Martin Kulldorff | |
---|---|
Born | 1962 (age 61–62) [1] |
Alma mater | Umeå University (BSc) Cornell University (PhD) |
Known for | Creator of software SaTScan, Co-author of Great Barrington Declaration |
Father | Gunnar Kulldorff |
Scientific career | |
Fields | |
Institutions | National Cancer Institute University of Connecticut Uppsala University Harvard Medical School Brigham and Women's Hospital |
Thesis | Optimal Control of Favorable Games with a Time Limit (1989) |
Doctoral advisor | David Clay Heath |
Martin Kulldorff (born 1962) is a Swedish biostatistician. He was a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School from 2003 until his dismissal in 2024. [2] [3] [4] He is a member of the US Food and Drug Administration's Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee and a former member of the Vaccine Safety Subgroup of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. [1] [5]
In 2020, Kulldorff was a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated lifting COVID-19 restrictions on lower-risk groups to develop herd immunity through infection before vaccines became available, while promoting the fringe notion that vulnerable people could be simultaneously protected from the virus. [6] [7] [8] [9] The declaration was widely rejected, and was criticized as being unethical and infeasible by Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director-general of the World Health Organization. [10]
During the pandemic, Kulldorff opposed disease control measures such as vaccination of children, lockdowns, contact tracing, and mask mandates. [7] [11] [12] [13]
Kulldorff was born in Lund, Sweden, in 1962, the son of Barbro and Gunnar Kulldorff. He grew up in Umeå and received a BSc in mathematical statistics from Umeå University in 1984. [1] [14] He moved to the United States for his postgraduate studies as a Fulbright fellow, [1] obtaining a doctorate in operations research from Cornell University in 1989. [14] His doctoral thesis, titled Optimal Control of Favorable Games with a Time Limit, was written under the direction of David Clay Heath. [15]
Kulldorff was an associate professor at the Department of Community Medicine at the University of Connecticut [16] for five years and an associate professor at the Department of Statistics at Uppsala University for six years. He has also worked as a scientist at the National Institutes of Health in the US. [1] From 2003 to 2021 he was a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and from 2015 to 2021 he was also a biostatistician at the Brigham and Women's Hospital. [4]
Kulldorff developed SaTScan, a free software program used for geographical and hospital disease surveillance [17] which is widely used, [18] as well as a TreeScan software program for data mining. He is the co-developer of the R-Sequential software program for exact sequential analysis. [19] He developed the statistical and epidemiological methods that are used in the software. These methods include spatial and space-time scan statistics, the tree-based scan statistics and various sequential analysis methods. [20] [21] He helped develop and implement statistical methods used by the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) project that the CDC uses, among other tools, to discover and evaluate vaccine health and safety risks. [22] [2] [23]
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Kulldorff advised Florida governor Ron DeSantis on health policy. In a September 2020 meeting he advocated aiming for herd immunity by not inhibiting the virus, saying that young people could "live normal life" until it had been reached, at which point older people could live more normal lives too. [24] : 191
In 2021, Kulldorff was named a senior scientific director at the Brownstone Institute, a right-wing think tank launched by Jeffrey Tucker that publishes articles challenging various measures against COVID-19, presenting research supporting authors' opinions, and discussing alternative measures. [25] [26] Jay Bhattacharya and Sunetra Gupta, his co-authors on the Great Barrington Declaration, also have had roles there. Tucker is the former editorial director of the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), where the declaration was signed. [11]
In December 2021, Kulldorff became one of the first three fellows, along with Bhattacharya and Scott Atlas, at the Academy for Science and Freedom, a program of the private, conservative Hillsdale College, a liberal arts school. [27]
In March 2024, Kulldorff announced that Harvard had dismissed him. [3] [28]
In 2020, Kulldorff was invited to meet with leaders, lawyers and staff at the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), an American libertarian think tank. [9] Following the meeting Kulldorff took the lead in an effort to oppose lockdowns in favor of pursuing COVID-19 herd immunity before vaccines became available. His efforts resulted in the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter co-authored with Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta and Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya for the AIER. [9] The document stated that lower-risk groups would develop herd immunity through infection while vulnerable groups should be protected from the virus. [29] [30] The World Health Organization, the National Institutes of Health and other public-health bodies said such a policy lacked a sound scientific basis. [31] [8] [32] [33] [34] Scientists dismissed the policy as impossible in practice, unethical and pseudoscientific, [6] warning that attempting to implement it could cause many unnecessary deaths with the potential of recurrent waves of disease spread as immunity decreases over time. [8] Kulldorff and the other authors met with US officials of the Trump administration to share their ideas on 5 October 2020, the day after the declaration was made public. [35]
