 This is Just Asking Questions, a show for inquiring minds for a reason. Why do colleges still have vaccine mandates? Just Asking Questions. I'm Zach Weissmuller, senior producer for Reason. Joined by my co-host, Liz Wolfe, Reason Associate Editor and author of The Daily Reason Roundup, which you should be getting delivered to your inbox every morning. At least 40 US colleges still require a COVID vaccine, according to nocollegemandates.com, which is an initiative that tracks and opposes such mandates. And our guest today is Martin Koldorf, a professor of medicine and biostatistician, who lost his job at Harvard for refusing the vaccine, even though he'd already survived a COVID infection. Harvard has since dropped its mandates, but Koldorf likely will not be getting his job there back anytime soon, for reasons we'll discuss shortly. Koldorf created one of the earliest disease outbreak surveillance software systems and was also booted from the COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Commission, regularly deboosted on Twitter for his views, and was one of the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration that prompted former NIH Director Francis Collins to label him and his co-signers fringe epidemiologists and call for a quick and devastating takedown. So today, we're going to talk with him about his ordeal at Harvard, his retrospective on the pandemic and the cultural and governmental response to it, and his involvement in the Supreme Court case, Murthy v. Missouri, in which plaintiffs argue that federal agencies violated the First Amendment by pressuring social media companies to take down certain content about COVID-19. Martin Koldorf, thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. It's a great pleasure. What happens between you and Harvard? Well, I don't think they were quite happy with me when I was outspoken against the lockdowns and school closures and instead favoring focused protection and doing better protection in order people who are at the high risk. And when I had COVID, I was hospitalized for it, and I have an autoimmune disease. So there was no need for me to get the vaccine, nor would I protect others by taking the vaccine. So they didn't like that either. So they said goodbye. So you mentioned you had an autoimmune disease. Was that part of your reason for not wanting to follow up with a vaccine after your infection? It's not an autoimmune disease. It's an immune deficiency. So it's called autoimmune deficiency, which makes me sensitive to infections. It's a genetic thing. I reached out to so I was trying to understand the dynamics of Harvard and correct me if I'm wrong, but you were working at Mass Brigham Hospital, which is affiliated with Harvard. And they seem to be the ones who have the vaccine requirement. And I emailed them to ask, first of all, to confirm, were you all the ones that fired Martin Koldorf? And if so, would you hire him back now that COVID is, people have had access to the vaccine for years now? And yes, they confirmed that your employment at Mass General Brigham was terminated and that faculty positions at the medical school are contingent upon employment at Harvard Affiliated, at a Harvard Affiliated Academic Medical Center. And then that there's a continuing primary series requirement, which affects new hires. It amounts to receiving the latest COVID vaccine if the new hire has not received a COVID vaccine in the past. So I guess the bottom line here is that if you're an undergraduate or a faculty member at Harvard, you don't have to get the vaccine, but there's a kind of special situation here for people affiliated with the medical programs. Is there anything else you can add to that understanding? Yeah, so that was partly news to me, but that they still have that requirement. But it's very unscientific because having recovered from COVID, I have better immunity against COVID than people who just had the vaccine. Right. Why would it still be in place in April 2024? It's not clear to me what the point is, given that we're at a point where pretty much everybody has had COVID. I agree with that question and I don't have an answer into it because I don't think there's a good answer to it. But I mean, in your scientific and medical understanding, is there any steelman case for why they're requiring this? Or is it just entirely, because they always have, and so they're digging their heels in and continuing to force people to get this vaccine when in reality, there's not much utility? Yeah, so there's no scientific reason for it or public health reasons or patient safety reasons to have this mandate in place. So it's probably inertia or unwillingness to admit that the vaccine mandates were both unscientific and unethical to begin with. And I say they are unscientific because we've known since four in the 30 BC during the Athenian plague, two and a half thousand years ago, that if you have recovered from an infectious disease, you have immunity. Sometimes it's permanent immunity for lifetime, like these thousand, sometimes it just protects you from severity of disease the next time you get infected, which is the case for Corona viruses, including the four previous ones. So there's no, and we know, we knew very early on in 2020 that if you had COVID, you had immunity that protected you from later. You can still get it again, as with other coronaviruses, but you're still protected. So it's unscientific for that reasons, but it's also very unethical because less for the sake of argument, assume that this is the best vaccine ever. 100% efficacy, it doesn't have that, but let's just assume it and no side effects, there are side effects, but let's assume this is just the perfect thing. Then with COVID, there's more than a thousand for difference in mortality among the old and the young. So to force people that are young or to force people who have already had COVID to have immunity to get the vaccine when there are a lot of people, including my 87-year-old neighbor who hadn't gotten the vaccine, that's very unethical because you're deprived, there was a shortage of vaccines, you're depriving the vaccine from people who need it and who benefit from it by forcing mandate to people who don't need it. So it's very unethical and very bad public health policy to have these mandates on people that don't need a vaccine when there are people out there that haven't gotten it, but who do need it because there's very high risk. So I think that what Harvard's National Brigham and Harvard University by these mandates was highly unethical and very bad for public health. A great example of that is the vaccination of children. I'm still struck by how to this day as a New York City parent, when I take my toddler to the pediatrician, there's frequently the suggestion that he gets a COVID vaccine and the implication that this is very, very important. And I wonder for parents who were receiving this pressure from the city of New York during peak pandemic, when the vaccine was beginning to be rolled out, it doesn't really make sense to be vaccinating a one and a half-year-old boy compared to my elderly in-laws. That was always a component to this that's sort of bizarre when we