Dr. Martin Kulldorf Did Nothing Wrong

childrenshealthdefense  |  Martin Kulldorff, Ph.D., an epidemiologist and professor of Medicine at Harvard University, on Monday confirmed the university fired him.

Kulldorff has been a critic of lockdown policies, school closures and vaccine mandates since early in the COVID-19 pandemic. In October 2020, he published the Great Barrington Declaration, along with co-authors Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, Ph.D., and Stanford epidemiologist and health economist Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D.

In an essay published Monday in City Journal, Kulldorff wrote that his anti-mandate position got him fired from the Mass General Brigham hospital system, where he also worked, and consequently from his Harvard faculty position.

Kulldorff detailed how his commitment to scientific inquiry put him at odds with a system that he alleged had “lost its way.”

“I am no longer a professor of medicine at Harvard,” Kulldorff wrote. “The Harvard motto is Veritas, Latin for truth. But, as I discovered, truth can get you fired.”

He noted that it was clear from early 2020 that lockdowns would be futile for controlling the pandemic.

“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,” Kulldorff wrote.

“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.”

That viewpoint got little debate in the mainstream media until the epidemiologist and his colleagues published the Great Barrington Declaration, signed by nearly 1 million public health professionals from across the world.

The document made clear that no scientific consensus existed for lockdown measures in a pandemic. It argued instead for a “focused protection” approach for pandemic management that would protect high-risk populations, such as elderly or medically compromised people, and otherwise allow the COVID-19 virus to circulate among the healthy population.

Although the declaration merely summed up what previously had been conventional wisdom in public health, it was subject to tremendous backlash. Emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request revealed that Dr. Francis Collins, then-director of the National Institutes of Health called for a “devastating published takedown” of the declaration and of the authors, who were subsequently slandered in mainstream and social media.