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Martin Kulldorff
Born1962 (age 61–62)[1]
Lund, Sweden[1]
Alma materUmeå University (BSc)
Cornell University (PhD)
Known forCreator of software SaTScan, Co-author of Great Barrington Declaration
FatherGunnar Kulldorff
Scientific career
Fields
InstitutionsNational Cancer Institute
University of Connecticut
Uppsala University
Harvard Medical School
Brigham and Women's Hospital
ThesisOptimal Control of Favorable Games with a Time Limit (1989)
Doctoral advisorDavid 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]

Early life and education

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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]

Career

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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]

Views on COVID-19

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Further information: Great Barrington Declaration

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]

References

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  1. ^ a b c d e f Söderbergh, Ingrid (August 10, 2020). "Harvard statistician appointed honorary doctor at the Faculty of Science and Technology". Umeå University. Umeå University. Retrieved March 18, 2021.
  2. ^ a b "Harvard Catalyst Profiles: Martin Kulldorff". Harvard Catalyst. Retrieved January 15, 2022.
  3. ^ a b Kulldorff, Martin (March 12, 2024). "Harvard Tramples the Truth". City Journal. Retrieved March 14, 2024.
  4. ^ a b "Martin Kulldorff, PhD". Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center. Archived from the original on May 19, 2022. Retrieved September 20, 2022.
  5. ^ a b c Peebles, Angelica (April 21, 2021). "J&J Shot's Future Depends on 15 Cautious Vaccine Experts". Bloomberg. Retrieved September 2, 2021.
  6. ^ a b
  7. ^ a b c d e D'Ambrosio, Amanda (October 19, 2020). "Who Are the Scientists Behind the Great Barrington Declaration?". www.medpagetoday.com. Retrieved January 22, 2021.
  8. ^ a b c Toy, Sarah; Hernandez, Daniela (October 18, 2020). "Scientists Push Back on Herd-Immunity Approach to Covid-19". The Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660. Retrieved August 27, 2021. 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.
  9. ^ a b c d Gorski, David (March 14, 2022). "Old antivax tropes never die: 'COVID theater,' 'Urgency of Normal,' and the Great Barrington Declaration". Science-Based Medicine.
  10. ^ Farzan, Antonia Noori; Berger, Miriam. "Trying to reach herd immunity is 'unethical' and unprecedented, WHO head says". The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved February 20, 2022.
  11. ^ a b D'Ambrosio, Amanda (November 11, 2021). "New Institute Has Ties to the Great Barrington Declaration". www.medpagetoday.com. Retrieved November 27, 2021.
  12. ^ a b "Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis Pushes Through Pardons For Mask Mandate And COVID-19 Violators". CBS Miami. June 16, 2021. Retrieved August 27, 2021.
  13. ^ a b Howard J (August 28, 2022). "Lockdowns 'Postponed the Inevitable'. Is That a Bad Thing?". Science-Based Medicine. 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.
  14. ^ a b "Implementation of Signal Detection Capabilities in the Sentinel System Biographies" (PDF). Margolis Institute for Health Policy. Duke University. Retrieved March 27, 2024.
  15. ^ Martin Kulldorff at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  16. ^ "History". UConn Department of Public Health Sciences. February 27, 2017. Retrieved June 1, 2023.
  17. ^ Blair, Kimberly (October 26, 2014). "UWF students turn quality-of-life data detectives". Pensacola News Journal. Retrieved February 9, 2022.
  18. ^ Elias J, Harmsen D, Claus H, Hellenbrand W, Frosch M, Vogel U (2006). "Spatiotemporal Analysis of Invasive Meningococcal Disease, Germany". Emerging Infectious Diseases. 12 (11): 1689–1695. PMC 3372358. PMID 17283618.
  19. ^ Silva, Ivair; Gagne, Joshua; Najafzadeh, Mehdi; Kulldorff, Martin (November 25, 2019). "Exact sequential analysis for multiple weighted binomial end points". Statistics in Medicine. 39 (3): 340–351. doi:10.1002/sim.8405. PMC 6984739. PMID 31769079.
  20. ^ "Package 'Sequential'" (PDF). February 21, 2021. Retrieved March 22, 2021.
  21. ^ "Spatial and Space-Time Scan Statistics". surveillance.cancer.gov. Retrieved January 13, 2022.
  22. ^ Lieu, Tracy A.; Kulldorff, Martin; Davis, Robert L.; Lewis, Edwin M.; Weintraub, Eric; Yih, Katherine; Yin, Ruihua; Brown, Jeffrey S.; Platt, Richard; Team, Vaccine Safety Datalink Rapid Cycle Analysis (2007). "Real-Time Vaccine Safety Surveillance for the Early Detection of Adverse Events". Medical Care. 45 (10): S89–S95. doi:10.1097/MLR.0b013e3180616c0a. ISSN 0025-7079. JSTOR 40221562. PMID 17909389. S2CID 16950711. 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.
  23. ^ Li, Rongxia; Weintraub, Eric; McNeil, Michael M.; Kulldorff, Martin; Lewis, Edwin M.; Nelson, Jennifer; Xu, Stanley; Qian, Lei; Klein, Nicola P.; Destefano, Frank (April 2018). "Meningococcal conjugate vaccine safety surveillance in the Vaccine Safety Datalink using a tree-temporal scan data mining method". Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety. 27 (4): 391–397. doi:10.1002/pds.4397. ISSN 1099-1557. PMC 10878474. PMID 29446176. S2CID 4537909.
