Martin Kulldorff

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Martin Kulldorff
Martin Kulldorff.jpg
Born1962 (age 59–60)[1]
Lund, Sweden[1]
NationalitySwedish
Alma materUmeå University
Cornell University
Known forCo-author of Great Barrington Declaration
Scientific career
InstitutionsHarvard 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. From 2015 to 2021, he was a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and biostatistician at the Brigham and Women's Hospital.[2][3] He is a member of the Food and Drug Administration's Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee and a former consultant for the Centers for Disease Control.[1][4]

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, while claiming that vulnerable people could be protected from the virus.[5] The Declaration was criticized on grounds of being unethical and infeasible and was widely rejected.[6]

During the pandemic, Kulldorff opposed disease control measures such as lockdowns, contact tracing, and mask mandates.[5][7][8]

Early life and education[edit]

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] He then moved to the United States for his postgraduate studies as a Fulbright fellow,[1] obtaining a PhD in operations research from Cornell University in 1989. His PhD thesis, titled Optimal Control of Favorable Games with a Time Limit, was written under the direction of David Clay Heath.[9]

Career[edit]

Biostatistics[edit]

He developed a free SaTScan software program used for geographical and hospital disease surveillance[10] 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.[11] 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.[12][13][non-primary source needed]

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.[14][15][16]

Kulldorff was a member of the CDC's Vaccine Safety Technical subgroup.[4] 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.[4][Note 1][Note 2][17] Kulldorff said the CDC fired him after the disagreement.[18]

Kulldorff is a member of the Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee at the FDA.[1][19]

COVID-19 pandemic[edit]

Further information: Great Barrington Declaration

Kulldorff was one of the three authors, along with Sunetra Gupta and Jay Bhattacharya, of the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020, which made the claim that lower-risk groups could develop COVID-19 herd immunity through infection while vulnerable groups could be protected from the virus.[20][21] The World Health Organization, the National Institutes of Health and other public-health bodies said such a policy lacked a sound scientific basis,[22][23][24][25][26] and scientists dismissed the document as impossible in practice, unethical and as pseudoscience,[27] and warned that attempting to implement it could cause many unnecessary deaths with the potential of recurrent waves of disease spread as immunity decreases over time.[verification needed][23] Kulldorff and the other authors met with officials of the Trump administration to share their ideas on October 5, 2020, the day after the declaration was made public.[28]

Kulldorff has opposed COVID-19 lockdowns, contact tracing and mask mandates during the pandemic, and has appeared at media events to support the Great Barrington Declaration.[29][5][30][31][32][8] Kulldorff has spoken out against vaccine passports, contending that they harm the working class.[33] Kulldorff supports COVID-19 vaccinations for "older people" but questions whether younger adults and children should be vaccinated against COVID-19, and contends that "vaccine mandates are unethical".[34][non-primary source needed]

In a September 2020 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Bhattacharya and Kulldorff argued that COVID-19 testing should not be used to "check asymptomatic children to see if it is safe for them to come to school" and that "strategic age-targeted viral testing will protect older people from deadly COVID-19 exposure and children and young adults from needless school closures."[5][35]

On March 18, 2021, Kulldorff participated in an online roundtable with the governor of 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."[36] In April, YouTube removed the recording of the roundtable, asserting it violated YouTube's policy regarding medical information.[37][38] The Centers for Disease Control recommended universal indoor masking for children 2 years and older.[36][39]

In 2021, Kulldorff was named a senior scientific director at the Brownstone Institute, a new think tank launched by Jeffrey Tucker that publishes articles challenging various measures against COVID-19, presenting research supporting authors' opinions, and discussing alternative measures.[40] Bhattacharya and 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.[7]

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.[41]

On February 13, 2022, Kulldorff tweeted in support of the Canada convoy protest,[42] which was organized to protest against vaccine mandates and other government restrictions regarding COVID-19.[43][44][45]

Notes[edit]

  1. ^ "The U.S. has extensive supplies of shots that haven’t been linked to clots from Moderna Inc. and the partnership of Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE, and those may be a better option for people under 50, who appear more vulnerable to the side effect, said Martin Kulldorff, a member of the panel’s Vaccine Safety Technical subgroup."
  2. ^ "The big problem to pause this is for people over 50," said Kulldorff, who’s also a biostatistician and epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School. "They really need this vaccine; it’s older people who are dying, and we need to vaccinate as many as possible."

