A Swedish Harvard professor claims he was fired from the prestigious school for urging Americans to follow his native country’s approach to Covid lockdowns.
Epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff, who was a professor at Harvard for 20 years, said he was fired for attaching his name to the Great Barrington Declaration, a coalition of scientists who opposed blanket shutdowns to suppress the virus, and for speaking publicly on against the government’s response to the pandemic.
The professor aired his grievances in a City Journal editorial this week, claiming he was fired for “clinging to the truth as the world lost its way during the Covid pandemic.”
But the former professor has been accused of making inflammatory comments during the pandemic, at one point comparing children wearing masks to the Taliban’s brutal treatment of women, as well as claiming that unvaccinated Americans would lead to herd immunity in six months.
Harvard professor Martin Kulldorff said he was fired from the university this week. The professor aired his grievances in a City Journal editorial this week, claiming he was fired for “clinging to the truth as the world lost its way during the Covid pandemic.”
Kulldorff alleged that the university ignored data from Sweden, a country that kept schools open and the elderly at home, showing it had the lowest excess mortality among major European countries and less than half that of the United States.
Harvard Communications Director Laura DeCoste told DailyMail.com: ‘Harvard Medical School has affiliation agreements with several Boston hospitals that it does not own or operationally control.
‘Hospital faculty, like Dr. Kulldorff, are employees of the hospital and not Harvard Medical School.
“Therefore, when a faculty member’s hospital employment ends, his or her academic appointment at Harvard Medical School also ends.”
Kulldorff began his career as a professor of medicine at Harvard in 2003, but was on leave last year.
He teamed up with Professor Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford and Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford to write the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020.
The document raised concerns about “how current Covid-19 strategies are forcing our children, the working class and the poor to bear the heaviest burden”.
‘The statement made it clear that there was no scientific census on school closures and many other lockdown measures. However, in response, the attacks intensified and even became slanderous,” Kulldorff wrote in the city diary.
The former teacher has been accused of making inflammatory comments during the pandemic, at one point comparing children wearing masks to the Taliban’s brutal treatment of women.
Kulldorff (left) teamed up with Professor Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford and Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford to write the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020. The document raised concerns about “how current Covid-19 strategies are forcing our children , the working class and the poor to carry the heaviest burden
He went on to explain that he and his colleagues were called “fringe epidemiologists” by Francis Collins, who is “a laboratory scientist with limited public health experience who controls most of the country’s medical research budget.”
“A leading Harvard epidemiologist publicly called the statement ‘an extreme and fringe view,’ equating it with exorcism to cast out demons,” Kulldorff shared.
‘A member of the Harvard Center for Health and Human Rights, who had advocated for school closures, accused me of ‘trolling’ and having ‘idiosyncratic policies,’ falsely claiming that I had ‘sit down…’. . . with Koch money”, “cultivated by right-wing think tanks” and “will not debate with anyone”.
Kulldorff claimed that he tried to convince Harvard to remain open using the Sweden model.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Sweden was one of the few countries that did not enforce strict lockdown mandates.
The nation put the decision in the hands of its citizens, allowing them to make voluntary behavioral changes.
Data published in 2021 by the research platform Our World in Data, based at the University of Oxford, showed that the Scandinavian country suffered almost 1,500 confirmed Covid deaths per million people.
The United States had 32,350 deaths per million people around the same time the report was released in November of that year.
“Covid deaths in Sweden were below average and collateral mortality caused by lockdowns was avoided,” Kulldorff said in the post.
‘However, on July 29, 2020, the New England Journal of Medicine, published by Harvard, published an article by two Harvard professors on whether elementary schools should reopen, without even mentioning Sweden.
‘It was like ignoring the placebo control group when evaluating a new drug. That is not the way to the truth.
In addition to criticizing lockdowns across the United States, Kulldorff also opposed vaccine mandates.
In March 2021, a Twitter user asked Kulldorff if everyone should get the Covid vaccine, to which he responded “No.”
“Thinking that everyone should get vaccinated is as scientifically wrong as thinking that no one should,” the tweet reads.
He went on to explain: “Covid vaccines are important for high-risk older people and their caregivers; those with a previous natural infection do not need them.” Not even children.
Kulldorf broke the news of his firing at X this week, sharing his story in a post he wrote for City Journal.
That tweet was flagged by a content moderator on the site saying it shared “false information about the effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccines” because it differed from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) guidelines at the time.
It was soon labeled as “misleading” and all replies and likes were closed.
The following year, documents detailed how Twitter executives attempted to censor “inconvenient” data about COVI by discrediting doctors and experts who spoke out against vaccines.
And Kulldorff was named among the experts who allegedly spread “misinformation.”
However, a study published in 2023 by the University of Oxford found that Covid was the eighth leading cause of death in children and young people in the US between August 2021 and July 2022.
Researchers revealed that there were 1,300 deaths among children and young people from zero to 19 years old.
That tweet was flagged by a content moderator on the site saying it shared “false information about the effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccines” because it differed from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) guidelines at the time.
While Kulldorff opposed mandatory Covid vaccines, he noted in the post that he helped the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) develop their post-market vaccine safety system.
“Vaccines are a vital medical invention that allows people to gain immunity without the risk of getting sick,” he explained.
‘The smallpox vaccine alone has saved millions of lives. In 2020, the CDC asked me to serve on its Covid-19 Vaccine Safety Technical Working Group.’
Kulldorff went on to claim that “Covid vaccines were not designed properly.”
“While they demonstrated short-term efficacy of vaccines against symptomatic infection, they were not designed to assess hospitalization and death, which is what matters,” he said.
A 2023 study led by the CDC determined that “first-generation Covid-19 mRNA vaccines were associated with protection against Covid-19 during predominant periods of the Omicron BA.4/BA.5 sublineage, but protection decreased over time”.
The study included 82,229 emergency department or urgent care visits and 21,007 hospitalizations for Covid-19-like illnesses.
Those hospitalized received three doses of the vaccine, providing a 68 percent efficacy rate, but that rate dropped to a 36 percent efficacy rate 120 days after receiving the shot.
Kulldorff also mentioned that the CDC will suspend the J&J vaccine in 2021 due to reports of blood clots in women under 50 years old.
‘I argued in an op-ed that the J&J vaccine should not be suspended for older Americans. This is what got me in trouble,” she wrote.
‘I’m probably the only person fired by the CDC for being too pro-vaccine.
‘Although the CDC lifted the pause four days later, the damage had already been done. No doubt some older Americans died because of this vaccine “pause.”
He argued that the world realized in 2021 that “immunity acquired by Covid is superior to immunity acquired by vaccine.”
Kulldorff began his career as a professor of medicine at Harvard in 2003, but was on leave last year.
However, Kulldorff cited the only paper that publishes such claims: a study conducted by researchers in Tel Aviv.
Johns Hopkins shared its opinion on the study, noting that it had not been peer-reviewed.
“These findings should not be taken as confirmation that becoming infected is a better overall protection option than the highly effective vaccines that are available, as only those who survived the initial infection were eligible for analysis,” the university shared in a statement. release.
Kulldorff concluded the post by saying that Harvard professors “diligently seek truth in a wide variety of fields,” but truth “has not been the guiding principle of Harvard leaders.”
‘The search for truth requires academic freedom with open, passionate and civilized scientific discourse, with zero tolerance for slander, harassment or cancellation,’ he added.