Biography:Martin Kulldorff

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Short description: Professor of medicine, biostatistician
Martin Kulldorff
Martin Kulldorff.jpg
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
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 has been a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School since 2003, though on leave as of 2023.[2][3] 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 US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.[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 before vaccines became available, while promoting the false promise that vulnerable people could be protected from the virus.[5][6][7][8] 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.[9]

During the pandemic, Kulldorff opposed disease control measures such as vaccination of children, lockdowns, contact tracing, and mask mandates.[6][10][11][12]

Early life and education

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 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.[13]

Career

Kulldorff was an associate professor at the Department of Community Medicine at the University of Connecticut[14] (US) (five years) and an associate professor at the Department of Statistics at Uppsala University (Sweden) (six years).[15][third-party source needed] He also worked as a scientist at the National Institutes of Health for four years.[15][third-party source needed] 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.[3]

Kulldorff developed SaTScan, a free software program used for geographical and hospital disease surveillance[16] which is widely used,[17][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][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.[22][2][23]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Kulldorff advised Florida governor Ron DeSantis on health policy. In an 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.[10]

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]

Views on COVID-19

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.[8] 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.[8] The document stated that lower-risk groups would develop herd immunity through infection while vulnerable groups should be protected from the virus.[28][29] The World Health Organization, the National Institutes of Health and other public-health bodies said such a policy lacked a sound scientific basis.[30][7][31][32][33] Scientists dismissed the policy as impossible in practice, unethical and pseudoscientific,[5] 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.[7] 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.[34]

During the pandemic Kulldorff has opposed COVID-19 disease control measures.[12] The measures opposed include lockdowns, contact tracing,[35] vaccine mandates, and mask mandates.[6][36][11] He has spoken out against vaccine passports, stating they disproportionately harm the working class.[37] Kulldorff and Bhattacharya opposed broad vaccine mandates, stating that the mortality risk is "a thousand fold higher" in older people than in younger people.[38][6][36] He has argued against COVID vaccinations for children, saying that the risks outweigh the benefits.[8]

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".[6][39]

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."[40] In April, YouTube removed the recording of the roundtable, asserting it violated YouTube's policy regarding medical information.[41] At the time the video was published, the Centers for Disease Control recommended universal indoor masking for children 2 years and older.[40][42]

Kulldorff was a member of the Vaccine Safety Technical subgroup of CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.[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][43]

In December 2021 Kulldorff published an error-laden essay for the Brownstone Institute in which he falsely claimed that influenza was more hazardous to children than COVID-19, and on that basis illogically argued against children receiving COVID-19 vaccination. In reality, influenza had been responsible for one child death in the 2020/21 season, while public health mitigation of COVID-19 was in place – COVID-19 had, in contrast, killed more than 1,000.[25]

