Fired Harvard prof tapped by CDC for vaccine advisory board
A former Harvard University professor fired for protesting COVID-19 vaccine mandates and refusing to get vaccinated is a new member of a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) vaccine advisory board.
Martin Kulldorff previously worked as a professor of medicine at Harvard from 2003 until 2021 when the school fired him for not complying with vaccine mandates.
A former Harvard University professor fired for protesting COVID-19 vaccine mandates and refusing to get vaccinated is a new member of a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) vaccine advisory board.
Martin Kulldorff previously worked as a professor of medicine at Harvard from 2003 until 2021 when the school fired him for not complying with vaccine mandates—a fact he disclosed in a March 2024 op-ed for City Journal.
More recently, Secretary of Health Robert Kennedy Jr. announced in a June 9 Wall Street Journal op-ed that the federal government was retiring the 17 current members of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP).
“Vaccines have become a divisive issue in American politics, but there is one thing all parties can agree on: The U.S. faces a crisis of public trust. Whether toward health agencies, pharmaceutical companies or vaccines themselves, public confidence is waning,” Kennedy wrote in the opinion piece, proceeding to explain that re-establishing trust demands a “clean sweep.”
“Without removing the current members, the current Trump administration would not have been able to appoint a majority of new members until 2028,” he continued.
One of Kennedy’s concerns, according to the op-ed, 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.
In a June 12 X post, Kennedy said the eight new members are “credentialed scientists, leading public-health experts, and some of America’s most accomplished physicians. All of these individuals are committed to evidence-based medicine, gold-standard science, and common sense.”
According to The New York Times, Kennedy also considered the fact that President Biden appointed the 17 previous members in firing them.
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In his March City Journal article, Kulldorff argued that lawmakers and experts pushing widespread lockdown policies failed to grasp that herd immunity provided the only means of escaping the virus. He also criticized vaccine mandates and refused to take the vaccine himself for health reasons.
Kulldorff now serves as a member of Hillsdale College’s Academy for Science and Freedom. He is also a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued for herd immunity against COVID-19 in October 2020.
Campus Reform contacted Martin Kulldorff for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.
