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THOUGHT LEADERS

The COVID-19 Fallout: Collateral Damage and Loss of Trust

D

r . m a r t i n k u l l d o r f f

is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a biostatistician and epidemiologist at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He helped develop the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s system for monitoring potential vaccine risks and is also one of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued for “focused protection” of the most vulnerable, instead of lockdowns.

Recently on “American

Thought Leaders,” host Jan Jekielek interviewed Kulldorff on vaccine passports, the Delta variant, and the COVID-19 “public health fiasco.”

JAN JEKIELEK: We’re

about a year and a half into the coronavirus pandemic. We’ve had lockdowns.

We’ve had an emergence out of lockdowns right now in places like New York.

We were getting closer to

54 I N S I G H T August 20–27, 2021

some kind of semblance of normality, and now we have the Delta variant and there’s discussion of lockdowns again.

You’ve described the global COVID response as, and I’ll quote you here, “The biggest public health fiasco in history.” That feels like a big statement to make. Tell me more.

DR. MARTIN KULLDORFF: I think it is,

without a doubt. There are two aspects of that. One

is, while anybody can get infected by COVID, there’s more than a thousand-fold difference in the risk for death between the oldest and the youngest. So with the naive belief that these lockdowns would protect everybody—which now, obviously, we know that didn’t work—a lot of people got COVID, and a lot of people died.

But there was this naive belief that they would protect the older people.

Because of that, we did

Dr. Martin Kulldorff