know in fact that thankfully, this is not particularly dangerous to children or the virus itself is not particularly dangerous to children. The vaccine certainly carries some risks for boys of a certain age. You're 100% right. So when you look at any vaccine or any drive for that matter, you have to look at the benefits and the potential risks. So for older people who have a high risk of dying from COVID back in 2021, if they hadn't had COVID already, they maybe had a 1% risk of dying. And then even if there's a small risk from the vaccine, it's still worth taking it because the benefits outweigh the risks. But for children or young adults, we know that the risk of dying from COVID is minuscule. And it's less than the average influenza year during the last decades. We're usually about 200,000 kids every year die from influenza, depending on the severity. So COVID has less risk than the typical historical influenza season. And then to give a vaccine to a child with very minuscule risk. So you know the benefit is very, very small at best. But you don't know what the risks are. Now we know it because we know that the risk of, for example, microcarditis which is the inflammation of the heart, especially among teenage boys and young men. So we know there are some risks. So I don't think children should get this vaccine. And I think also basically forcing this vaccine or trying to force it on people, just make parents skeptical about the other vaccines like measles, which is actually a very important vaccine. I wanna back up for a second and then I wanna return to what we know and don't know about vaccines at this point. But I wanna, you know, now there's a little bit, there feels like a little more breathing room to talk about these issues. People aren't quite as heated as they were maybe two or three years ago. First of all, when did your relationship with Harvard, when was that severed? What's the timeline here? So Harvard's national curriculum fired me a little bit two years ago. Okay. And then Harvard Medical School put me on leave for two years. And then they ended that leave at the end of last year. So we're talking about 2022. What was it like, you know, people have a certain perception of Harvard and what the culture of Harvard is like. What was it like for you at that time being a sort of dissident among the Harvard faculty? Like what was that experience like in 2022? So among my colleagues that I worked with like on a regular basis doing research with, I had no problems. I would say the majority of them were in favor of focus protection. I was skeptical school closures and stuff like that. So I had absolutely no problems with any of the people I've worked with on a regular basis. The leaderships of Harvard's Master General Brigham did not like, for example, when I did interviews with about the Great Franks Declaration. So they were not so happy and there were others who were also unhappy. When two of my colleagues tried to arrange, this was in late 2020, they tried to arrange like a debate between me and some of my colleagues who are in favor of school closures and lockdowns. So two of them tried to arrange a debate, but there was no takers on the other side. So I said, yes, of course. But there were no takers on the other side. No, they didn't want to debate me. But they were making that whole land. I don't understand how you could possibly, you know, force a policy into place and then not feel comfortable defending it in a public forum. To me, that's kind of shocking. And when people wonder who they should trust when it comes to public health, I think one criteria is if there's a scientist who's not willing to debate other scientists about it, then you shouldn't trust them. Yeah, this is, it's a strange time to reflect on because you are ensconced in this world and suddenly because of some of these views you articulated, you were pushed to the fringes. I mean, we talked about, you know, Francis Collins labeling you and Jay Bottichari and the other signers of the document, fringe epidemiologists, and suddenly becoming untouchable. Like we can't even debate him. You can't even quote unquote platform him. I mean, you were part of the COVID-19 vaccine safety working group here. I've got your name highlighted among a list of, you know, luminaries here and you were booted off that. Tell me about that experience. Why were you booted out of this? Like what did this group do? And why were you booted out of it? So this was set up actually in early 2020 before there were any vaccine on the market to evaluate the safety of the COVID vaccines once they were approved. So the post-marketing surveillance. So it's an important thing to do. You want to monitor the safety after it's approved to see if there any unexpected serious events. Looking at, for example, anaphylaxis, and mycoditis, and other things. And I was fired from this committee not for the reason you might think, but the opposite. I was fired because there was two pro vaccine. So in the spring of 2020, CDC, there were reporters on blood clots in older women after the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. So that's the vaccine that's not the mRNA. mRNA is the Pfizer Moderna. This was a cell vaccine, which is an inner virus vector vaccine. So there was some blood clots in older women and CDC decided to take your pause on this vaccine. And to me, that was, sorry, sorry. The blood clots was in younger women under 50 only. There was none among the older women. So I think it was reasonable to put a pause among younger women because they are so low risk for mortality anyhow, that they don't feel a great need of this vaccine. But I objected to backing the pause for older people because this was the one dose vaccine. It was the non-MRNA vaccine. So some people feel more comfortable with it. A one dose vaccine important for like rural areas that are hard to reach people or homeless people that you might only be able to reach once. So a two dose vaccine is more difficult there. And at the time there was the shortest of vaccines. So not everybody who needed it were getting it. So your logic was essentially that, if for a woman, I'm a 27 year old woman, if we were in vaccination time in 2021, you were basically positing, okay, Liz should not receive the Johnson and Johnson vaccine if at all possible, but a 75 year old homeless man in an encampment somewhere probably should receive the Johnson and Johnson vaccine because that's sort of the best means to get him vaccinated and he's higher risk. Is that correct? Yes. So that seems like a really appropriate sort of like, like it seems like your lens through which you were looking at all of this was just cost benefit. It was just cost benefit analysis for every single type of case. And that was seen as inappropriate to them or what was their objection to that? Yeah, so I didn't think that the discussions, internal discussions were very fruitful. So I decided to write an op-ed in the Hill, arguing against the pause for older Americans. And they were not happy about that. So that's why I was fired from the committee. Wow. Now, four days after they fired me, they dropped the pause on it. So they did implement what I