Dr. Martin Kulldorff has been fired from his position as Professor of Medicine at Harvard University. A victim of the college’s brutal Covid vaccine mandate, the Great Barrington Declaration author tells his story in City Journal.
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 10th 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.
Schools closed in many other countries, too, but under heavy international criticism, Sweden kept its schools and daycares open for its 1.8 million children, ages one to 15. Why? While anyone can get infected, we have known since early 2020 that more than a thousandfold difference in Covid mortality risk holds between the young and the old. Children faced minuscule risk from Covid, and interrupting their education would disadvantage them for life, especially those whose families could not afford private schools, pod schools, or tutors, or to homeschool.
What were the results during the spring of 2020? With schools open, Sweden had zero Covid deaths in the one-to-15 age group, while teachers had the same mortality as the average of other professions. Based on those facts, summarised in a July 7th 2020 report by the Swedish Public Health Agency, all U.S. schools should have quickly reopened. Not doing so led to “startling evidence on learning loss” in the United States, especially among lower- and middle-class children, an effect not seen in Sweden. …
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.
I had no inclination to back down. Together with Gupta and Jay Bhattacharya at Stanford, I wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, arguing for age-based focused protection instead of universal lockdowns, with specific suggestions for how better to protect the elderly, while letting children and young adults live close to normal lives.
With the Great Barrington Declaration, the silencing was broken. While it is easy to dismiss individual scientists, it was impossible to ignore three senior infectious-disease epidemiologists from three leading universities. The declaration made clear that no scientific consensus existed for school closures and many other lockdown measures. In response, though, the attacks intensified — and even grew slanderous. Collins, a lab scientist with limited public-health experience who controls most of the nation’s medical research budget, called us “fringe epidemiologists” and asked his colleagues to orchestrate a “devastating published takedown.” Some at Harvard obliged.
A prominent Harvard epidemiologist publicly called the declaration “an extreme fringe view,” equating it with exorcism to expel demons. A member of Harvard’s Centre for Health and Human Rights, who had argued for school closures, accused me of “trolling” and having “idiosyncratic politics”, falsely alleging that I was “enticed… with Koch money”, “cultivated by Right-wing think tanks” and “won’t debate anyone”. (A concern for those less privileged does not automatically make you Right-wing!) Others at Harvard worried about my “scientifically inaccurate” and “potentially dangerous position”, while “grappling with the protections offered by academic freedom”.
Though powerful scientists, politicians and the media vigorously denounced it, the Great Barrington Declaration gathered almost a million signatures, including tens of thousands from scientists and health-care professionals. We were less alone than we had thought.
Even from Harvard, I received more positive than negative feedback. Among many others, support came from a former chair of the Department of Epidemiology — a former dean, a top surgeon and an autism expert, who saw firsthand the devastating collateral damage that lockdowns inflicted on her patients. While some of the support I received was public, most was behind the scenes from faculty unwilling to speak publicly. …
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 [hospital system] — and consequently fired from my Harvard faculty position.
While several vaccine exemptions were given by the hospital, my medical exemption request was denied. …
If Harvard and its hospitals want to be credible scientific institutions, they should rehire those of us they fired. And Harvard would be wise to eliminate its Covid vaccine mandates for students, as most other universities have already done.
Most Harvard faculty diligently pursue truth in a wide variety of fields, but Veritas has not been the guiding principle of Harvard leaders.
Worth reading in full.
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What should also be looked at is the age distribution of those excess deaths. In the same way the “quality years of life lost” are used to assess the cost/benefit of a proposed treatment, maybe the same strategy should be used regarding excess deaths.
Coldly logical it may seem, but 10 extra “died suddenly” events in school children (10 x 70 years lost) is far worse than 100 “died suddenly” events in octogenarians (100 x 5 years lost), for example.
Whether or not QUALYs lost is a measure of quality, it is useful as a measure of something badly wrong. You don’t have to put a figure on a child’s life to know that children dying is abnormal and bad.
See here
In addition to excess deaths since the summer of 2022, there’s this – posted here by ebygum a couple of weeks ago, which deserves repeating – it’s a recent report by the obviously highly reputable Institute for Fiscal Studies:
“In summer 2021, each month 15,000 or so working-age people started a PIP claim. That monthly figure had remained little changed for years. It then steadily increased, such that by July 2022 (the latest data) it had doubled to 30,000. This report investigates the increase.”
Why would this be happening?
https://ifs.org.uk/sites/default/files/2022-12/The-number-of-new-disability-claimants-has-doubled-in-a-year-IFS-report-R233.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1k-a8Om62k8oxzlRqcMbmBf9Rk-JKuIMNvnWST-i3VmnM8SnJtbenITyw
Yes…it seems to me that there is confirmation evidence to show that deaths and injuries are excessive…and it’s coming, not just from Government ONS or UKHSA, but from different data sets….like the PIP claims, and insurance claims for instance….
