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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Gloves off.
He needn’t hold back at all now.
Bring it on, Dr Kulldorff!
Damned right.
The useless Elite Globalist Ivy League.
How much stupidity and non science has come out of these schools?
Gestapo Censorship = ‘The Science’ ™
Universities are so corrupt and insipid that spending a £100K to send a child there is a very dubious investment (says a parent who is making this investment but in real subjects ie computer science not dance, or an ology, history etc or fake science)
Saddened and yet unsurprised to read “While some of the support I received was public, most was behind the scenes from faculty unwilling to speak publicly”
I hope Martin Kulldorf replied to them thanking them for their cowardice.
If half of the faculty had risen up in support I suspect the so-called leadership would have retreated.
I’ve always been intrigued by how German society succumbed to Hitler and his cronies. I’m sure the “go along to get along” crowd were a big factor.
Revenge for the sacking of the plagiarist Chancellor or whatever the yanks call the equivalent?
I posted a similar comparison with those thst failed to speak out during the Nazi era. It has disappeared into City Journals “awaiting moderation…”
oh the irony !
I’ve always been intrigued by how German society succumbed to Hitler and his cronies. I’m sure the “go along to get along” crowd were a big factor.
People are able to accept a real lot when the alternative is the guillotine. Insofar the official narrative is correct, Hitler was installed as chancellor against the will of the people and maintained his regime through terror. That his German victims are somehow culpably responsible for that is one of the many contradictions in this narrative.
Harvard certainly shouldn’t fire people for not being covaxxed in 2024 (or should ever have started doing so, for that matter). OTOH, manadatory house arrest for so-called older people just because someone else claims to be afraid of a virus is only quantitatively less worse than for everyone instead. Qualitatively, it’s exactly as nefarious. COVID isn’t dangerous to the by far overwhelming amount of people, minus the exceedinly trite observation that old and frail people eventually die of something.
Kulldorf claims some people at some hospital had saved his life when he got COVID. That is, he was really afraid for his life, went to hospital and came back out again in a physically improved condition. It follows that the people working at that hospital didn’t kill him but not that whatever else they did actually helped him recover. This may be the case. But it might as well not. Without more information about this, my balance of probabilities opinion on that is Probably just hocus-pocus. He must also know that he very likely already had COVID before this became a popular sport and certainly also several times since, like all of us.
He also writes that he was aware that the covaxx trials were improperly conducted, yet he claims to be convinced that Covaxxes saved millions of lifes! (not really in the article, I’m just quoting the official phrase for this part of the narrative). And that’s, I think, the key to to his problem: He’s lukewarm in favour of the pandemic establishment. With him in control, we would have three gentler years of Total F***ing Madness™. That wouldn’t have helped us. And it didn’t help him because the pandemistas don’t want lukewarm supporters.
Make up your mind, Herr Doktor.
Good post. I don’t know much about this ‘Doctor’ and didn’t realise that he was a moderate fascist Covidiot Ronatard with yet another make believe near death from the flying virus story. Well screw him. As you posted he is only moderately less Fascist than the other Med Nazis.
I think he held a lot back. He isn’t perfect. He has a lot less to lose now. Let’s see.
But the Great Barrington Declaration was his shot across the bows of the corrupt steamroller. Sunetra Gupta and Jay Bhattacharya deserve a lot of respect too. They are from “inside” and together represent a great opportunity to beam sunlight on the whole sordid affair.
If he had had his way, the Great Barrington Declaration would have been the norm, saving many people a great deal of grief.
The litmus test here (mine at least) is Had this enabled me to meet my parents 2020, 2021 or 2022 and the answer is No. They would have been locked up or at least strongly encouraged to lock up themselves. This would have suffered from the same Once started, how can it ever end?-problem. And the only theoretically possible answer to that is When the miracle vaxxes are ready. And Some product which can be injected which comes with all the right high tech buzzword and kills only a few people on the spot doesn’t qualify as miracle vax. This was the opportunity for the pharmaceutical industry to demonstrate that it can actually save us and – not entirely unsurprisingly – it preferred shareholder value instead.
One should note that the covaxxes were all already theoretically useless by the time they became available because the kind of virus that had been designed for was no longer in general circulation.
By their deeds you will know them.
Those who stood up.
Those who stood in support.
Those who kept quiet out of fear.
Those who won’t allow free opinion.
Those who sought to profit from forcing themselves on others.
The gift of the covid era is that humanity was left fully exposed.
The BBC published this article in which among other things they report research that shows that a person aged 85+ is 630 times more likely to die of Covid than a person aged 18-29. The arithmetic is probably correct but it’s almost completely meaningless. From the (pre-Covid) 2010-19 annual death statistics for England and Wales I have calculated that if you were a woman aged 90+ your risk of dying (of anything) was 1,346 (one thousand three hundred and forty six) times higher than that of a woman aged 20-24.
Unsurprising fact: as we get older we are more likely to die.
I did some calculations a few months into “covid” in order to understand how much more likely I was to die now that “covid” was “rampant” compared to before “covid”, based on all cause mortality in my age band. The difference was vanishingly small, and for all I know had nothing to do with “covid” – you could take any arbitrary baseline from the past and compare it to now and get some difference, because the death rate fluctuates a bit for reasons that are probably hard to understand (and not worth the effort in trying to understand).
Indeed: Everyone knows that Covid-19 disproportionately affected ‘the elderly’
The two charts above show the split in registered death rates each week from Jan 2010 between the various age groups – firstly for females and secondly for males. Note the disruption to the pattern around April 2020. No, wait. There’s nothing significantly different from (say) Winter 2014/15 or Winter 2017/18.
Note (really) that you can’t see the yellow (15-44s) or red (1-14s) bands – they’re too small.
If secondary bacterial infections causing pneumonia had been addressed with the use of an antibiotic, administered in a timely manner, no one needed to die when they got covid, including the elderly. Stay home til your lips turn blue was indeed a death sentence for many including the elderly. Thank you to sage and our gov’t for their dangerous advice.
I’m very grateful to Dr Kulldorff for being a voice of reason during the Covid insanity. I’m very sorry he has had to pay the price he has. He is a hero. What a shame the purge of any medical professional who pursues good outcomes continues, leaving us with only those who pursue profit.
Prof Kulldorf failed to understand that he was dealing with the adherents of a new Fundamentalist Religion, not debating the scientific principle.
The Religious Leaders needed a witch-hunt to excite and unite their brainwashed flock around the dogma and rituals of their “faith.” He was “the witch” and therefore has had to be made an example of. In true Biblical fashion, he has been cast out.
“And these signs will follow those who believe: In My name they will cast out demons; they will speak with new tongues; Mark v16-17.
They were no more going to voluntarily debate the validity of their Fundamentalist Religion than the Catholic Church was in Medieval Europe, or the Mullahs of Iran are now.
This will go down in history and the legal books as one of the worst crimes committed against an academic. I hope Professor Kuldorff has enough financial support to sue the bought and paid for institution known as Harvard. The last place I would send anyone for their education.
What a brave man ! I signed the declaration too because it was so obviously correct. There are people who should go to jail for their actions, like Fauci
I note that Angus Dalgleish has been ” retired” from St. Georges for also being outspoken.