Martin Kulldorff

Career Kulldorff was an associate professor at the Department of Community Medicine at the University of Connecticut for five years and an associate professor at the Department of Statistics at Uppsala University for six years. He has also worked as a scientist at the National Institutes of Health in the US. which is widely used, 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. 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.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Kulldorff advised Florida governor Ron DeSantis on health policy. In a 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. and co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration.

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. 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.

In March 2024, Kulldorff announced that Harvard had dismissed him. Kulldorff had refused a COVID vaccination that was required by Mass General Brigham, the hospital through which Harvard employed him as Medical School faculty.

In 2025 Kulldorff, along with Jay Bhattacharya and others, founded the Journal of the Academy of Public Health, with Kulldorff serving as one of two editors-in-chief. The journal only publishes work by members of the newly formed "Academy of Public Health,"and is a subsidiary of the Real Clear Foundation, a conservative donor funded organization.

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. The World Health Organization, the National Institutes of Health and other public-health bodies said such a policy lacked a sound scientific basis. Scientists dismissed the policy as impossible in practice, unethical and pseudoscientific, 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. Francis S. Collins, N.I.H. director at the time, has said the authors were "fringe epidemiologists".

Kulldorff and the other authors met with US officials of the first Trump administration to share their ideas on 5 October 2020, the day after the declaration was made public.

During the pandemic, Kulldorff opposed COVID-19 control measures. The measures he opposed included lockdowns, contact tracing, vaccine mandates, and mask mandates. Kulldorff and Bhattacharya opposed broad vaccine mandates, stating that the mortality risk is "a thousand fold higher" in older people than in younger people.

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 "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."

On 18 March 2021, Kulldorff participated in an online roundtable with the governor 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." In April, YouTube removed the recording of the roundtable, asserting it violated YouTube's policy regarding medical information. At the time the video was published, the Centers for Disease Control recommended universal indoor masking for children two years and older.

Kulldorff was a member of the Vaccine Safety Technical subgroup of CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. In April 2021, he disagreed with the CDC's pause of the Janssen COVID-19 vaccine rollout and argued publicly that the vaccine's benefits outweighed clotting risks, particularly for older people.

In December 2021, Kulldorff published an essay for the Brownstone Institute in which he argued against children receiving vaccinations against COVID-19, falsely claiming that influenza was a greater risk to children than COVID-19. In addition to this, Kulldorff's essay omitted that children who are infected with COVID-19 are at risk for rare but serious conditions, such as MIS-C, with 8,862 confirmed cases of children with MIS-C by March 2023.

On 13 February 2022, Kulldorff tweeted in support of the Canada convoy protest, which was organized to protest against vaccine mandates and other government restrictions regarding COVID-19. In December 2022, Florida Governor Ron 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.

Personal life Kuldorff has written that he has alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency.