respectfulinsolence | So what was (and is) going on? Kulldorff now says he was fired as though the firing happened recently, but two and a half years ago he was already referring to his time as professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in the past tense. Something odd is going on here but what could it be. One big hint is his profile on the Harvard website, which lists him as being “on leave,” which led me to immediately recognize that trying to figure out when Kulldorff went on leave was a job for the almighty Wayback Machine at Archive.org. There, I found that, as early as December 2021, Kulldorff’s status had already been listed as “on leave.” So where did Wikipedia get the idea that he had only been on leave since 2023? Whatever the case, it’s clear that before his “firing,” Kulldorff had not been working for Mass General Brigham or Harvard since at least November or December 2021, given that the last archive of his webpage showing him not on leave is dated October 20, 2021 and the next one on December 20, 2021 shows his status as “on leave.” This time period aligns very nicely with his move to the Brownstone Institute.
However, it also aligns with the Harvard vaccine mandate for the fall 2021 term. So maybe Harvard did fire him for refusing to be vaccinated and raising all sorts of nonsensical objections, such as his claim that it was against his religion because the vaccine mandate was more religious than science-based? If that was the case, though, then why was he listed as “on leave” on the website, rather than as suspended? Let’s look further.
Here’s yet another hint. If you look at Kulldorff’s Harvard listing, you’ll see that it includes his research support, specifically his grant support. This listing indicates that he has not had NIH grant support since 2019. To understand why this is important, you need to know that lots of universities, but in particular Harvard Medical School-associated positions, require faculty to maintain grant support sufficient to cover a specific percentage of their salary. This percentage can range from a relatively modest 30-50% to a rather draconian 100%. (If you have to get grants to cover 100% of your salary, I always wonder, what good is the university?) While it is true that there is some wiggle room in that if you lose grant funding for a while usually the university will support you until you reacquire funding, but the university won’t support you forever. Kulldorff’s leave started a bit more than two years after his NIH R01 grant support expired, which is a fairly reasonable period of time for Harvard to support whatever percentage of Kulldorff’s salary that had been grant-supported, in the hopes that he would reacquire NIH funding.
The overall narrative is that the reason that Kulldorff had to go on leave was because of Harvard’s vaccine mandate for its fall 2021 term, which somewhat fits with the timeline. However, what doesn’t make sense (at least to me, at least) about this potential explanation. Harvard got rid of its vaccine mandate a week ago. Would Harvard decide to fire Kulldorff now, given that it had progressively decreased its requirements for boosters and now has eliminated the COVID-19 vaccine mandate altogether? Possibly. I can’t rule it out entirely. Certainly, that’s what Kulldorff appears to be claiming, that he was fired because he refused to be vaccinated. However, it seems rather excessive that it took over two and a half years. I also believe, based on my experience observing him, that Kulldorff is not to be trusted, which is why I’m skeptical of his explanation.
Here’s my educated guess as to what really happened, and I freely acknowledge that it is nothing more than an educated guess. However, it is a guess that makes sense given the timeline and what we know. My guess is that in late 2021, having failed to garner any new NIH RO1 grants, Kulldorff saw the writing on the wall and decided to go on leave in order to accept Tucker’s offer to become senior scientific director of the new right wing think tank that Tucker was forming, the Brownstone Institute. (It is also possible that Harvard’s imposition of a vaccine mandate for fall 2021 might have played into his considerations.) My further guess is that Brigham has a limit to how long you can be on leave before you lose your position. Here we are, over two years since Kulldorff went on leave, and Kulldorff shows no signs of renewed academic activity that might allow him to score new NIH or other government grant funding. Assuming that Kulldorff was not tenured, which now seems likely, that meant that it was time for him to go.
Of course, I still can’t totally rule out the possibility that he was actually canned because he refused to be vaccinated against COVID-19 and that he was tenured, which somehow allowed him to drag out the process two and a half years. However, it still seems unlikely (to me, at least) that he would have been able to drag out the appeals process that long even as a tenured full professor, particularly given that in the intervening time Harvard has progressively decreased its vaccine mandate until it got rid of it altogether a week ago. Still, it seems rather implausible that it would take two and a half years from his refusal to his being fired, and it seems even less plausible that Harvard would go through with firing Kulldorff after that long given how much the political winds have shifted with respect to mandates and how much heat Harvard would face for doing so, in particular after its president Claudine Gay was forced to resign over her testimony regarding campus free speech plus plagiarism charges.
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