On 13 February 2022, Kulldorff tweeted in support of the Canada convoy protest,[44] which was organized to protest against vaccine mandates and other government restrictions regarding COVID-19.[45] 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.[46]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 Söderbergh, Ingrid (August 10, 2020). "Harvard statistician appointed honorary doctor at the Faculty of Science and Technology". Umeå University. https://www.umu.se/en/news/harvard-statistician-appointed-honorary-doctor-at-the-faculty-of-science-and-technology_9277314/. 
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 "Harvard Catalyst Profiles: Martin Kulldorff". https://connects.catalyst.harvard.edu/Profiles/display/Person/78448. 
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 "Martin Kulldorff, PhD". https://www.dfhcc.harvard.edu/insider/member-detail/member/martin-kulldorff-phd/. 
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Peebles, Angelica (April 21, 2021). "J&J Shot's Future Depends on 15 Cautious Vaccine Experts". https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-21/j-j-shot-s-u-s-future-depends-on-15-cautious-vaccine-experts. 
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 D'Ambrosio, Amanda (October 19, 2020). "Who Are the Scientists Behind the Great Barrington Declaration?" (in en). https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/89204. 
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Toy, Sarah; Hernandez, Daniela (October 18, 2020). "Scientists Push Back on Herd-Immunity Approach to Covid-19" (in en-US). The Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660. https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-touts-document-calling-for-herd-immunity-approach-to-covid-19-crisis-11603051550. "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." 
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 Gorski, David (14 March 2022). "Old antivax tropes never die: 'COVID theater,' 'Urgency of Normal,' and the Great Barrington Declaration". Science-Based Medicine. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/covid-theater-urgency-of-normal-gbd/. 
  9. ↑ Farzan, Antonia Noori; Berger, Miriam. "Trying to reach herd immunity is 'unethical' and unprecedented, WHO head says" (in en-US). The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2020/10/13/herd-immunity-coronavirus-unethical-who/. 
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 D'Ambrosio, Amanda (November 11, 2021). "New Institute Has Ties to the Great Barrington Declaration" (in en). https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/95601. 
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 "Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis Pushes Through Pardons For Mask Mandate And COVID-19 Violators" (in en-US). June 16, 2021. https://miami.cbslocal.com/2021/06/16/florida-gov-ron-desantis-pardons-mask-mandate-covid-19-violators/. 
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 "Lockdowns 'Postponed the Inevitable'. Is That a Bad Thing?". Science-Based Medicine. 28 August 2022. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/isthatbad/. "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." 
  13. ↑ Martin Kulldorff at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  14. ↑ "History". February 27, 2017. https://health.uconn.edu/public-health-sciences/about-us/history/. 
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 "Martin Kulldorff". https://www.linkedin.com/in/martin-kulldorff-8a31a775. 
  16. ↑ Blair, Kimberly (October 26, 2014). "UWF students turn quality-of-life data detectives". Pensacola News Journal. https://www.pnj.com/story/news/2014/10/26/uwf-students-turn-quality-life-data-detectives/17983773/. 
  17. ↑ Elias, Johannes; Harmsen, Dag; Claus, Heike; Hellenbrand, Wiebke; Frosch, Matthias; Vogel, Ulrich (2006). "Spatiotemporal Analysis of Invasive Meningococcal Disease, Germany". Emerging Infectious Diseases 12 (11): 1689–1695. PMID 17283618. PMC 3372358. https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/16407. 
  18. ↑ Yang, Shu-qin; Fang, Zheng-gang; Lv, Cai-xia; An, Shu-yi; Guan, Peng; Huang, De-sheng; Wu, Wei (February 2022). "Spatiotemporal cluster analysis of COVID-19 and its relationship with environmental factors at the city level in mainland China". Environmental Science and Pollution Research 29 (9): 13386–13395. doi:10.1007/s11356-021-16600-9. PMID 34595708. 
  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. PMID 31769079. 
  20. ↑ "Package 'Sequential'". February 21, 2021. https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/Sequential/Sequential.pdf. 
  21. ↑ "Spatial and Space-Time Scan Statistics". https://surveillance.cancer.gov/satscan/. 
  22. ↑ Lieu, Tracy A.; Kulldorff, Martin; Davis, Robert L.; Lewis, Edwin M.; Weintraub, Eric; Yih, Katherine; Yin, Ruihua; Brown, Jeffrey S. et al. (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. PMID 17909389. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40221562. "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 et al. (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. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29446176/. 
  24. ↑ 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. 2023. ISBN 9781959346036. 
  25. ↑ 25.0 25.1 "I Disagree With an Article Called 'Vaccines Save Lives'". Science-Based Medicine. 23 December 2021. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/i-disagree-with-an-article-called-vaccines-save-lives/. 