suggested, yeah. Unbelievable. They were not happy that I went out arguing. So I'm probably the only one who has ever been fired by CDC if it being too pro-vaccine. It seems like the common thread to both of these scenarios is basically these organizations wanting to save face. It's not even that you're wrong. It's that they don't want to admit that you're correct. And you have to follow the narrative, the established narrative. And if you don't, you're a pariah. And to me, that doesn't make any sense because if I serve on the vice committee for the CDC, I'm there to give as good as the devices I can about these things. And if I feel that I have to follow the narrative, I'm pretty useless. So everybody who's on that committee or just feel that they have to follow whatever CDC wants are not really serving any purpose on that committee. So I say freely what I think is accurate based on my scientific knowledge. And if I didn't do that, I wouldn't do what I was supposed to do on that committee. The other strange thing is I've noticed this throughout the pandemic. It's present in what Liz was bringing up with the attitude towards vaccinating children. It's evident in this example you just gave of maybe the Johnson and Johnson vaccine is still appropriate for some groups, but not other groups. It seemed like there was a real resistance to doing any sort of stratification like saying that certain vaccines are good for certain demographics and certain vaccines aren't ideal for certain demographics. There was never that level of nuance or granularity at least from my perspective just as a semi-informed consumer. I never saw it broken down to that level. What should I as a at the time 37-year-old relatively healthy guy be doing? It was never broken down to that level. Why didn't that ever happen? Yeah, that's a huge problem because that's not how you should do public health or science. There are certain drugs or vaccines that are suitable for some people and others. And there was a general problem, I think during the pandemic that people were ignoring the fact that while anybody can get infected that there's more than 1,000 for a difference in the risk of dying. So, and also of course ignoring infection required a national immunity. So people just wanted to treat everybody the same. That doesn't make any sense in this scenario. Yeah, there was also the, you talked about how you're, there's something about your personality where you are just gonna keep saying what you think despite these consequences. And that's the consequences were not just getting kicked out of Harvard or booted off this committee but also actually having your voice de-boosted online. One of the tweets that we've pulled here was you weighing in on this question of children and vaccines on Twitter before it was transformed into X. This was in March, 2021. You said you're replying to somebody who's saying that younger people should get vaccinated and you say no, thinking that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking nobody should. COVID vaccines are important for older high-risk people and their caretakers. Those with prior natural infection do not need it nor children. And then you've got a little notification under there. This tweet is misleading. Learn why health officials recommend a vaccine for most people and nobody was allowed to share or like that. Talk a little bit about, reflect a little bit about that period of time, the old version of Twitter and what it was like trying to communicate under that kind of regime. Well, first of all, I think what I said there is true. So I don't think it was misleading, I think. And I think it has been confirmed to be true. But it's shocking to me that I'm a scientist and I'm saying simple basic public health facts and that that's being censored because it contradicts something that the government thought which actually turned out to be wrong. So if you had told me four years ago that I would be censored, I would have thought you were crazy. That could never happen. I would censor a scientist. And of course, this is true information that the Twitter censored. And in this particular case, we know it was the behest of the government because the government funded this entity at Stanford called the Variety Project. So they funded them to go after certain things on sort of media that the government didn't like. And it was the Variety Project who contacted the Twitter and said, please do something about this tweet. So we know there was a clear link from the federal government to pressure the social media companies to remove what in this case was true information. Now, I think that the First Amendment rights is important whether the information is true or false. So if you wanna claim that the earth is flat, you should be allowed to do that. Nobody should censor for saying that. But in this case, the social media company censored accurate information at the behest of the federal government. And to me, that's kind of shocking. And it wasn't just Twitter, it's also our censor by YouTube, which is owned by Google. Our censor by LinkedIn, which is owned by Microsoft. And I was censored by Facebook. So... I've actually got that. I've got that clip of you being of the YouTube takedown as well. This is where you appeared in March of 2021 with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis doing a roundtable discussion with some other epidemiologists. Jay Bodditaria was there. Let's roll that clip, because that's another one worth reflecting on now in the rear view mirror of 2024. Let's see like how bad was what you were saying in this roundtable. Ian, could you roll that clip? These lockdowns and contact tracing in mass, they were not able to prevent resurgence of the disease during the winter. And the problem is that the belief that the pandemic could be suppressed through these lockdowns meant that in a lot of places in the world, people did not use focus protections of the old. They thought that the lockdowns would protect the old, but they didn't. So they didn't put in the standard public health measures to actually properly protect the older, higher-risk people, and I think that's very tragic and it has led to many unnecessary deaths among our older citizens. For all people, have to be very careful because this is more dangerous than the annual influenza, but for children, this is less dangerous than the annual influenza. So we should have utilized that feature of COVID to protect the old with focus protection while letting younger people live normal lives to avoid all the collateral public health damage from the lockdown, which are enormous. Dr. Gupta mentioned about, you know, not putting masks on kids that's not effective, not necessary. Martin Kolder, do you agree in school there's no need for them to be wearing face masks? Children should not wear face masks, no. They don't need it for their own protection and they don't need it for protecting other people either. I believe that was that last comment that angered the YouTube moderators spreading misinformation about children and masks. You know, reflecting on all that now, is there anything you would change or say differently or do you pretty much stand by all that? I