I am NOT satisfied-A Reckoning with Modern Vaccinology

The Bureaucracy Disease: Why vaccine policy failed people, not numbers!

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Ivory Towers, Empty Trials: A Reckoning with Modern Vaccinology

Host Freddy Sayers interviews epidemiologist and biostatistician Martin Kulldorff, a Great Barrington Declaration co-author who left Harvard after pandemic controversies and now serves on (and chairs) a federal vaccine advisory committee. He says Sweden’s “focused protection” approach was vindicated by low excess mortality, whereas U.S. public health leaders still refuse to admit mistakes—eroding trust.

Kulldorff recounts opposing CDC’s pause on the J&J COVID-19 vaccine; he claims older adults died because access was curtailed, that he was removed from a CDC working group for being “too pro-vaccine,” and that CDC reversed course days later. He criticises agencies for “lying” that COVID vaccines would prevent infection and transmission and that vaccine-induced immunity was superior to infection-induced immunity, arguing these overstatements fuelled today’s vaccine hesitancy.

Asked about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kulldorff says Kennedy is not anti-vaccine, wants “solid science,” and even urged measles vaccination during a recent outbreak while mentioning vitamin A for treatment. Kulldorff says he has seen no evidence that MMR causes autism but insists it’s legitimate to research autism’s causes. He distances ACIP from mandates, noting Sweden’s high uptake without mandates, and frames the challenge as rebuilding trust through evidence-based recommendations. He rebukes former CDC directors for labelling the new committee “dangerous and unscientific,” saying such attacks further damage trust. Pressed about committee member Robert Malone’s public claims (e.g., “vaccine-induced AIDS”), Kulldorff declines to judge statements he hasn’t personally verified. He notes policy on COVID boosters for age groups varies internationally and expects ACIP to revisit recommendations as COVID becomes endemic.

In summary:

• Kulldorff portrays himself as pro-vaccine but opposed to lockdowns, mandates, and exaggerated claims about COVID vaccines.

• He argues Sweden’s strategy and the Great Barrington Declaration were vindicated; U.S. leaders won’t admit error, undermining trust.

• He says CDC’s J&J pause cost lives, that CDC misled the public on sterilising immunity and comparative immunity, and that such missteps explain current hesitancy.

• He defends serving under RFK Jr. while rejecting an MMR–autism link, and says researching autism’s causes is proper.

• He calls for trust-building, less politics, and evidence-based vaccine policy; condemns attacks from former CDC leaders as slander that harm public health credibility.

My Opinion

Dr. Kulldorff’s remarks exemplify the very technocratic mindset that corroded public trust: bureaucratic epidemiology treating humans as spreadsheet entries, measured in abstractions like “excess mortality,” while lived harms, ethical pluralism, and informed consent are subordinated to committee consensus.

1. Bureaucracy first, people last.
   Kulldorff insists the solution is to “re-establish trust” in the same centralised apparatus—ACIP, CDC, HHS—by “basing recommendations on science.” But the problem wasn’t merely bad messaging; it was the bureaucratic model itself: insulated panels, revolving-door experts, and one-size-fits-all edicts rendered from afar. Real people with comorbidities, prior infection, unique risk tolerances, and competing values became denominators in a rate, not patients with rights. Any framework that privileges institutional reputation over patient autonomy will keep repeating the same violations—just with better press releases.

2. Ivory-tower certainty masquerading as humility.
   He rightly rebukes overclaims about COVID-19 vaccines preventing infection and transmission—but still defaults to panel authority as the fix. That’s the ivory tower reflex: after catastrophic failures of prediction, surveillance, and communication, double down on “let the committee decide,” as though committees were less political than the politicians who appoint them. Trust is earned by decentralising power, publishing full data promptly, enabling independent replication, and honouring dissent—not by reshuffling seats on the same dais.

3. People as numbers: collateral damage is not collateral to those harmed.
   Kulldorff argues the J&J pause “cost lives” among the elderly—maybe. But the same calculus ignored other lives: vaccine-associated myocarditis in the young, injury signals flagged late or minimised, coercive mandates that cost people jobs, education, and mental health. Epidemiology that counts averted deaths but discounts iatrogenic harms, developmental impacts, and liberty losses isn’t “science,” it’s policy preference dressed as mathematics.

4. On vaccine safety and the demand for real controls.
   I argue generally that no vaccines have undergone rigorous placebo-controlled trials. To be precise some vaccines have been studied in randomised, placebo-controlled trials; however, many pivotal studies use “active comparators,” adjuvanted placebos, or short follow-up windows that cannot characterise long-term or cumulative harms across the childhood schedule. There is also a striking absence of randomised trials evaluating the entire schedule versus delayed or alternative schedules, and limited head-to-head evidence for risk-stratified strategies. Calling that “science settled” is misleading, to say the least. If Kulldorff truly wants to rebuild trust, he should champion large, independently run randomised trials with inert placebos where ethical, long horizons, and transparent data access—not merely rely on surveillance systems with known under-reporting and signal-detection limitations.

5. Mandates and manufactured consent.
   Kulldorff says Sweden proves you don’t need mandates if there’s trust. Exactly. So why not say plainly: mandates were an ethical failure that corrupted consent and backfired? Anything short of a categorical rejection of coercion keeps the door ajar for the next “exception,” ensuring the same moral injury to the public.

6. Conflicts and credibility.
   He dismisses critics and touts his own publication record and system-building as proof of legitimacy. That misses the point. Public confidence won’t be restored by resumes; it will be restored when advisory bodies pre-register analyses, publish all code and data, disclose every financial and institutional conflict, invite independent statisticians onto voting panels, and cede outcome ownership to the public—patients, families, and front-line clinicians—not to federal committees.

7. The broader hazard profile.
   I contend that vaccines as a class carry underappreciated, systemic risks—immune dysregulation, autoimmunity, oncologic concerns, and synergistic toxicity with environmental exposures—especially when layered across an expanding schedule. Kulldorff’s framework never truly entertains this possibility; it assumes a priori that “more vaccines = more health” and that dissent is a messaging obstacle, not a scientific lead. A real scientist interrogates that prior with hard tests, not assurances.

The bottom line is this-Kulldorff identifies real failures (lockdowns, overpromising), but his remedy—restore trust in centralised vaccine policy through the same committees—keeps the bureaucracy-first, human-last paradigm intact. From my vantage, that paradigm is the disease. Replace mandates with full informed consent, models with open data, panel dogma with real randomised evidence (including completely inert placebos and long follow-up), and treat people as patients, not parameters. Until then, “rebuilding trust” is a slogan, not a solution.

Oh to live in a village with a tribe and the wisdom of the ages.

Ian Brighthope