  24. ^ Howard J (2023). We Want Them Infected: How the failed quest for herd immunity led doctors to embrace the anti-vaccine movement and blinded Americans to the threat of COVID. Redhawk Publications. ISBN 9781959346036.
  25. ^ a b c d Howard J (December 23, 2021). "I Disagree With an Article Called 'Vaccines Save Lives'". Science-Based Medicine.
  26. ^ "About Brownstone Institute". Brownstone Institute. Retrieved January 14, 2022.
  27. ^ Bragman, Walker; Kotch, Alex (December 22, 2021). "How The Koch Network Hijacked The War On COVID". The Daily Poster. Retrieved January 19, 2022.
  28. ^ Howard J (March 12, 2024). "Dr. Martin Kulldorff, Who Posted Pictures of Guillotines and Promised Herd Immunity Would Arrive 3-6 Months After Lockdowns Ended, Fired for 'Clinging to the Truth'". Science-Based Medicine.
  29. ^ Gorski, David (October 12, 2020). "The Great Barrington Declaration: COVID-19 deniers follow the path laid down by creationists, HIV/AIDS denialists, and climate science deniers". Science-Based Medicine.
  30. ^ Burki, Talha Khan (February 1, 2021). "Herd immunity for COVID-19". The Lancet Respiratory Medicine. 9 (2): 135–136. doi:10.1016/S2213-2600(20)30555-5. ISSN 2213-2600. PMC 7832483. PMID 33245861.
  31. ^ Zilbermints, Regina (October 15, 2020). "Dozens of public health groups, experts blast 'herd immunity' strategy backed by White House". The Hill. Retrieved January 22, 2022.
  32. ^ Gordon, Elana (October 20, 2020). "Public health experts warn against herd immunity strategy to manage COVID-19". The World from PRX. Retrieved August 27, 2021. 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.
  33. ^ Swanson, Ian (October 5, 2020). "Trump health official meets with doctors pushing herd immunity". The Hill. Retrieved August 27, 2021. 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.
  34. ^ Achenbach, Joel (October 14, 2020). "Proposal to hasten herd immunity to the coronavirus grabs White House attention but appalls top scientists". The Washington Post. 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.
  35. ^ Mandavilli, Apoorva; Stolberg, Sheryl Gay (October 19, 2020). "A Viral Theory Cited by Health Officials Draws Fire From Scientists". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved January 22, 2022. 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.
  36. ^ Musgrave, Jane. "Coronavirus: DeSantis lays groundwork to overturn local mask mandates, chides 'lockdown' states". The Palm Beach Post. Retrieved August 27, 2021.
  37. ^ a b Lenzer, Jeanne (October 7, 2020). "Covid-19: Group of UK and US experts argues for "focused protection" instead of lockdowns". BMJ. 371: m3908. doi:10.1136/bmj.m3908. ISSN 1756-1833. PMID 33028622.
  38. ^ "Gov. DeSantis: Vaccine passports are 'totally unacceptable'". NBC2 News. March 18, 2021. Retrieved August 27, 2021.
  39. ^ Kulldorff, Martin; Bhattacharya, Jay (June 17, 2021). "The ill-advised push to vaccinate the young". The Hill. Retrieved September 2, 2021.
  40. ^ Kulldorff, Martin; Bhattacharya, Jay (September 3, 2020). "Opinion, The Case Against Covid Tests for the Young and Healthy". The Wall Street Journal.
  41. ^ a b Wilson, Kirby; Ross, Allison (April 9, 2021). "YouTube removes video of DeSantis coronavirus roundtable". Tampa Bay Times. Retrieved February 14, 2022.
  42. ^ Knight, Victoria. "Censorship or misinformation? DeSantis and YouTube spar over COVID roundtable takedown". PolitiFact. Retrieved February 14, 2022.
  43. ^ CDC (January 28, 2022). "Guidance for Operating Early Care and Education/Child Care Programs". Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Archived from the original on February 14, 2022. Retrieved February 14, 2022.
  44. ^ Kulldorff, Martin (April 17, 2021). "The dangers of pausing the J&J vaccine". The Hill. Retrieved January 16, 2022. Unfortunately, the recent "pause" on using the Johnson & Johnson vaccine will dampen the impact of this success.
  45. ^ Maltz-Matyschsyk, Michele; K. Melchiorre, Clare; Herbst, Katherine W.; Hogan, Alexander H.; Dibble, Kristina; O'Sullivan, Brandon; Graf, Joerg; Jadhav, Aishwarya; Lawrence, David A.; Lee, William T.; J. Carson, Kyle; Radolf, Justin D.; C. Salazar, Juan; Lynes, Michael A. (March 31, 2023). "Development of a biomarker signature using grating-coupled fluorescence plasmonic microarray for diagnosis of MIS-C". Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology. 11. doi:10.3389/fbioe.2023.1066391. PMC 10102909. PMID 37064248.
  46. ^ Butler, Kiera (February 15, 2022). "These doctors' groups are cheering on the anti-vax truckers". Mother Jones. Retrieved March 4, 2022.
  47. ^ Woods, Michael; Pringle, Josh (January 27, 2022). "Truck convoy rolls into Kingston, Ont". CTV News Ottawa. Retrieved March 5, 2022.
  48. ^ Catherman, Caroline (December 13, 2022). "DeSantis announces grand jury to investigate 'wrongdoing' around COVID-19 vaccines". Orlando Sentinel. Retrieved December 13, 2022.
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