stand by it and I think this issue with masks is actually very problematic because we know from randomized trials from one from Denmark and one that was done in Bangladesh that the protection for masks is either zero or minuscule. The Danish study find no benefit and the Bangladesh study found a benefit between reducing it by between zero and 18%, which is almost nothing or nothing. So actually the fact that people were told that the mask will protect them is actually very dangerous to do. It's a very bad public health messaging because you then have people like older people, let's say the 75-year-old man that Liz was talking about, he may be like, oh, okay, I like to go to this crowded restaurant, but I'll put on the mask and everybody's wearing masks will be safe. Well, that's not the case. During the height of the pandemic is 74, five-year-old man should not be in a crowded restaurant. So it's dangerous. But then you told people, well, wear a mask and be safe. That's very dangerous. They give sort of a false sense of protection. And then, so I think people actually died because they were falsely told that the mask will protect them, so when they didn't. So that's very dangerous public health messaging to do. So they shouldn't have done that. What did you, what was your reaction when you heard that that round table with the sitting governor of the third largest state in the US was taken down off YouTube? Yeah, I think that was again shocking because you even censor a governor, elected governor of the state. But that's also related to LinkedIn, for example. I retweeted or I reposted something. I didn't add anything on myself. Just reposted something that was said by the state acknowledges of Iceland, which is sort of the equivalent of the CDC director of Iceland. And that was censors. They even censored the official views by a foreign government official. So it's clear that they were willing to censor anybody who said anything against the official narrative. And I think the reason they did it is that they didn't have any arguments. If they had had good arguments, they would use those in a debate and explain things. Since they didn't, they had to do either censoring or slandering and they did both of those things. In retrospect, reflecting on the last four years, from my perspective, it looks like the greatest coverup that the US government has conducted in a very long time. It looks as if there was initially really bad guidance, maybe a poor understanding of how this virus operates. Certainly, bad public health guidance instructing people to get away from one another to socially distance, to lock themselves inside of their homes, to refrain from going to work. Very little messaging as to which groups are most at risk and very little tailoring of the lockdown guidance to protect those who are most in need of it, but then to allow the rest of people to sort of go about their lives in a relatively normal manner. And then the thing that's been really shocking to me is the fact that there was dissent. There were people like you. There was the Great Barrington Declaration. There were sort of sane and rational people who were saying, hey, from the epidemiological and scientific perspective, this is not quite right. The government is airing. And then there were lots of people talking from the public policy perspective and saying, hey, our children are not learning well at home. It is actually really, really important that we get children back into a communal learning environment. And all of these people at all of these different levels were sort of systematically targeted and fired, dismissed from their posts or de-platformed over and over again. And then even now, there's still not some sort of widespread mea culpa or even necessarily a shared understanding of what we lived through. There's more of the sense of, at least I think, for maybe half of the population or some smaller percentage, there's a sense of, how dare our government do this to us? How is it that we had this sort of mass psychotic break or so it feels where there's still no atonement for it? And then for maybe half of the population, it's kind of a, yeah, that was bad, but we had to do that. And maybe if something like that happens again, we'll do it all over again. To me, that feels just shocking that we don't have a more collective understanding of what went down. How does it look to you? I agree. We have had commissions for things like when something happened at the space shuttle, there was a commission for the 9-11, there was a commission for and so on. So obviously we should have a commission for the pandemic response. I think the reason we do, and they started to work on it actually, but then when they realized that what was done was such a catastrophe, they just closed down the plans for a commission. So right now there's no commission at the federal level. There are, there is one in New Hampshire that just started and I believe that Florida has a grant jury investigation that published something about a month or two ago at the first report. So there are some at the state level, but not at the federal level. I should also say that, I mean, I guess you can claim that you didn't know about, not about public health, you didn't know what was going on, but this thing of censoring and our first amendment, free speech rights, that should never be accepted by anybody. And to me, that's actually a shock that there are people who think that it's okay to violate the first amendment. The government shouldn't be allowed to do that, but also the social media companies, even on their own, they shouldn't do that. They should have free speech. And the one who suffers most is not me, but when I'm censored, I think the people are some of the public who can't hear different viewpoints. And of course I know about the pandemic, but the other things I don't know about and I don't want them to censor you so that I can hear what you have to say. So free speech is not only about protecting the right to speak, it's also to protecting the right for people to hear different views. Also, I want to be able to listen to a voice like yours more so than I want to listen to Alex Jones, right? And so in a position in a situation where Twitter has decided to bring down its wrath at the behest of the government on a voice like yours, that makes it so people like me suddenly are more incentivized to turn to voices that are far less trustworthy, right? And going down these deeper alternative rabbit holes, I think frequently lead people with stray. And so it's crazy that it's like the sort of sane rational middle ground that is so frequently cracked down on. And that doesn't necessarily mean that people's questioning will be stifled. It just means that they'll feel a sense of like, okay, well, where should I find this information now? I guess, I don't know, like Alex Jones, isn't there something better than that, right? It's either like traditional establishment or alt voices and there's kind of no appropriate middle ground. And I think frequently it's that middle ground that's really speaking a lot of truth. Yeah. And I think the reason is that those of us who are there, like sort of the scientists, we