I’ve posted Dr John Campbells video below in my comment…for UK/insurance…
..this is from the USA insurance stats’…
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/where-did-all-workers-go
Clearly prior to 2020 mortality was coming down and coming down at a rate greater than the effects of increasing population size and an ageing population, and so raw death numbers were numerically reducing too. That trend couldn’t continue for ever or else based on that existing trend we’d all be immortal at some time in the future, but at the same time an abrupt turnaround couldn’t be expected.
What has always surprised me is that people have been living for longer. I’ve never understood why that was in the context of a population of seemingly worsening health with higher metabolic illness. I’ve tentatively put it down to us being better at prolonging life at the very end of life rather than increasing healthy lifespan. But the honest answer is I don’t know.
Without understanding why mortality has been coming down to 2019, it’s hard to say how long we would have expected the trend to continue. But to assume a future trend of no improvement after such a long period of mortality improvement seems a strange starting assumption for Noah Carl to be using, but that ultimately is the assumption he’s using in claiming 2022 was a normal year.
We have significantly high mortality in working ages even after adjusting for population and looking at age stratified data.
Given that, what is most likely that the excess mortality caused by experimental vaccines and lack of access to healthcare etc only affects those of working ages and not those over say 75 or that there is some effect like a lack of ‘dry timber’ in the oldest ages because of the ravages of the last few years. I think the latter is the obvious starting assumption.
‘ I’ve never understood why that was in the context of a population of seemingly worsening health with higher metabolic illness. I’ve tentatively put it down to us being better at prolonging life…’
i have.
Propaganda from the experts and vested interests misleading us into believing the situation is worse than it is to serve their own interests, just like all the propaganda about masks, lockdowns, protecting granny, vaccines that aren’t, climate change, lies about cholesterol, eating meat, sugar, salt, saturated fats – quite a list.
I just wonder how many more lies do people have to hear before the penny drops and they stop listening.
Where is the Matrix Cat? Are we in a parallel universe? LOL!
Just put this on the ‘other side’ Dr John Campbell and the worrying rise in excess deaths in the 20-44 age cohort in comparison with 2019…using insurance actuary data…something that Ed Dowd in the USA has used to show massive increases in death and disability…..
There seems to be more than one source of data confirming a rise in all cause mortality!?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OD0na_NZaLM
I’ve got a great idea.
Why don’t we just differentiate vaxxed v. unvaxxed re the apparent increase in deat rate.
But the ‘vaccines’ was going to ‘save lives’ particularly of the ‘most vulnerable’.
Never mind the age-adjusted malarkey and percentages, it still doesn’t explain why so many more ‘saved lives’ died in the vaccinated group when we were categorically assured they would not.
If people are going to die anyway, what’s the point of the ju-ju medicine?
It is a grim picture from an economic point of view. The workforce is going to become severely diminished and incapcitated, at least terms of quality whilst at the same time less pressure on housing and employment will bring no relief in terms of inflation which is now essentially a perfectly calibrated extract and control mechanism. We are being funnelled into this reality at an alarming speed and yet we fail to understand the urgency and we are so dependent on these systems that we struggle to formulate a path of resistance.
The work force has been diminished and incapacitated gradually since the British Socialist Party took over in 1945 with the promise of Utopia.
Borriwing from the apocryphal reply attributed to Pope John… how many people work in Britain? About half of them.
We now have nearly 50% of the work-able getting a wage fir jobs that create no wealth, in jobs of such low productive output they need State welfare top up, peopke who just don’t work at all and get benefits.
It’s called Socialism – that Faustian pact where people stupidly sell their Souls – delayed payment – for the instant gratification of a life of State provision, safety and security.
If you have a heart problem there are three herbs that you might want to consider: hawthorn and Arjuna and danshen or red sage. All of these are being investigated by big pharma but it is worth investigating these substances.
And what’s going on in Scotland? Just in December 2022 they saw a 10% rise in excess deaths and 15.6% decrease in births. England and Wales have an excess death rate of 23.1% in week 1 this year.
https://nakedemperor.substack.com/p/scottish-excess-deaths-reach-29
And add into all the comments below Ed Dowd’s reporting of a global average of 29 deaths on the field of sports people before 2021 and now it’s huge numbers every month. (See James Delingpole’s podcast with Edward Dowd, 22/1/23).
‘… this means the model assumes society is ageing very fast and this ageing is having a large impact on mortality rates…’
But if all the ‘dry tinder’ got used up in 2020 & 2021, the population would be on average be younger having lost a significant portion of its ageing people.
‘He told me: “The ASMR is ultimately just an opaque ‘model’ that relies on multiple unverifiable assumptions…’
Isn’t this what is now called: The Science™️
It certainly was the basis for the ‘pandemic response’ and underpins the climate change scam.