World-Class Scientist Calls Out Medical Journal For Smearing Lockdown Critics Instead Of Proving Them Wrong
One of the world’s most-respected vaccine safety researchers underscored in a blistering article Oct. 12 that scientific institutions are killing their own legitimacy by enabling and perpetrating lies, distortions, smears, and unwarranted hysteria about COVID-19.
“Open and honest discourse is critical for science and public health. As scientists, we must now tragically acknowledge that 400 years of scientific enlightenment may be coming to an end,” writes Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine at Harvard University and coauthor of the Great Barrington Declaration, in The Spectator.
The British Medical Journal (@bmj_latest) is supposed to publish high quality medical research, but it is now printing tabloid gossip and false slander against physicians and scientists voicing views on the pandemic. https://t.co/faYvxmZ03J
— Martin Kulldorff (@MartinKulldorff) October 12, 2021
Kulldorff’s article responds to a recent British Medical Journal (BMJ) attack on that declaration, a statement of scientific opposition to lockdowns as an effective public health tool due to their many devastating health, economic, and other consequences.
“Collateral public health damage from Covid restrictions are real and enormous on cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, backsliding childhood vaccinations, starvation and mental health, just to name a few. It is not the GBD, but those who downplay lockdown harms who should be equated with those who question the harms of tobacco or climate change,” Kulldorff explains in the article.
Lockdowns also stretch out disease outbreaks, forcing the vulnerable to protect themselves for a longer amount of time by delaying herd immunity, which increases deaths.
Kulldorff also discusses herd immunity. He says that accusing the Great Barrington Declaration coauthors of supporting herd immunity is “akin to accusing someone of being in favour of gravity. Both are scientifically established phenomena. Every Covid strategy leads to herd immunity. The key is to minimise morbidity and mortality. The language, here, is non-scientific: herd immunity is not a creed. It’s how pandemics end.”
The scientist refutes both falsehoods and innuendo from the medical journal, saying he does so because the process of scientific advancement developed over many centuries of human experimentation cannot exist without open inquiry, disagreement, questioning, and debate. These have been so damaged by the political and social response to COVID, Kulldorff says, that it’s an open question whether the human advances these hard-won scientific practices lead to can continue.
One smear he responds to is the idea that the 59,000 medical professionalsignatories of the declaration, who have thereby publicly opposed lockdowns, were “critics of public health measures to curb Covid-19.” “On the contrary,” Kulldorff writes, “throughout the pandemic we have strongly advocated better public health measures to curb Covid-19 – specifically protection of high-risk older people, with many ‘clearly defined’ proposals. The failure to implement such measures, in our view, has led to many unnecessary Covid deaths.”
Kulldorff calls his critics’ hand by demanding they engage in a scientific discussion about their position, rather than name-calling and threatening professional repercussions.
“If we are to be faulted for anything, it is that we failed to convince governments to implement focused protection instead of damaging lockdowns,” Kulldorff writes. “One place where we had some success was Florida, where the cumulative age-adjusted Covid mortality is lower than the US national average with less collateral damage. If we are wrong, then as scientists we would welcome a scientific discussion on how and where we are wrong.”
Key priorities for public health agencies:
1. Return to basic principles of public health
2. Apologize for the biggest public health fiasco in history
3. Rebuild public trust https://t.co/RTYdWlplBS— Martin Kulldorff (@MartinKulldorff) October 7, 2021
The fact that the world is now 19 months into COVID demands that continue to defy science, ethics, and human and natural rights, with still no substantive response to the evidence- and reason-based critics of all these drastic impositions, suggests oppression is all the COVID authoritarians have. If they had science, reason, and humanity on their side, they would demonstrate it instead of twisting everyone’s arms.
Since they’re sticking with coercion and pressure tactics instead of informed and open debate, it’s safe to presume at this point that arm-twisting is all they have. And that they’re not going to stop until people make them.