are more of a threat to the narrative than some other person who is whoever they are. So we are more of a threat and therefore we are more likely to be censored. Yeah. Let me ask you, let me try to put forth, do my best to channel like the best argument of the censorious social media executive who's managing Facebook or Twitter during a pandemic where people are dying and they're thinking, you know what, there's a lot of quacks out there. And we, you know, I think all of us here can acknowledge now that, you know, you and Jay Bhattacharya had a lot to say that was worth listening to. But during this pandemic and possibly future pandemics, there will be legitimately bad or, you know, dangerously ill-informed people out there. And so there's a responsibility to stop just blatant nonsense from spreading around. Should they have, like, should they even attempt to that project or like, did they just do a bad job at it? How do you think about like the real bad actors in this space? Like what should social media companies do about that? So during the pandemic, I was actually in two different roles in the U.S. where I live and in Sweden, I'm a native of Sweden, I was born and raised there. And I just, I participated in the discussions that they did by supporting Sweden and the U.S. And in the U.S. that was on the fringe. Francis Collins said. In the Sweden, I was in the majority because Sweden was the only major Western country that didn't close all the schools and lockdown and so on and did focus protection. So I was in favor of the Swedish government of their approach to the pandemic. And of course, we now know that that turned out better because Sweden has the lowest access mortality of all major Western countries. Yeah, let me bring up a couple of slides. These are a couple of slides from, we spoke with Johan Norberg who did a study on this. This is showing the COVID death rate not being an outlier. It's right in the middle of the pack in Europe. And then you were talking about excess deaths. There it is all the way at the bottom for Europe. So Sweden, you know, took a lot of hits in the media and from our government officials while it was taking a different path. But at the end of the day, it seems as though Sweden fared just fine, even better than average on some metrics. Yeah, well, I'm COVID and they're much better avoiding some of the collateral damage on public health, the cardiovascular disease and cancer and mental health and so on. So in Sweden, I was on the majority. I was arguing for the establishment view, but there were a group of scientists, they were called the group of 22. There was one official disease technologist, but then also like a mathematician, an oncologist and a climate scientist and so on. They were very much against what, they were arguing very forcefully against the Swedish approach and understand now what he was proposing. Wanting to have love now stuck in the rest of the country or the world. Now, they published in the major newspapers in Sweden their objections to the Swedish approach. And I completely disagree with what they said, but I'm very grateful that they did write it because I think that was important. Because obviously there were other people in Sweden who would have thinking the same thing. Maybe we should do it like the other countries. So it was very important to have that debate. So I think they did a huge service to Sweden by actually writing what they did. And then I responded to them in the same newspapers and other the understanders, the chief neurologist responded and other scientists responded. And we could then explain to the public, well, this is the reason why we agree with this 22 and why it's better to do it the way it's being done. So this is an example, I think where free speech actually operates the way it should be. So again, I disagree with what they said, but I'm very thankful. I think it was a very good thing that actually wrote this thing that it took the time to write that thing. So I'm very grateful that they did so. Did we notice the shift in public opinion as a result of that public duking it out? Yeah, so we did notice a trust in the public authority of Sweden. So Sweden, the Swedish public, both from surveys and talking to friends and family were very confident in the protest we didn't took. So there was never any sort of serious public efforts to do it like other countries. So they had throughout very high public trust. But that trust went forthright because the public authority also trusted the public. Yeah, is some of that baked into the Swedish DNA though? I mean, it's a little bit more of a conformist culture than individualistic USA. I think that if you read Swedish children's books by Esther Lindgren and others, children are often allowed to be a little mischievous and in a good hearted way. That's sort of the ideal thing that children should not just obey but should actually do things that are a little bit mischievous. And I think that that has led to a society where you can't fool around them too much. They weren't just obeyed. So you have to really convince them that this is good for them to obey. I was not expecting to be long-stocking to somehow be brought in to have this useful Scandinavian insight. But you did it, you really... Yeah, you spared that pretty well. I mean, was being from Sweden and just like having a special interest in what was going on there, do you think that was a major factor that led you to look at things a little bit differently? Was that, did that somehow cause you to swerve from the kind of consensus path? So I came to the same conclusion that Sweden did independent of Sweden. But it did give me some sanity that there was, that I could read the Swedish newspapers that... And I was afraid that Sweden were buckled under the international pressure because it was enormous pressure. The UK first also had the same sensible approach like Sweden and then Boris Johnson buckled and they completely shifted. So that was a disappointment. Then I was afraid that Sweden would do the same. So that's where I became active in the Swedish debate. And then we saw Sweden didn't close the schools for ages one to 15 during that whole wave during the spring of 2020. And the data was clear that if you look at the mortality data of those 1.8 million children exactly zero died from COVID. And there was only a few hospitalizations. And if you look at teachers, they worked at no higher risk in other professions. So it was obvious after the spring of 2020 from the Swedish data that we should open all the schools here in the US and elsewhere. And that was one of the things that I had the Twitter account with maybe a few hundred followers at the time. I was maybe posting two or three times a year only. So I figured, okay, I'll try to use this. I can't publish in the US media, which I tried but failed, I used to use Twitter. So I was sort of putting out this report from the Swedish public health agency that came out in early July, showing that it was safe to have the school. So I was trying to put as much as possible. And most of the time it didn't reach anybody. A few times some people saw it, but I found out later that Twitter had put me on a