  26. ↑ "About Brownstone Institute" (in en-US). https://brownstone.org/about/. 
  27. ↑ Bragman, Walker; Kotch, Alex (December 22, 2021). "How The Koch Network Hijacked The War On COVID" (in en). https://www.dailyposter.com/how-the-koch-network-hijacked-the-war-on-covid/. 
  28. ↑ 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". https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/great-barrington-declaration/. 
  29. ↑ Burki, Talha Khan (February 1, 2021). "Herd immunity for COVID-19" (in English). The Lancet Respiratory Medicine 9 (2): 135–136. doi:10.1016/S2213-2600(20)30555-5. ISSN 2213-2600. PMID 33245861. 
  30. ↑ Zilbermints, Regina (October 15, 2020). "Dozens of public health groups, experts blast 'herd immunity' strategy backed by White House" (in en). https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/521159-dozens-of-public-health-groups-experts-blast-herd-immunity-strategy-backed. 
  31. ↑ Gordon, Elana (October 20, 2020). "Public health experts warn against herd immunity strategy to manage COVID-19" (in en). https://www.pri.org/stories/2020-10-20/public-health-experts-warn-against-herd-immunity-strategy-manage-covid-19. "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." 
  32. ↑ Swanson, Ian (October 5, 2020). "Trump health official meets with doctors pushing herd immunity" (in en). https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/519727-trump-health-official-meets-with-doctors-pushing-herd-immunity. "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." 
  33. ↑ Achenbach, Joel (October 14, 2020). "Proposal to hasten herd immunity to the coronavirus grabs White House attention but appalls top scientists". The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/covid-herd-immunity/2020/10/10/3910251c-0a60-11eb-859b-f9c27abe638d_story.html. "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." 
  34. ↑ Mandavilli, Apoorva; Stolberg, Sheryl Gay (October 19, 2020). "A Viral Theory Cited by Health Officials Draws Fire From Scientists" (in en-US). The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/19/health/coronavirus-great-barrington.html. "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." 
  35. ↑ Musgrave, Jane. "Coronavirus: DeSantis lays groundwork to overturn local mask mandates, chides 'lockdown' states" (in en-US). https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/coronavirus/2021/03/18/coronavirus-desantis-lays-groundwork-overturn-local-mask-mandates/4748407001/. 
  36. ↑ 36.0 36.1 Lenzer, Jeanne (October 7, 2020). "Covid-19: Group of UK and US experts argues for "focused protection" instead of lockdowns" (in en). BMJ 371: m3908. doi:10.1136/bmj.m3908. ISSN 1756-1833. PMID 33028622. https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m3908. 
  37. ↑ "Gov. DeSantis: Vaccine passports are 'totally unacceptable'" (in en-US). March 18, 2021. https://nbc-2.com/news/health/2021/03/18/gov-desantis-round-table-vaccine-passports-could-be-detrimental-to-working-class/. 
  38. ↑ Kulldorff, Martin; Bhattacharya, Jay (June 17, 2021). "The ill-advised push to vaccinate the young". The Hill. https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/558757-the-ill-advised-push-to-vaccinate-the-young. Retrieved September 2, 2021. 
  39. ↑ Kulldorff, Martin; Bhattacharya, Jay (3 September 2020). "Opinion, The Case Against Covid Tests for the Young and Healthy". The Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-case-against-covid-tests-for-the-young-and-healthy-11599151722. 
  40. ↑ 40.0 40.1 Wilson, Kirby; Ross, Allison (April 9, 2021). "YouTube removes video of DeSantis coronavirus roundtable" (in en). Tampa Bay Times. https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida-politics/2021/04/09/youtube-removes-video-of-desantis-coronavirus-roundtable/. 
  41. ↑ Knight, Victoria. "Censorship or misinformation? DeSantis and YouTube spar over COVID roundtable takedown" (in en-US). https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/apr/21/censorship-or-misinformation-desantis-and-youtube-/. 
  42. ↑ CDC (January 28, 2022). "Guidance for Operating Early Care and Education/Child Care Programs" (in en-us). https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/schools-childcare/child-care-guidance.html. 
  43. ↑ Kulldorff, Martin (April 17, 2021). "The dangers of pausing the J&J vaccine" (in en). https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/548817-the-dangers-of-pausing-the-jj-vaccine. "Unfortunately, the recent "pause" on using the Johnson & Johnson vaccine will dampen the impact of this success." 
  44. ↑ Butler, Kiera (February 15, 2022). "These doctors' groups are cheering on the anti-vax truckers" (in en-US). https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/02/ottawa-convoy-protest-promoters-elite-medical-credentials-financial-incentives-astroturf-libertarian/. 
  45. ↑ Woods, Michael; Pringle, Josh (January 27, 2022). "Truck convoy rolls into Kingston, Ont." (in en). https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/truck-convoy-rolls-into-kingston-ont-1.5756220. 
  46. ↑ Catherman, Caroline (2022-12-13). "DeSantis announces grand jury to investigate 'wrongdoing' around COVID-19 vaccines" (in en-US). https://www.orlandosentinel.com/coronavirus/os-ne-coronavirus-desantis-grand-jury-covid-vaccines-ladapo-research-20221213-owp55jm45bayzmpwvp3wel6f6y-story.html. 

External links



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