During the pandemic Kulldorff has opposed COVID-19 disease control measures. [13] The measures opposed include lockdowns, contact tracing, [36] vaccine mandates, and mask mandates. [7] [37] [12] He has spoken out against vaccine passports, stating they disproportionately harm the working class. [38] Kulldorff and Bhattacharya opposed broad vaccine mandates, stating that the mortality risk is "a thousand fold higher" in older people than in younger people. [39] [7] [37] He has argued against COVID vaccinations for children, saying that the risks outweigh the benefits. [9]
In an Op-ed in the Wall Street Journal co-authored with Jay Bhattacharya, the authors stated that COVID-19 testing should not be used to "check asymptomatic children to see if it is safe for them to come to school" because of the difference in mortality risk for young persons compared to older persons. Instead, the authors wrote that "[w]ith the new CDC guidelines, strategic age-targeted viral testing will protect older people from deadly COVID-19 exposure and children and young adults from needless school closures". [7] [40]
On 18 March 2021, Kulldorff participated in an online roundtable with the governor of the state Florida, Ron DeSantis, to discuss COVID-19. In the video, which was posted on YouTube, DeSantis asked the group if children should wear masks in school and Kulldorff responded "children should not wear face masks. No. They don't need it for their own protection and they don't need it for protecting other people, either." [41] In April, YouTube removed the recording of the roundtable, asserting it violated YouTube's policy regarding medical information. [42] At the time the video was published, the Centers for Disease Control recommended universal indoor masking for children two years and older. [41] [43]
Kulldorff was a member of the Vaccine Safety Technical subgroup of CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. [5] In April 2021, he disagreed with the CDC's pause of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine rollout and argued publicly that the vaccine's benefits outweighed clotting risks, particularly for older people. [5] [44]
In December 2021, Kulldorff published an essay for the Brownstone Institute in which he argued against children receiving vaccination against COVID-19, falsely claiming that influenza was a greater risk to children than COVID-19. [25] In a critical response published in Science-Based Medicine, Jonathan Howard noted errors and factual inaccuracies in Kulldorff's essay, pointing out that while influenza was responsible for only one child death in the 2020/21 season – while public health mitigation of COVID-19 was in place – COVID-19 killed more than 1,000. [25] In addition to this, Kulldorff's essay omitted that children who are infected with COVID-19 are at risk for rare but serious conditions, such as MIS-C, with 8,862 confirmed cases of children with MIS-C by March of 2023. [25] [45]
On 13 February 2022, Kulldorff tweeted in support of the Canada convoy protest, [46] which was organized to protest against vaccine mandates and other government restrictions regarding COVID-19. [47] In December 2022, Florida Gov. DeSantis named Kulldorff, Bhattacharya, and several other opponents of the scientific consensus on COVID-19 vaccines to his newly formed Public Health Integrity Committee to "offer critical assessments" of recommendations from federal health agencies. [48]
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is the national public health agency of the United States. It is a United States federal agency under the Department of Health and Human Services, and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.
Vaccination is the administration of a vaccine to help the immune system develop immunity from a disease. Vaccines contain a microorganism or virus in a weakened, live or killed state, or proteins or toxins from the organism. In stimulating the body's adaptive immunity, they help prevent sickness from an infectious disease. When a sufficiently large percentage of a population has been vaccinated, herd immunity results. Herd immunity protects those who may be immunocompromised and cannot get a vaccine because even a weakened version would harm them. The effectiveness of vaccination has been widely studied and verified. Vaccination is the most effective method of preventing infectious diseases; widespread immunity due to vaccination is largely responsible for the worldwide eradication of smallpox and the elimination of diseases such as polio and tetanus from much of the world. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), vaccination prevents 3.5–5 million deaths per year. A WHO-funded study by The Lancet estimates that, during the 50-year period starting in 1974, vaccination prevented 154 million deaths, including 146 million among children under age 5. However, some diseases have seen rising cases due to relatively low vaccination rates attributable partly to vaccine hesitancy.