trans-blacklist. So I had to avoid that this information came out. Yeah. Yeah, I mean- It's kind of shocking that you wouldn't even look at Sweden and that wasn't the highest level because the New England Journal of Medicine, which is edited by Harvard professors, they published a piece at the end of July, talking about where the school should be open or not by two Harvard professors. And they didn't even mention Sweden. And that's not how you find the truth because if you do a drug trial, then you have the people, some people get the drug and so they have some placebo control group. So to ignore Sweden, it's like ignoring the control group. Yeah. That's not how you find what's going on. As a sauna and cold plunger, I want to attribute Sweden's good outcomes to the overall health trends of the country and the fact that overall in Scandinavia, I mean, we're talking a particularly healthy demographic with perhaps the notable exception of the Danes who chain smoke and eat way too much sugar and have way too much obesity, right? Like the Danes are off doing God knows what. But the rest of Scandinavia sort of has the right idea with the exception of like Finnish alcoholics. But maybe that's just a self-serving hypothesis. Do you think that there's any truth to that type of thing of like the actual population that we're talking about looks very different than the population that we're talking about in the United States? So a good health system, obviously, is helps when it comes to keeping down the COVID death. But it doesn't do anything when you look at excess death because if you look at excess death, you compare the death rates during the pandemic with the death phase of three prior years with the five prior years. So obviously Sweden had a good health system before the pandemic and a good health system during the pandemic. If you compare that with Bulgaria, which has very high excess death, they don't have as good a health system before or during. But when you do look at excess death, that sort of cancels out because you compare Sweden to now during the pandemic to just before. So to me, that makes it's not because of the health system that Sweden has lower excess death, it's because it didn't do the lockdowns. So it doesn't have the collateral damage on these other public health issues like cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes or mental health. And the other Scandinavian countries, Denmark, Finland and Norway also are low because they also didn't, they closed the schools in the spring of 2020, but they had much less lockdowns and closures than the rest of Europe. Yeah, that's so interesting to me. I am going to continue to believe that it's cold punches that result in overall good health. So just because it's a very self-serving thing for me personally. I wanna return to the social media question for a second because you're involved, you're named plaintiff in this case, Murthy v. Missouri, which is in front of the Supreme Court right now. And it raises some really thorny questions. I mean, there is undoubtedly something has gone wrong if serious academics trying to engage in a serious academic debate are being blacklisted on Twitter and the government is in any way involved with that. We've come to call this job owning where the government kind of exerts this like vague threat to get what it wants out of the social media companies. The question then, the legal question in this case is really where is that line between the government's kind of just communicating and sharing ideas with tech companies and where does it come into coercion? Do you have any thoughts on that question? Like how much freedom do you think there should be between the government and tech companies to be able to communicate and share information about public health, for instance? I think the government should communicate with social media companies with this illegal content. Okay. Because that's illegal, that should be taken down. There are certain content that is illegal. Social media companies should do something about that. I don't think the federal government should communicate with them with other things. If they object to what I have to say, they should write a response on Twitter or go out with a news press release or whatever to argue against it or set up a debate with it. So for example, when Francis Collins, the former NIH director requested this devastating takedown he should instead have invited us to have a debate with other scientists to discuss this. And in my mind, it's this during a crisis when the pandemic was a crisis, that's when we need the First Amendment the most. If everything is fine, then, well, First Amendment, a free speech is always important, but it's especially during a hard time that we really need it. And if you go back in history, the First Amendment was written after a time of crisis during the Revolutionary War. So it's clear that the authors of this great document sort of didn't say, okay, we have freedom of speech because we are living such a great situation. It was, we just went through this major crisis and we really need to have freedom of speech. Yeah, so just drawing a hard line with the government should really only be involved with things that are explicitly illegal. That's a pretty clear line. With regards to pandemic policy, as we reflect and try to improve on what happened over the past four years, a lot of these things are now in the rear view, thankfully, masks, lockdowns, and so forth. Really the main live issue at this point is the vaccine. And there have been changing views of the vaccine as more and more data has come in. Where, what is your overview of the mRNA vaccines? Like what do you think is the best public health use of this kind of revolutionary technology at this point? What if they go back to the randomized trials? So there were randomized trials before they got the emergency use. So it's good that we're randomized. It's good that some people got the vaccine and other people got the placebo, which is basically a shot in the arm but without any of the vaccine in the shot. So that was good, but the clinical trials were not done properly. They were designed to evaluate symptomatic COVID infection. But I don't really care too much if you have to be home for three days in bed. I care about you not dying or also not being hospitalized. But they recruited a lot of people but they recruited mostly young and middle-aged adults and they're gonna survive COVID no matter what, the vast majority of them. So there was not enough death in these trials to actually determine if they reduced death. And in the Pfizer trial, there was about the same number of deaths in the vaccine and the placebo group. So there was no evidence that this protected against death. So you would say, okay, if it protects against infection, maybe it protects against death as well. Well, that's a reasonable assumption to do at least among older people who are at high risk of dying, but they could also be adverse reactions that leads to death. So they made a mistake not to look at actually older people to look at death as an outcome and they made a mistake to end the trial too soon but didn't have enough follow-up. So now