A Swedish Harvard professor claims he was fired by the prestigious school for urging American 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 let go for attaching his name to the Great Barrington Declaration, a coalition of scientists who opposed blanket shutdowns to suppress the virus, and speaking publicly against the government’s response to the pandemic.
The professor aired his grievances in an editorial for City Journal this week, claiming that he was terminated 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, along with claiming 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 an editorial for City Journal this week, claiming that he was terminated 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, which showed it had the lowest excess mortality among major European countries and less than half of the US.
Harvard’s chief communications officer, Laura DeCoste, told DailyMail.com: ‘Harvard Medical School has affiliation agreements with several Boston hospitals which it neither owns nor operationally controls.
‘Hospital-based faculty, such as Dr. Kulldorff, are employed by the hospital and not Harvard Medical School.
‘Therefore, when a faculty member’s hospital employment ends, their 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 at Oxford University and Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya to write the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020.
The document raised concerns about ‘how the current Covid-19 strategies are forcing our children, the working class and the poor to carry the heaviest burden.’
‘The declaration made clear that no scientific census existed for school closures and many other lockdown measures. In response, though, the attacks intensified—and even grew slanderous,’ Kulldorff wrote in the City Journal.
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
Kulldorff (left) teamed up with Professor Sunetra Gupta at Oxford University and Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya to write the Great Barrington Declaration in 2020. The document raised concerns about ‘how the current Covid-19 strategies are forcing our children, the working class and the poor to carry the heaviest burden
He continued to explain that he and his colleagues were called ‘fringe epidemiologists’ by Francis Collins who is ‘a lab scientist with limited public-health experience who controls most of the nation’s medical research budget.’
‘A prominent Harvard epidemiologist publicly called the declaration ‘an extreme fringe view,’ equating it with exorcism to expel demons,’ Kulldorff shared.
‘A member of Harvard’s Center for Health and Human Rights, who had argued for school closures, accused me of ‘trolling’ and having ‘idiosyncratic politics,’ falsely alleging that I was ‘enticed . . . with Koch money,’ ‘cultivated by right-wing think tanks,’ and ‘won’t debate anyone.’
Kulldorff claimed he attempted to convince Harvard to stay open using the blueprint from Sweden.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Sweden was among 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 released in 2021 by Oxford University-based research platform Our World in Data, showed the Scandinavian country suffered almost 1,500 confirmed Covid deaths per million people.
The US had 32,350 deaths per million people around the same time as the report was released in November of that year.
‘Sweden’s Covid deaths were below average, and it avoided collateral mortality caused by lockdowns,’ Kulldorff said in the post.
‘Yet on July 29, 2020, the Harvard-edited New England Journal of Medicine published an article by two Harvard professors on whether primary schools should reopen, without even mentioning Sweden.
‘It was like ignoring the placebo control group when evaluating a new pharmaceutical drug. That’s not the path to truth.’
Along with criticizing lockdowns across the US, Kulldorff also stood on the opposition of vaccine mandates
In March 2021, a Twitter user asked Kulldorff if everyone should get the Covid jab, to which he responded ‘No.’
‘Thinking everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking nobody should,’ the tweet reads.
He continued to explain: ‘Covid vaccines are important for older high-risk people and their care-takers, those with prior natural infection do not need it. Nor children.’
Kulldorf broke the news of his termination on X this week, sharing his story in a post he wrote for City Journal
That tweet was flagged by a content moderator at the site saying it shared ‘false information regarding the efficacy of the Covid-19 vaccines’ because it differed from Centers for Disease Control (CDC) guidelines at the time.
It was soon labeled as ‘misleading,’ and all replies and likes were shut off.
The following year, documents detailed how Twitter executives sought to censor ‘inconvenient’ data about COVI by discrediting doctors and experts who spoke out against vaccines.
And Kulldorff was named among the experts deemed to have spread ‘misinformation.’
However, a study published in 2023 by the University of Oxford found Covid was the eighth leading cause of death in children and young people in the US from August 2021 to July 2022.
Researchers revealed there were 1,300 deaths among children and young people aged zero to 19 years.
That tweet was flagged by a content moderator at the site saying it shared ‘false information regarding the efficacy of the Covid-19 vaccines’ because it differed from Centers for Disease Control (CDC) guidelines at the time
While Kulldorff opposed mandated Covid vaccines, he noted in the post that he helped the CDC and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) develop their post-market vaccine safety system.
‘Vaccines are a vital medical invention, allowing people to obtain immunity without the risk that comes from 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 Work Group.’
Kulldorff continued to claim that the ‘Covid vaccines were not properly designed.’
‘While they demonstrated the vaccines’ short-term efficacy against symptomatic infection, they were not designed to evaluate hospitalization and death, which is what matters,’ he said.
A 2023 study led by the CDC determined that the ‘first-generation Covid-19 mRNA vaccines were associated with protection against Covid-19 during the Omicron BA.4/BA.5 sublineage-predominant periods but protection declined over time.’
The study included 82,229 emergency department or urgent care encounters and 21,007 hospitalizations for Covid–19–like illness.
Those hospitalized had three doses of the vaccine, providing a 68 percent effective rate, but that dropped to a 36 percent effective rate 120 days after receiving the jab.
Kulldorff also mentioned the CDC pausing the J&J vaccine in 2021 due to reports of blood clots in women under the age of 50.
‘I argued in an op-ed that the J&J vaccine should not be paused for older Americans. This is what got me in trouble,’ he wrote.
‘I am probably the only person ever fired by the CDC for being too pro-vaccine.
‘While the CDC lifted the pause four days later, the damage was done. Some older Americans undoubtedly died because of this vaccine ‘pause.’
He argued that the world became aware in 2021 that ‘Covid-acquired immunity is superior to vaccine-acquired immunity.’
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 to publish such claims – a study conducted by researchers in Tel Aviv.
Johns Hopkins shared its take on the study, noting it had not been peer-reviewed.
‘These findings should not be taken as an endorsement that getting infected is a better overall option for protection than the highly effective vaccines that are available as only those who survived initial infection were eligible for analysis,’ the university shared in a statement.
Kulldorff concluded the post by saying that Harvard faculty ‘diligently pursue truth in a wide variety of fields,’ but truth ‘not been the guiding principle of Harvard leaders.’
‘The pursuit of truth requires academic freedom with open, passionate, and civilized scientific discourse, with zero tolerance for slander, bullying, or cancellation,’ he added.
