An LU blogger never got vaccinated for infectious diseases before attending Harvard Law School. He just relied on a religious exemption, even though he had lost his religion by that point. Harvard didn’t seem to care very much about vaccines.
But Harvard got rid of a world-famous medical professor who had criticized COVID lockdowns and school closings — for not getting the COVID vaccine — even though he had already had the disease and thus felt he didn’t need the vaccine. The College Fix reports:
World-renowned infectious-disease epidemiologist and biostatistician Martin Kulldorff is no longer a professor at Harvard Medical School after refusing the COVID vaccine because he had infection-acquired immunity….
Kulldorff told The Wall Street Journal on Thursday that … he was put on leave from his faculty position, and the university recently ended that limbo with an official termination. He said Harvard and Harvard-affiliated hospitals do not support infection-acquired immunity and would not approve his exemption requests.
Since the COVID lockdowns began four years ago this month, Kulldorff argued that tactics such as social distancing, masking children, vaccines after infections, and other extreme measures were not the best course of action to fight the virus. He co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for sensible tactics that would allow the globe to reach “herd immunity” and has to date been signed by nearly 1 million scientists worldwide.
A petition calling for Kulldorff’s reinstatement with over 2,600 signatures argues that reinstating Kulldorff “will uphold the values of academic freedom and respect for individual autonomy in health decisions that Harvard stands for.”
But Kulldorff, writing in City Journal this week, said Harvard turned its back on him, open debate, and medical freedom.
“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,” he wrote. “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.”
Only last week, Harvard removed its COVID vaccine mandate for incoming students.
“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,” Kulldorff wrote, adding that both his medical and religious exemption requests were denied….
Asked to weigh in on the Kulldorff affair, George Mason University Professor of Law Todd Zywicki said it illustrates the “fascist approach” university leaders and the medical establishment embraced during the pandemic.
“It just shows that all this business about ‘trust the science’ and ‘trust the experts’ is just garbage,” Zywicki said in a telephone interview Thursday with The College Fix. “There was no one more of an expert on this than Kulldorff.”
Kulldorff’s advice has been validated as correct, yet the bureaucratic class has learned nothing and still refuses to acknowledge its missteps, he said, adding “they are not amenable to reason, they don’t have a shred of decency in their souls, and they want conformity and they want to crush people.”
Zywicki, who like Kulldorff has infection-acquired immunity, had sued his employers over their COVID vaccine mandate in a case that was ultimately settled in the professor’s favor in 2021 when GMU approved his exemption request.
Many progressive Harvard professors supported the school closings criticized by Dr. Kulldorf, which did enormous harm to the educations and physical fitness of America’s youth. By driving up obesity rates, school closings harmed students’ health. Many children became fatter when schools closed to in-person learning during the coronavirus pandemic. Childhood obesity rose at the fastest annual rate ever. “Overweight or obesity increased among 5- through 11-year-olds from 36.2% to 45.7% during the pandemic,” reported the Journal of the American Medical Association. Skyrocketing obesity made suffering from the coronavirus worse. “The evidence linking obesity to adverse COVID-19 outcomes is ‘overwhelmingly clear,’” say medical experts. Most people hospitalized for the coronavirus were obese.
Shutting schools actually increases COVID-19 deaths, according to researchers at the University of Edinburgh. Moreover, “Schools do not, in fact, appear to be major spreaders of COVID-19,” said Brown University Professor Emily Oster. There is “little evidence that schools have contributed meaningfully to community transmission,” according to the federal Centers for Disease Control.
COVID vaccination mandates often did not exempt people who had already had COVID and thus felt they didn’t need to get vaccinated because they already had natural immunity as a result. Some people had unusual health conditions that made them worry about taking the vaccine.
On the other hand, the COVID vaccines clearly did reduce mortality against the initial strain of COVID they were targeted against, saving millions of lives when the vaccines first came out. Moreover, coronavirus vaccines sometimes protected against medical problems that are wrongly blamed on the vaccine by ignorant people. A recent study finds that “COVID-19 vaccination reduced the risk of post-COVID-19 cardiac and thromboembolic outcomes.”
The rigidity of the COVID vaccine mandates seems to have caused a backlash against vaccines in general. The mandates did increase the number of people who took the original COVID vaccine, but the ensuing backlash against the mandates resulted in fewer people taking the booster shots, and resulted in people avoiding vaccines other the COVID vaccine. This decline in vaccination rates will increase illness rates for things like measles and the flu.
A recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences confirms this backlash and how it is reducing vaccination rates:
During the COVID-19 pandemic, some US states mandated vaccination for certain citizens. We used state‐level data from the CDC to test whether vaccine mandates predicted changes in COVID-19 vaccine uptake, as well as related voluntary behaviors involving COVID-19 boosters and seasonal influenza vaccines. Results showed that COVID-19 vaccine adoption did not significantly change in the weeks before and after states implemented vaccine mandates, suggesting that mandates did not directly impact COVID-19 vaccination. Compared to states that banned vaccine restrictions, however, states with mandates had lower levels of COVID-19 booster adoption as well as adult and child flu vaccination, especially when residents initially were less likely to vaccinate for COVID-19. This research supports the notion that governmental restrictions in the form of vaccination mandates can have unintended negative consequences, not necessarily by reducing uptake of the mandated vaccine, but by reducing adoption of other voluntary vaccines.
Many of these coronavirus vaccine mandates were imposed by administrative agencies, rather than legislatures, and thus were of dubious legality. The U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Biden administration’s mandate that most workers in the U.S. either be vaccinated for COVID; or wear masks and undergo frequent testing. It found that was beyond the authority of the administration to impose, absent Congressional authorization. The Supreme Court did uphold a separate vaccination requirement for health care workers, though.