we're in a situation where there's somebody put out a paper claiming that 17 million people died because of the COVID vaccine. Another paper claims that 14 million people were saved by the COVID vaccine. But neither of those are reliable because we don't even have a proper trial, randomized trial to determine whether people if this reduced death or not. Now there's a vaccine group in Denmark who does excellent research led by Christine Stabel-Benn at the Southern Danish University or the University of South Denmark. And they took the randomized trials for the mRNA vaccine and pull them together. And then they took the randomized trials from the DNA virus vaccine and pull them together. That's Johnson and Johnson, that's the Seneca and Sputnik to do two pool analysis. And by doing that, they increase the sample size so you can say something about death. And for the mRNA trials, there was no reduction in deaths or no excess death in this trials. So this is short-term for younger and middle-aged adults. There were no benefit in terms of deaths from the mRNA trials. The DNA virus trials, there was at least a 30% reduction in death based on the confidence interval. So based on that, it seems that we gave people the wrong vaccine, we gave them the mRNA vaccine instead of the data virus vector vaccines. But of course that's only short-term and among young and middle-aged people. Among older people, I think that probably all the vaccines still reduce mortality during 2021 based on observational studies done in various countries. For children and young adults, I think we don't know whether it's save more people or kill more people. So is there a policy record? I mean, it sounds like you want more randomized controlled trials on this specific question. And are you suggesting that they actually are taken off the market until those trials are completed? So we're now in a different situation because now we're doing a booster for people who have had, most people have had the vaccine and or had COVID. So we're now in a different situation. So the original trial is not as relevant for the boosters, but they haven't done even a proper randomized trial for the boosters. So what they should do and for example, Dr. Vinay Prasad at University of California, San Francisco has been really pushing this hard. They should do a randomized trial on the boosters and they should do it for older people, people in the 70s and 80s and 90s to see if it reduces mortality in older people who all of them have had either the vaccine or the infection before. Because we don't know if it reduces mortality or not in this group, but maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. The counter that you always hear to this is that the real world data, the fact that we vaccinated billions of people across the world indicates, and you can kind of see the outcomes from that, that it indicates that, yeah, the vaccine saved a lot of lives. I mean, this is the chart that I controversially pulled up when I was talking to RFK and there was a lot of interesting discourse around it, but it's pulling from CDC data and shows, the orange line here are the unvaccinated and the lines below are people who received at least one, some two vaccines. And during that surge, you see a large spike in deaths among the unvaccinated and not so much among the vaccinated. And so it's data like this that these models that you were talking, these mathematical models that you were referencing that say, millions of people have been saved by the vaccine. They're extrapolating from real world data like that. Is that somehow not valid or good enough to infer that from? So I think that in 2021, when you saw this big peak in the unvaccinated, in 2021, I think the core vaccines did save lives among older people. And I think there's actually better data than this, this is sort of just the graph, but there's individual data where you look at like cohort studies, where you compare individuals who got the vaccine or they didn't, you adjust for a number of various factors. So I believe that in 2020, there was the vaccine saved the lives of older people based on observational data. We should have had randomized data for it, but we don't. So, but I think the observational data is really convincing that it saved people. At the same time, if you look at the right part of this, there's not much mortality in either group. And that's probably because everybody has something of immunity whether they were vaccinated or not. So the question there is that would boost us help or not. And there should be a randomized trials to determine that. Well, so I'm in Florida and the policy makers here have taken a different path on many things related to COVID, but also the vaccines in October, 2022, the state surgeon general Joseph Lapidow announced that he had already recommended against the vaccine for children, anyone under age 18. And then in October of 2020 to based on a study that he conducted that's received some criticism. It's not peer reviewed, but he said that he was recommending against the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines for males age 18 to 39 years old based on in his study, finding an elevated risk of cardiac issues, myocarditis and so forth. Just to give the full picture here for everyone because I'm not weighing in on this one side or another, the CDC and Lapidow exchanged letters on this and they say that the risk of stroke and heart attack is actually lower in people who've been vaccinated, not higher based on their analysis of VAERS data. I don't know how much that's, I don't think that's highly stratified by age or sex, which seems like it could be a problem, but you, I'm curious, like what do you think of, you know, these are the real policy questions on the table now. Do you have any opinion one way or another on these sorts of policy recommendations? Yeah, so I have a, my oldest son is in that age bracket and I don't think he should get the vaccine, the booster. So I don't think there's any reason for this age group to get the booster, so I agree with Florida in that respect. As for the two studies, the Florida study, it has some Florida in that study, but I think the conclusion that young men and young women do not need the boosters, I think it's accurate. We know that the adverse reactions there, we know that they can be mycoditis. That's a well-established fact that also CDC acknowledges and we know that the benefit is minuscule in this age group. So I agree with the Florida recommendation not to recommend the vaccine to this age group. As for the VAERS data, that's very bad data and I'm surprised that they were referring to that. They are much better data on the CDC has on vaccine safety like from the Vaccine Safety Data Link. The Vaccine Safety Data Link has good data. The VAERS data is not reliable for many things. When we're thinking about the state of science right now, I've heard you in the past criticize kind of the state of peer review. You know, John Ianitis published this famous paper in 2005 why most published research findings are false. And one of his conclusions was that prestigious investigators may suppress via the peer review process the appearance and