🌊 Fired from Harvard

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A Dangerous Man

Sitting in an office in Worcester, Massachusetts, the mild-mannered Martin Kulldorff seems neither fringe nor dangerous. Yet that’s exactly what the director of the NIH labeled him in 2020.

Dr. Kulldorff was born in Sweden but spent a chunk of his childhood living in Texas. He arrived there at age eight speaking no English, but quickly picked up the local culture, taking to wearing a cowboy hat and boots. When he returned to the US a decade later, it was to a very different place: The Ivy League, where he was pursuing a doctorate at Cornell University.

Kulldorff received that PhD and went on to become a US government employee at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). His work in biostatistics – which focused on applying statistics to public health – landed him jobs at Harvard Medical School and the Harvard-affiliated Mass General Brigham Hospital.

By 2020, Kulldorff had over 20 years of experience in predicting pandemics and analyzing vaccine safety. To quote his LinkedIn, “I develop statistical and epidemiological methods for the detection and monitoring of disease outbreaks.”

Few people on Earth were as well-positioned to advise on the pandemic response as him.

By February 2020, Kulldorff says, “it was obvious that this was going to hit the whole world. There was no way to stop it.”

“I was scared for about 10, 20 minutes,” he told Roca, “because I immediately looked at the data from Wuhan…And we didn't know then what the infection fatality rate is, like the risk of dying if you get infected.

“But I could see that the people who died in Wuhan were mostly older people. But obviously, everybody was infected, all age groups. Since it was only the older people who died, I could do a back of the envelope calculation. And it was clear that there was more than a thousand-fold difference in mortality rates from the old and the young.”

Kulldorff concluded that the US needed an approach like that his native Sweden would take, namely: Protecting the vulnerable while keeping schools and businesses open.

But when he tried to share this view, it was silenced.

Rather than joining a debate about the best lockdown policy, Kulldorff found himself boxed out of decisions that had already been made up. Beginning with Harvard – which in closing its campus set an example for other universities to follow – his opinions fell on ears that were deaf or refused to listen. The media, meanwhile, declined to publish his articles.

When we asked Kulldorff why he diverged from the scientific consensus, he said there was no consensus: A majority of his Harvard colleagues privately agreed with him, he claimed, but wouldn’t say so publicly. In Sweden, a fierce debate was playing out in government and the press; in the US, only one side of the conversation was shared with the public.

As Kulldorff continued to share his views, he found himself blacklisted on social media and attacked in the press. In October 2020, the difficulty in disseminating these views led him and two other prominent scientists – one from Stanford and one from Oxford – to author the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter that called for an end to lockdowns and “focused protection” of high-risk groups.

Days later, the US government went on the offensive: “This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists…seems to be getting a lot of attention,” wrote NIH Director Francis Collins to Dr. Anthony Fauci on October 8. “There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises.”

A week later, Dr. Collins told The Washington Post, “This is not mainstream science. It’s dangerous.”

Thus fell Martin Kulldorff from leading expert at one of the world’s most established institutions to the fringe. He’d soon be suspended from social media, fired from his hospital, and, eventually, Harvard.

Dr. Kulldorff is the first-ever guest on Roca’s We the 66 podcast, which we are thrilled to share below. It’s also on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

This podcast is named for the 66% of Americans who do not trust the media. Our goal is to answer the question of why that figure is so large. Dr. Kulldorff’s story helps do so, whether you agree with him or not.

We’ll be back later this week. We hope you enjoy, and thanks for reading Roca. If you support our mission and want to continue receiving these premium articles, you can become a paid subscriber here.

Sincerely,

Max F and Max T

RocaNews co-founders