Kulldorff promotes vaccine birth defects disinformation

Prior to the pandemic he worked on genuinely useful projects, but the contrarian path has reduced him to a mouthpiece for RFKs antivax talking points

If you needed any more proof Martin Kulldorff, coauthor of the Great Barrington Declaration, is one of RFK Jr's many poor picks for a vital vaccine committee, his X post on 29 September on its own should prove his unsuitability.

On the face of it, this post; which has received over half a million views in a couple of days, has some alarming statistics, its certainly been held up by anti-vaxxers as verification of their beliefs, however the claims collapse under the slightest scrutiny. The birth defects had developed prior to vaccination.

From Prof Jeffrey S Morris

If ACIP wants to build public confidence, they must do better than this.

At the meeting, a “gotcha” question was put to the Pfizer representative about a single secondary endpoint from one Pfizer covid vaccine pregnancy trial—buried in table 26 on page 94 of a 2,102-page report with hundreds of tables and thousands of outcomes.

The post that followed insinuated that the randomized trial showed vaccine harm in the form of birth defects, while ignoring the basic fact that these defects occurred long before the women were vaccinated.

The trial protocol shows women were vaccinated at 24–34 weeks gestation (clinicaltrials.gov/study/NCT04754…)— well after most defects would have formed, typically at conception or during weeks 4–10.

The eight cases in the vaccine group (vs. two in placebo) are detailed in table 26, page 94 of this 2,102-page report (cdn.pfizer.com/pfizercom/Anal…).

The birth defects for the Pfizer group are atrial septal defect (4–6 wks), congenital rubella syndrome (maternal infection, wks 4–10), DiGeorge syndrome (present at conception), microcephaly (early onset), mucopolysaccharidosis (genetic, at conception), polydactyly (4–8 wks), syndactyly (6–8 wks), and trisomy 21 (present from fertilization).

Why would the chair of ACIP make a public post implying that this trial showed significant vaccine harm, and suggest Pfizer was concealing results simply because they couldn’t provide a detailed answer on the spot at the meeting?

And why post this long afterward, when it was obvious from the protocol that these birth defects arose well before vaccination—a fact any national vaccine leader, especially the chair of ACIP, should recognize immediately?

If ACIP hopes to convince the public that it is serious about rigorous scientific evaluation, its leaders must rise above “gotcha” social media posts that misrepresent clinical trial results and risk feeding anti-vaccine narratives.

2020's contrarian experts

Kulldorff background before the pandemic wouldn’t suggest that five years later he'd be laundering woeful anti-vax disinformation for RFK Jr as part of a Trump administration.

What motivated Kulldorff to take this path, radicalisation, audience capture, or following the money? Only Kulldorff knows the answer, but he will have also know he's promoting disinformation.

Kulldorff was paraded by sections of the right wing media as one of the experts who should be trusted above all others, and there is an ongoing effort to rewrite history to claim Kulldorff and his associates have been proven right. This is despite claims there wouldn’t be a second wave proved disastrously wrong, and despite the fact that Florida's third wave was its deadliest due to listening to the advice of Kulldorff and co.

This comes shortly after his GBD coauthor Jay Bhattacharya stood alongside Trump as he made his mad claims about paracetamol and autism.

Considering the level of manufactured outrage from the covid contrarians and their media supporters at accusations of promoting disinformation to support a right wing project, taking up positions in a Trump administration and promoting undeniable disinformation seems a strange way of rejecting these accusations.

Further Reading