
The same hostility to evidence is what eventually did Kulldorff in. He had, for decades, advised the CDC on vaccines and was considered a world expert on the subject. Kulldorff himself was among the first to take the vaccine as he has a severe immune deficiency, and was a strong advocate for using it in especially vulnerable populations.
But he dissented on vaccine policy, which he considered both irrational and immoral. In this he was not alone–two FDA scientists who led the vaccine research at the FDA resigned rather than sign off on the FDA’s booster policies. Kulldorff himself was fired.
I have spent decades studying drug and vaccine adverse reactions without taking any money from pharmaceutical companies. Every honest person knows that new drugs and vaccines come with potential risks that are unknown when approved. This was a risk worth taking for older people at high risk of Covid mortality—but not for children, who have a minuscule risk for Covid mortality, nor for those who already had infection-acquired immunity. To a question about this on Twitter in 2021, I responded:
Thinking that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking that nobody should. COVID vaccines are important for older high-risk people and their care-takers. Those with prior natural infection do not need it. Nor children.
At the behest of the U.S. government, Twitter censored my tweet for contravening CDC policy. Having also been censored by LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube, I could not freely communicate as a scientist. Who decided that American free-speech rights did not apply to honest scientific comments at odds with those of the CDC director?
I was tempted just to shut up, but a Harvard colleague convinced me otherwise. Her family had been active against Communism in Eastern Europe, and she reminded me that we needed to use whatever openings we could find—while self-censoring, when necessary, to avoid getting suspended or fired.
On that score, however, I failed. A month after my tweet, I was fired from the CDC Covid Vaccine Safety Working Group—not because I was critical of vaccines but because I contradicted CDC policy. In April 2021, the CDC paused the J&J vaccine after reports of blood clots in a few women under 50. No cases were reported among older people, who benefit the most from the vaccine. Since there was a general vaccine shortage at that time, I argued in an op-ed that the J&J vaccine should not be paused for older Americans. This is what got me in trouble. I am probably the only person ever fired by the CDC for being too pro-vaccine. While the CDC lifted the pause four days later, the damage was done. Some older Americans undoubtedly died because of this vaccine “pause.”
It was Kulldorff’s now-proven assertion that natural immunity from prior infection is superior to vaccine-induced immunity (which we now know persists for mere WEEKS) that gave Harvard the opening to fire him. Kulldorff applied for an was denied permission to skip further boosters, and Harvard used this incident to let him go.
For scientific, ethical, public health, and medical reasons, I objected both publicly and privately to the Covid vaccine mandates. I already had superior infection-acquired immunity; and it was risky to vaccinate me without proper efficacy and safety studies on patients with my type of immune deficiency. This stance got me fired by Mass General Brigham—and consequently fired from my Harvard faculty position.
Even if Kulldorff had proved to be wrong instead of having been proven to be right, as a professor of medicine it is criminally irresponsible to silence him.
Truth is impossible to discover without discussion and debate, and silencing opposition to a scientific consensus is fatal to the scientific enterprise. Literally every great enhancement in scientific understanding begins with one or a few standing up and saying “what you all believe is wrong.” The two great scientific achievements in physics of the 20th century–Einstein’s theories of relativity and the development of Quantum Mechanics began as heresies.
And, you will recall, Einstein was a Patent Officer, not a college professor when he revolutionized physics. Authority does not equate to being right. Often the opposite is true, as authority and orthodoxy are joined at the hip.
Kulldorff is one of the few heroes of the pandemic era, and if he and his colleagues had been listened to millions more Americans would be alive today, and children would not have been scarred irreparably.
Harvard has been ensnared in several scandals of late, and ironically Harvard Medical School has been revealed to be a hotbed of fraudulent cancer studies–suggesting that telling the truth is not only punished, but telling lies is rewarded.
Will Harvard, and the reputation of science itself recover? I expect so, at least among the elite. But in the meantime tens of millions of Americans will never trust them again, and they have every reason not to.