A vaccine is a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious or malignant disease. The safety and effectiveness of vaccines has been widely studied and verified. A vaccine typically contains an agent that resembles a disease-causing microorganism and is often made from weakened or killed forms of the microbe, its toxins, or one of its surface proteins. The agent stimulates the body's immune system to recognize the agent as a threat, destroy it, and recognize further and destroy any of the microorganisms associated with that agent that it may encounter in the future.
Anthony Stephen Fauci is an American physician-scientist and immunologist who served as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) from 1984 to 2022, and the chief medical advisor to the president from 2021 to 2022. Fauci was one of the world's most frequently cited scientists across all scientific journals from 1983 to 2002. In 2008, President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States, for his work on the AIDS relief program PEPFAR.
The American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) is a libertarian think tank located in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1933 by Edward C. Harwood, an economist and investment advisor, and is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. Since January 2022, the organization's president has been William P. Ruger, formerly of the Charles Koch Institute.
Sunetra Gupta is an Indian-born British infectious disease epidemiologist and a professor of theoretical epidemiology at the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford. She has performed research on the transmission dynamics of various infectious diseases, including malaria, influenza and COVID-19, and has received the Scientific Medal of the Zoological Society of London and the Rosalind Franklin Award of the Royal Society. She is a member of the scientific advisory board of Collateral Global, an organisation which examines the global impact of COVID-19 restrictions.
Martin Adel Makary is a British-American surgeon, professor, author, and medical commentator. He practices surgical oncology and gastrointestinal laparoscopic surgery at the Johns Hopkins Hospital, is Mark Ravitch Chair in Gastrointestinal Surgery at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and is the chief of Islet Transplant Surgery at Johns Hopkins.
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a contagious disease caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. The disease spread worldwide, resulting in the COVID-19 pandemic.
On December 31, 2019, China announced the discovery of a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan. The first American case was reported on January 20, and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar declared a public health emergency on January 31. Restrictions were placed on flights arriving from China, but the initial U.S. response to the pandemic was otherwise slow in terms of preparing the healthcare system, stopping other travel, and testing. The first known American deaths occurred in February and in late February President Donald Trump proposed allocating $2.5 billion to fight the outbreak. Instead, Congress approved $8.3 billion with only Senator Rand Paul and two House representatives voting against, and Trump signed the bill, the Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2020, on March 6. Trump declared a national emergency on March 13. The government also purchased large quantities of medical equipment, invoking the Defense Production Act of 1950 to assist. By mid-April, disaster declarations were made by all states and territories as they all had increasing cases. A second wave of infections began in June, following relaxed restrictions in several states, leading to daily cases surpassing 60,000. By mid-October, a third surge of cases began; there were over 200,000 new daily cases during parts of December 2020 and January 2021.
A COVID‑19 vaccine is a vaccine intended to provide acquired immunity against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that causes coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‑19).
Nils Anders Tegnell is a Swedish civil servant and physician specialising in infectious disease. From 2013 until his resignation in March 2022 he was Sweden's state epidemiologist.
Scott William Atlas is an American radiologist, political commentator, and health care policy advisor. He is the Robert Wesson Senior Fellow in health care policy at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank located at Stanford University. During the United States presidential campaigns of 2008, 2012, and 2016, Atlas was a Senior Advisor for Health Care to several presidential candidates. From 1998 to 2012 he was a professor and chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center.
Monica Gandhi is an American physician and professor. She teaches medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and is director of the UCSF Gladstone Center for AIDS Research and the medical director of the San Francisco General Hospital HIV Clinic, Ward 86. Her research considers HIV prevalence in women, as well as HIV treatment and prevention. She has been noted as a critic of some aspects of the COVID-19 lockdowns in the US.