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b c d e f "Harvard statistician appointed honorary doctor at the Faculty of Science and Technology". www.umu.se. Umeå University. August 10, 2020. Retrieved March 18, 2021.
  2. ^ "Martin Kulldorff, PhD". Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center. Retrieved February 13, 2021.
  3. ^ "Martin Kulldorff". LinkedIn. Retrieved January 11, 2022.
  4. ^ a b c Peebles, Angelica (April 21, 2021). "J&J Shot's Future Depends on 15 Cautious Vaccine Experts". Bloomberg. Retrieved September 2, 2021.
  5. ^ a b c d D'Ambrosio, Amanda (October 19, 2020). "Who Are the Scientists Behind the Great Barrington Declaration?". www.medpagetoday.com. Retrieved January 22, 2021.
  6. ^ "Trying to reach herd immunity is 'unethical' and unprecedented, WHO head says". Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. Retrieved February 20, 2022.
  7. ^ a b D'Ambrosio, Amanda (November 11, 2021). "New Institute Has Ties to the Great Barrington Declaration". www.medpagetoday.com. Retrieved November 27, 2021.
  8. ^ 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.
  9. ^ Martin Kulldorff at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  10. ^ Blair, Kimberly (October 26, 2014). "UWF students turn quality-of-life data detectives". Pensacola News Journal. Retrieved February 9, 2022.
  11. ^ 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.
  12. ^ "Package 'Sequential'" (PDF). February 21, 2021. Retrieved March 22, 2021.
  13. ^ "Spatial and Space-Time Scan Statistics". surveillance.cancer.gov. Retrieved January 13, 2022.
  14. ^ 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. ISSN 0025-7079. 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.
  15. ^ "Harvard Catalyst Profiles: Martin Kulldorff". Harvard Catalyst. Retrieved January 15, 2022.
  16. ^ 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. PMID 29446176.
  17. ^ Kulldorff, Martin (April 17, 2021). "The dangers of pausing the J&J vaccine". TheHill. Retrieved January 16, 2022. Unfortunately, the recent “pause” on using the Johnson & Johnson vaccine will dampen the impact of this success.
  18. ^ Kulldorff, Martin (December 4, 2021). "I am probably the only person fired by CDC for being too pro-vaccine. Any others?". Twitter. Retrieved January 22, 2022.
  19. ^ Research, Center for Drug Evaluation and (February 4, 2022). "Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee Roster". FDA.
  20. ^ Gorski, David. "The Great Barrington Declaration: COVID-19 deniers follow the path laid down by creationists, HIV/AIDS denialists, and climate science deniers". Science-Based Medicine.
  21. ^ 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.
  22. ^ Zilbermints, Regina (October 15, 2020). "Dozens of public health groups, experts blast 'herd immunity' strategy backed by White House". TheHill. Retrieved January 22, 2022.
  23. ^ a b Hernandez, Sarah Toy and Daniela (October 18, 2020). "Scientists Push Back on Herd-Immunity Approach to Covid-19". 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.
  24. ^ 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.
  25. ^ Swanson, Ian (October 5, 2020). "Trump health official meets with doctors pushing herd immunity". TheHill. 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.
  26. ^ 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.
  27. ^
  28. ^ 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.
  29. ^ Varadarajan, Tunku (October 23, 2020). "Opinion | Epidemiologists Stray From the Covid Herd". Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660. Retrieved January 22, 2021.
  30. ^ 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.
  31. ^ "Anti-lockdown advocate appears on radio show that has featured Holocaust deniers". the Guardian. October 19, 2020. Retrieved March 11, 2021.
  32. ^ Musgrave, Jane. "Coronavirus: DeSantis lays groundwork to overturn local mask mandates, chides 'lockdown' states". The Palm Beach Post. Retrieved August 27, 2021.
  33. ^ "Gov. DeSantis: Vaccine passports are 'totally unacceptable'". NBC2 News. March 18, 2021. Retrieved August 27, 2021.
  34. ^ Kulldorff, Martin; Bhattacharya, Jay (June 17, 2021). "The ill-advised push to vaccinate the young". The Hill. Retrieved September 2, 2021.
  35. ^ Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, The Case Against Covid Tests for the Young and Healthy, Wall Street Journal (September 3, 2020).
  36. ^ a b "YouTube removes video of DeSantis coronavirus roundtable". Tampa Bay Times. Retrieved February 14, 2022.
  37. ^ Washington, District of Columbia 1800 I. Street NW; Dc 20006. "PolitiFact - Censorship or misinformation? DeSantis and YouTube spar over COVID roundtable takedown". @politifact. Retrieved February 14, 2022.
  38. ^ Knight, Victoria (April 21, 2021). "Censorship or Misinformation? DeSantis and YouTube Spar Over Covid Roundtable Takedown". Kaiser Health News. Retrieved February 14, 2022.
  39. ^ CDC (January 28, 2022). "Guidance for Operating Early Care and Education/Child Care Programs". Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Retrieved February 14, 2022.
  40. ^ "About Brownstone Institute ⋆ Brownstone Institute". Brownstone Institute. Retrieved January 14, 2022.
  41. ^ Bragman, Walker; Kotch, Alex (December 22, 2021). "How The Koch Network Hijacked The War On COVID". The Daily Poster. Retrieved January 19, 2022.
  42. ^ Butler, Kiera (February 15, 2022). "These doctors' groups are cheering on the anti-vax truckers". Mother Jones. Retrieved March 4, 2022.
  43. ^ "Heavy police presence as truckers arrive in downtown Ottawa". Ottawa. January 28, 2022. Retrieved March 5, 2022.
  44. ^ "Truck convoy rolls into Kingston, Ont". Ottawa. January 27, 2022. Retrieved March 5, 2022.
  45. ^ "'Freedom Convoy' highlights frustrations over COVID-19 mandates". therecord.com. January 27, 2022. Retrieved March 5, 2022.

External links[edit]

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