dissemination of findings that refute their findings, thus condemning their field to perpetuate false dogma. Empirical evidence on expert opinion shows that it is extremely unreliable. Do you agree with that or I guess more broadly what is your view of kind of academia and the peer review process? Yeah, I agree with that. And I think we have a problem. We have what's not a good one of my co-authors for the Great Britain Regulations Studies we have like a cartel system in science, not one for all of science, but each subset of science as a cartel system where the leading established scientists control who gets funded, who gets published and so on. And that's not a good thing. We have to decentralize science. We also have to open it up. So, for example, I think that peer review should be open. How would you do that? What do you mean by open? Well, if I write the paper, I'll publish it in some journal and then it's reviewed. I think it's good to have it reviewed by other scientists, but I think that their review should be published together with the papers so that other people can sort of see, okay, Martin said this and that, but maybe there's a question right here or maybe he did this other thing completely wrong. So I think now the, and it is open also, it's harder to sort of use that as a tool against your scientific enemies. Now it's all anonymous so somebody can write something bad about this guy, this thing and unsophisticated and it's never noticed that the paper is rejected and has to go to different journal. So the current system is very slow in terms of publishing things and it doesn't give the open debate, which I think an open peer review system should have. So hopefully we will be able to revise how the whole scientific publishing industry operates. Obviously it should also be open access so that anybody can read the scientific literature. There's a movement for open access that has been very strong in the last 20 years, which is very good. But there are still many papers that are behind the paywalls. So the scientists will produce the paper based on research plans that the taxpayers are funding. And then it goes to a journal for big publishing house and then they get people to review it for free and then they put it up there and they charge people to read it even though it was paid for by taxpayers' money. So that shouldn't happen. They have all scientific but it should be free and open to the public. So we're not getting the thing we paid for essentially. You're not, no. What do you mean by when you said decentralized, decentralized science more, how would you achieve that? So one thing interesting during the pandemic was that some of the big important studies on masks or on immunity from having had COVID versus vaccines and so on came from countries that are small countries, but with very good scientists like Denmark, for example, or Iceland or Sweden or Qatar. So they have very good scientists, but they're sort of independent on the big funding streams from NIH in the US and from the UK funding agencies, including the Wellcome Trust. So some of the best reasons came from there. And I think that was because they're not financially dependent on these big funders. And Anthony Fauci as the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, he was sitting in the biggest pile of infectious diseases in the world. So it's very scary to contradict him because of that. So I'm thinking, I mean, US is a big country. So instead of having one NIH, we could have six NIHs in different regions. And if that one is led by Anthony Fauci, well, that's too bad, but at least we have five other ones that are operational. So by decentralizing, if one thing doesn't work, then there will still be other things that are working. You know, speaking of Anthony Fauci, the question that's on a lot of our minds, those of us who were disturbed by what unfolded during the pandemic is this question of accountability. And whether or not there's gonna be any political accountability for any of the poor decisions for the censorship, it kind of seems as though it's fallen off the political radar as we go into 2024. I mean, Donald Trump was in charge of the federal government when this all went out and he's, you know, gliding to renomination. Joe Biden is the figurehead of the Democratic Party who kind of continued and exacerbated the problems that Trump started. I'm not particularly hopeful that there's gonna be any sort of like grand reckoning, but are you, do you see any signs for optimism on that front? Like you are pessimistic if for any sort of official reckoning or commission or may I call it, but I don't think that's gonna happen. Oh, you don't. I don't think that's gonna happen. So I'm pessimistic on that. What I'm optimistic is that I think the public has realized what a big huge mistake this was. So I think it's the majority now, the public. And I sometimes when I meet a random person, I would ask them, they don't know who I am, so I'll just ask them what their view is. And they would always ask, oh yeah, that was completely ridiculous. So they understand this. So they are very, very positive. And I think that if they ever try to do these lockdowns again, they won't succeed because there's already an organized sort of resistance to it. Yeah, I wonder if people became more sort of accidentally, the backlash was that they became more liberty loving and freedom appreciating than they were before in parts of the Anglosphere. I wonder how Australians reacted to their government really significantly curtailing their civil liberties. I wonder what some of the backlash to the Canadian trucker movement has looked like. I wonder whether there's an awful lot of normal people who are sort of hiding in plain sight who are basically saying, oh my God, my kid has been struggling with learning loss for years after that. The lockdowns were absolutely not worth it. Or, oh, I ended up actually getting the virus and it really wasn't that bad. And I'm grateful that the old people in my life were protected from it. But I was afraid of something that was unreasonable to be afraid of. And it was because the government tried to instill a hysteria. And in reality, a lot of that was baseless. I wonder how many normal people have walked away with the greater appreciation for their civil liberties than they had before. I think so, many people have. That's my guess. I was taking female speech for granted. I don't think that's regretted anymore. So. Well, Martin, Cole Dorfona, thank you very much for talking with us today. And for what you did throughout and after the pandemic. And, you know, maybe Harvard will reconsider its actions. Zach's going to keep emailing them every day on your behalf. I'll follow up with them to all of our listeners. Just a reminder that you can email us questions or topic suggestions at justaskingquestionsatreason.com. We'll be back here next week. See you then. Thanks. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to Just Asking Questions. These conversations appear on Reason's YouTube channel and the Just Asking Questions podcast feed every Thursday. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and please rate and review the show.