Abraar Karan is an American global health physician and researcher. He was active in the COVID-19 epidemic response in Massachusetts and involved nationally through his contributions to lay press media platforms. He is a columnist at the British Medical Journal, a contributor at the National Public Radio, and regularly writes in the lay press.
The Great Barrington Declaration is an open letter published in October 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns. It claimed harmful COVID-19 lockdowns could be avoided via the fringe notion of "focused protection", by which those most at risk of dying from an infection could purportedly be kept safe while society otherwise took no steps to prevent infection. The envisaged result was herd immunity within three months, as SARS-CoV-2 swept through the population.
JayantaBhattacharya is an American physician-scientist and economist who is a professor of medicine, economics, and health research policy at Stanford University. He is the director of Stanford's Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging. His research focuses on the economics of health care. In November 2024, President-elect Donald Trump named Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health.
Rochelle Paula Walensky is an American physician-scientist who served as the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2021 to 2023 and served as the administrator of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry in her capacity as the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from 2021 to 2023. On May 5, 2023, she announced her resignation, effective June 30, 2023. Prior to her appointment at the CDC, she had served as the chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Walensky is an expert on HIV/AIDS.
The COVID-19 pandemic has created and popularized many terms relating to disease and videoconferencing.
The Janssen COVID‑19 vaccine, (Ad26.COV2.S) sold under the brand name Jcovden, is a COVID‑19 vaccine that was developed by Janssen Vaccines in Leiden, Netherlands, and its Belgian parent company Janssen Pharmaceuticals, a subsidiary of American company Johnson & Johnson.
Joseph Abiodun Ladapo is a Nigerian-American doctor serving as the surgeon general of Florida since 2021. He is best known for his opposition to COVID-19 mitigation measures, and promotion of COVID-19 misinformation, for which he has been rebuked by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Ladapo has promoted unproven treatments, opposed vaccine and mask mandates, questioned the safety of COVID-19 vaccines, and contradicted professional medical organizations.
To boil it all down, if you listen to epidemiologists and public health scientists, you'll soon realize that it's impossible to protect the vulnerable from a virus that's rapidly spreading among the entire population, even if the risk of death or severe disease is much lower in the young.;
A group of scientists is pushing back on renewed calls for a herd-immunity approach to Covid-19, calling the method of managing viral outbreaks dangerous and unsupported by scientific evidence. ... If immunity wanes after several months, as it does with the flu, patients could be susceptible to the virus after being infected, they said. That, they said, would result in recurrent and potentially large waves of infection, a common occurrence before vaccines were invented.
In order to maintain the illusion that his plan had any relevance in a post-vaccine world, Dr. Kulldorff has been forced to disparage vaccines, lockdowns, and all other measures that limit the spread of the virus.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)-sponsored Vaccine Safety Datalink Project developed a real-time surveillance system and initiated its use in an ongoing study of a new meningococcal vaccine for adolescents.
As herd immunity gains new ground as a possible public health strategy, a growing chorus of public health experts is speaking out against it as an extremely dangerous idea. ... Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director of the World Health Organization, called the herd-immunity strategy unethical. ... In response to the mounting attention, dozens of health researchers from around the globe published what they've called the John Snow Memorandum last Thursday in the medical journal The Lancet.
The mainstream view of epidemiologists and public health experts, including the nation's top infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci and the World Health Organization, is that the best way to get through COVID-19 and protect people who are at risk for serious illness is to not get sick in the first place by wearing masks and practicing social distancing.
A senior administration official told reporters in a background briefing call Monday that the proposed strategy — which has been denounced by other infectious-disease experts and called "fringe" and "dangerous" by National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins — supports what has been Trump's policy for months. ... "What I worry about with this is it's being presented as if it's a major alternative view that's held by large numbers of experts in the scientific community. That is not true," Collins, NIH director, said in an interview.
On Oct. 5, the day after the declaration was made public, the three authors — Dr. Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard — arrived in Washington at the invitation of Dr. Atlas to present their plan to a small but powerful audience: the health and human services secretary, Alex M. Azar II.
Unfortunately, the recent "pause" on using the Johnson & Johnson vaccine will dampen the impact of this success.