Martin Kulldorff, no longer blacklisted

Fight! Fight! Fight! When Trump appointed Jay Bhattacharya, the director of Stanford University’s Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging, to head the National Institutes of Health (NIH) a few weeks after his election victory in November, I immediately noted that this choice “underlined quite forcefully the certainty that the outsider nature of all of Trump’s picks to head all the health-related agencies in the federal government will led to major changes in how those agencies operate.”

Bhattacharya had been blacklisted for his very vocal opposition to the government’s lockdown and mandate policies during the COVID epidemic. He along with Martin Kulldorff, one of the world’s foremost experts on vaccines and who was also blacklisted during the epidemic, co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration that strongly criticized the policies imposed by these health agencies, calling instead for a return to the standard response to infectious diseases that had been followed successfully for more than a century.

Putting Bhattacharya in charge of NIH is incredibly ironic. When he along with Kulldorff had come out opposed to the lockdown and jab mandates advocated by Francis Collins, then-head of the NIH, Collins in league with Anthony Fauci, then head of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), put together a back-room campaign to have Bhattacharya, Kulldorff, and many others blacklisted across social media. This campaign also had Kulldorff removed as a member of the CDC’s vaccine safety advisory committee.

My prediction that the outside nature of Trump’s appointments was going to signal major changes continues to hold true, and was further underlined with the announcement on June 29, 2025 that Kulldorff has now been re-appointed to the CDC’s vaccine advisory board as part of the major house-cleaning that Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. announced in early June, when he removed all seventeen members of the board. As noted in the previous link:

One of Kennedy’s concerns … is that previous members of the committee had incentives to selectively push for vaccines they would financially benefit from. The new eight members, such as Kulldorff, are free from such bias, he says.

Kulldorff’s qualifications are however far more important than being free from financial bias. When he was first fired from the vaccine board in April 2021, I documented his qualifications in detail, including this opinion by one of his colleagues:

Kulldorff is a “world-class” vaccine safety “superstar,” said Jeffrey Brown, a Harvard Medical School colleague specializing in drug and vaccine safety research. “His qualifications are spectacular,” Brown said of Kulldorff. “He’s an international expert in vaccine safety. No one on earth would question whether he’s qualified. … He’s a pioneer.”

It is also important to add that Kulldorff helped develop the CDC’s current system for monitoring potential vaccine risks. If anyone should be on that advisory board, it should be him. That Biden had him fired reveals starkly the ignorant totalitarian impulse that drove that president and the entire health field during the COVID panic.

The Trump house-cleaning continues

Kennedy’s changes in personnel guarantee that — at least until the end of Trump’s administration — we will no longer see health policies based on hearsay, rumors, politics, and feel-good opinions lacking any grounding in scientific research — such as social distancing, mask mandates, lockdowns, and jab requirements. Instead, health policies related to infectious diseases will return to the methods that were developed for over more than two centuries, based on actual research, data, and results. Wash your hands, quarantine the sick only, and let new respiratory illnesses spread quickly through the rest of the population in order to bring about herd immunity as fast as possible and thus best protect the elderly and chronically ill from such diseases.

These policies worked successfully throughout the 20th century. There is no evidence that they won’t work now, as well as for the rest of the 21st century.