A former Professor of Medicine in epidemiology shares his experience with me about how COVID destroyed his appointment at Harvard Medical School.
The Harvard motto is Veritas, Latin for truth. But, as I discovered, truth can get you fired. This is my story—a story of a Harvard biostatistician and infectious-disease epidemiologist, clinging to the truth as the world lost its way during the Covid pandemic.
On March 10, 2020, before any government prompting, Harvard declared that it would “suspend in-person classes and shift to online learning.” Across the country, universities, schools, and state governments followed Harvard’s lead.
Yet it was clear, from early 2020, that the virus would eventually spread across the globe, and that it would be futile to try to suppress it with lockdowns. It was also clear that lockdowns would inflict enormous collateral damage, not only on education but also on public health, including treatment for cancer, cardiovascular disease, and mental health. We will be dealing with the harm done for decades. Our children, the elderly, the middle class, the working class, and the poor around the world—all will suffer.
Schools closed in many other countries, too, but under heavy international criticism, Sweden kept its schools and daycares open for its 1.8 million children, ages one to 15. Why? While anyone can get infected, we have known since early 2020 that more than a thousandfold difference in Covid mortality risk holds between the young and the old. Children faced minuscule risk from Covid, and interrupting their education would disadvantage them for life, especially those whose families could not afford private schools, pod schools, or tutors, or to homeschool.
What were the results during the spring of 2020? With schools open, Sweden had zero Covid deaths in the one-to-15 age group, while teachers had the same mortality as the average of other professions. Based on those facts, summarized in a July 7, 2020, report by the Swedish Public Health Agency, all U.S. schools should have quickly reopened. Not doing so led to “startling evidence on learning loss” in the United States, especially among lower- and middle-class children, an effect not seen in Sweden.
Sweden was the only major Western country that rejected school closures and other lockdowns in favor of concentrating on the elderly, and the final verdict is now in. Led by an intelligent social democrat prime minister (a welder), Sweden had the lowest excess mortality among major European countries during the pandemic, and less than half that of the United States. Sweden’s Covid deaths were below average, and it avoided collateral mortality caused by lockdowns.
Yet on July 29, 2020, the Harvard-edited New England Journal of Medicine published an article by two Harvard professors on whether primary schools should reopen, without even mentioning Sweden. It was like ignoring the placebo control group when evaluating a new pharmaceutical drug. That’s not the path to truth.
That spring, I supported the Swedish approach in op-eds published in my native Sweden, but despite being a Harvard professor, I was unable to publish my thoughts in American media. My attempts to disseminate the Swedish school report on Twitter (now X) put me on the platform’s Trends Blacklist. In August 2020, my op-ed on school closures and Sweden was finally published by CNN—but not the one you’re thinking of. I wrote it in Spanish, and CNN–Español ran it. CNN–English was not interested. I was shadow-banned.
I was not the only public health scientist speaking out against school closures and other unscientific countermeasures. Scott Atlas, an especially brave voice, used scientific articles and facts to challenge the public health advisors in the Trump White House, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci, National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins, and Covid coordinator Deborah Birx, but to little avail. When 98 of his Stanford faculty colleagues unjustly attacked Atlas in an open letter that did not provide a single example of where he was wrong, I wrote a response in the student-run Stanford Daily to defend him. I ended the letter by pointing out that:
Among experts on infectious disease outbreaks, many of us have long advocated for an age-targeted strategy, and I would be delighted to debate this with any of the 98 signatories. Supporters include Professor Sunetra Gupta at Oxford University, the world’s preeminent infectious disease epidemiologist. Assuming no bias against women scientists of color, I urge Stanford faculty and students to read her thoughts.
None of the 98 signatories accepted my offer to debate. Instead, someone at Stanford sent complaints to my superiors at Harvard, who were not thrilled with me.
I had no inclination to back down. Together with Gupta and Jay Bhattacharya at Stanford, I wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, arguing for age-based focused protection instead of universal lockdowns, with specific suggestions for how better to protect the elderly, while letting children and young adults live close to normal lives.
With the Great Barrington Declaration, the silencing was broken. While it is easy to dismiss individual scientists, it was impossible to ignore three senior infectious-disease epidemiologists from three leading universities. The declaration made clear that no scientific consensus existed for school closures and many other lockdown measures. In response, though, the attacks intensified—and even grew slanderous. Collins, a lab scientist with limited public-health experience who controls most of the nation’s medical research budget, called us “fringe epidemiologists” and asked his colleagues to orchestrate a “devastating published takedown.” Some at Harvard obliged.
Harvard was not alone in recommending closure of schools.
