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We Now Know What Will Get One Fired From Harvard

Leah Barkoukis
Leah Barkoukis  |  March 19, 2024 8:00 AM

At Harvard, Claudine Gay’s short tenure showed the world that you can botch your response to antisemitism on campus, dig a bigger hole for the University during congressional testimony about that response, and then rack up plagiarism allegation after plagiarism allegation and not much will happen to you. Sure, the former president ended up stepping down after the pressure was finally too great, but she’s still on faculty at Harvard getting her $900,000 salary.

Carol Swain, one of the academics whose work Gay allegedly ripped off, argued at the time that had Gay been a white male, she would have been treated very differently and given the boot far sooner in the saga than she was. Which leads us to Harvard’s treatment of Martin Kulldorff.

In a piece for City Journal, the former professor of medicine at the University details what will get one fired at Harvard: defending the truth. 

Despite its motto of veritas, Kulldorff says it is no longer a “guiding principle of Harvard leaders.”

So, what was the biostatistician and infectious-disease epidemiologist’s transgression? Speaking out on COVID lockdowns and vaccine mandates.  

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Together with Gupta and Jay Bhattacharya at Stanford, I wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, arguing for age-based focused protection instead of universal lockdowns, with specific suggestions for how better to protect the elderly, while letting children and young adults live close to normal lives.

With the Great Barrington Declaration, the silencing was broken. While it is easy to dismiss individual scientists, it was impossible to ignore three senior infectious-disease epidemiologists from three leading universities. The declaration made clear that no scientific consensus existed for school closures and many other lockdown measures. In response, though, the attacks intensified—and even grew slanderous. Collins, a lab scientist with limited public-health experience who controls most of the nation’s medical research budget, called us “fringe epidemiologists” and asked his colleagues to orchestrate a “devastating published takedown.” Some at Harvard obliged.

A prominent Harvard epidemiologist publicly called the declaration “an extreme fringe view,” equating it with exorcism to expel demons. 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.” (A concern for those less privileged does not automatically make you right-wing!) Others at Harvard worried about my “scientifically inaccurate” and “potentially dangerous position,” while “grappling with the protections offered by academic freedom.”  

Though powerful scientists, politicians, and the media vigorously denounced it, the Great Barrington Declaration gathered almost a million signatures, including tens of thousands from scientists and health-care professionals. We were less alone than we had thought. […]

My former employer, the Mass General Brigham hospital system, employs the majority of Harvard Medical School faculty. It is the single largest recipient of NIH funding—over $1 billion per year from U.S. taxpayers. As part of the offensive against the Great Barrington Declaration, one of Mass General’s board members, Rochelle Walensky, a fellow Harvard professor who had served on the advisory council to NIH director Collins, engaged me in a one-directional “debate.” After a Boston radio station interviewed me, Walensky came on as the official representative of Mass General Brigham to counter me, without giving me an opportunity to respond. A few months later, she became the new CDC director.

At this point, it was clear that I faced a choice between science or my academic career. I chose the former. What is science if we do not humbly pursue the truth? (City Journal)

That was the 2020 controversy. The following year, a new one emerged with the COVID vaccines. He was kicked off the CDC’s Covid-19 Vaccine Safety Technical Work Group because he took issue with the brief pause on Johnson & Johnson’s shot over blood clots in younger Americans, arguing they should continue for older Americans. He also spoke out about the “unscientific and unethical” mandates and particularly the campaign against natural immunity. 

With a genetic condition called alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, which leaves me with a weakened immune system, I had more reason to be personally concerned about Covid than most Harvard professors. I expected that Covid would hit me hard, and that’s precisely what happened in early 2021, when the devoted staff at Manchester Hospital in Connecticut saved my life. But it would have been wrong for me to let my personal vulnerability to infections influence my opinions and recommendations as a public-health scientist, which must focus on everyone’s health.

The beauty of our immune system is that those who recover from an infection are protected if and when they are re-exposed. This has been known since the Athenian Plague of 430 BC—but it is no longer known at Harvard. Three prominent Harvard faculty coauthored the now infamous “consensus” memorandum in The Lancet, questioning the existence of Covid-acquired immunity. By continuing to mandate the vaccine for students with a prior Covid infection, Harvard is de facto denying 2,500 years of science.

Since mid-2021, we have known, as one would expect, that Covid-acquired immunity is superior to vaccine-acquired immunity. Based on that, I argued that hospitals should hire, not fire, nurses and other hospital staff with Covid-acquired immunity, since they have stronger immunity than the vaccinated.

Vaccine mandates are unethical. The RCTs mainly enrolled young and middle-aged adults, but observational studies showed that Covid vaccines prevented Covid hospitalizations and deaths for older people. Amid a worldwide vaccine shortage, it was unethical to force the vaccine on low-risk students or those like me who were already immune from having had Covid, while my 87-year-old neighbor and other high-risk older people around the world could not get the shot. Any pro-vaccine person should, for this reason alone, have opposed the Covid vaccine mandates.

For scientific, ethical, public health, and medical reasons, I objected both publicly and privately to the Covid vaccine mandates. I already had superior infection-acquired immunity; and it was risky to vaccinate me without proper efficacy and safety studies on patients with my type of immune deficiency. This stance got me fired by Mass General Brigham—and consequently fired from my Harvard faculty position.

While several vaccine exemptions were given by the hospital, my medical exemption request was denied. I was less surprised that my religious exemption request was denied: “Having had COVID disease, I have stronger longer lasting immunity than those vaccinated (Gazit et al). Lacking scientific rationale, vaccine mandates are religious dogma, and I request a religious exemption from COVID vaccination.”

If Harvard and its hospitals want to be credible scientific institutions, they should rehire those of us they fired. (City Journal)

As National Review notes, he was put on a leave of absence at Harvard Medical School after getting fired from the hospital system, and was kept in that state long enough that he "was terminated as a matter of policy" since one can only retain their position at Harvard Medical School with an active appointment at an affiliated hospital. 

There is currently a Change.org petition to reinstate Kulldorff at Harvard Medical School with over 5,000 signatures.