A prominent Harvard epidemiologist publicly called the declaration “an extreme fringe view,” equating it with exorcism to expel demons. A member of Harvard’s Center for Health and Human Rights, who had argued for school closures, accused me of “trolling” and having “idiosyncratic politics,” falsely alleging that I was “enticed . . . with Koch money,” “cultivated by right-wing think tanks,” and “won’t debate anyone.” (A concern for those less privileged does not automatically make you right-wing!) Others at Harvard worried about my “scientifically inaccurate” and “potentially dangerous position,” while “grappling with the protections offered by academic freedom.”
The Great Barrington Declaration
The Great Barrington Declaration – As infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists we have grave concerns about the damaging physical and mental health impacts of the prevailing COVID-19 policies, and recommend an approach we call Focused Protection. Current lockdown policies are producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health. The results (to name a few) include lower childhood vaccination rates, worsening cardiovascular disease outcomes, fewer cancer screenings and deteriorating mental health – leading to greater excess mortality in years to come, with the working class and younger members of society carrying the heaviest burden. Keeping students out of school is a grave injustice.
Though powerful scientists, politicians, and the media vigorously denounced it, the Great Barrington Declaration gathered almost a million signatures, including tens of thousands from scientists and health-care professionals. We were less alone than we had thought.
Even from Harvard, I received more positive than negative feedback. Among many others, support came from a former chair of the Department of Epidemiology—a former dean, a top surgeon, and an autism expert, who saw firsthand the devastating collateral damage that lockdowns inflicted on her patients. While some of the support I received was public, most was behind the scenes from faculty unwilling to speak publicly.
Two Harvard colleagues tried to arrange a debate between me and opposing Harvard faculty, but just as with Stanford, there were no takers. The invitation to debate remains open. The public should not trust scientists, even Harvard scientists, unwilling to debate their positions with fellow scientists.
My former employer, the Mass General Brigham hospital system, employs the majority of Harvard Medical School faculty. It is the single largest recipient of NIH funding—over $1 billion per year from U.S. taxpayers. As part of the offensive against the Great Barrington Declaration, one of Mass General’s board members, Rochelle Walensky, a fellow Harvard professor who had served on the advisory council to NIH director Collins, engaged me in a one-directional “debate.” After a Boston radio station interviewed me, Walensky came on as the official representative of Mass General Brigham to counter me, without giving me an opportunity to respond. A few months later, she became the new CDC director.
At this point, it was clear that I faced a choice between science or my academic career. I chose the former. What is science if we do not humbly pursue the truth?
In the 1980s, I worked for a human rights organization in Guatemala. We provided round-the-clock international physical accompaniment to poor campesinos, unionists, women’s groups, students, and religious organizations. Our mission was to protect those who spoke up against the killings and disappearances perpetrated by the right-wing military dictatorship, which shunned international scrutiny of its dirty work. Though the military threatened us, stabbed two of my colleagues, and threw a hand grenade into the house where we all lived and worked, we stayed to protect the brave Guatemalans.
While school closures and lockdowns were the big controversy of 2020, a new dispute emerged in 2021: the Covid vaccines. For more than two decades, I have helped the CDC and FDA develop their post-market vaccine safety systems. Vaccines are a vital medical invention, allowing people to obtain immunity without the risk that comes from getting sick. The smallpox vaccine alone has saved millions of lives. In 2020, the CDC asked me to serve on its Covid-19 Vaccine Safety Technical Work Group. My tenure didn’t last long—though not for the reason you may think.
The randomized controlled trials (RCTs) for the Covid vaccines were not properly designed. While they demonstrated the vaccines’ short-term efficacy against symptomatic infection, they were not designed to evaluate hospitalization and death, which is what matters. In subsequent pooled RCT analyses by vaccine type, independent Danish scientists showed that the mRNA vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna) did not reduce short-term, all-cause mortality, while the adenovirus-vector vaccines (Johnson & Johnson, Astra-Zeneca, Sputnik) did reduce mortality, by at least 30 percent.
In short, the chaos and panic in the general population was fermented by those not in the know. Many of them have not seen a patient in years. Like influenza COVID could be deadly to the aged or those with immune and/or cardiovascular diseases.
Covid was benigh in children, why were schools shut down? The approach should have been focused.
The Medical Profession, like many other previously revered institutions, has given up its basic principles in favor of...FAVOR. The lack of careful analysis, understanding of assumptions, and for too many the desire for fame and fortune, especially from the media, have undermined the essential features which in the not-so-recent past governed our actions: attention to and respect for the publications of major jounals, but levened with our own experiences and listening to outside voices and challenges. The "truths" in medicine, as in science, are discovered only through the hard and difficult road of challenge and data. Even then, as we were taught, what has been published is outdated as soon as it hits the pages. What once was accepted as the "best practice" changes with time, exploration, study, and experiment. Now it appears only a political agenda gets noticed, and that only if it comports to the current narrative. There always have been those who hung to old practices despite new knowledge, but what we are seeing here is a perversion based on politics, not medicine.