 What happened 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, doing better protection of older 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 generic thing. So. Okay. 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 like, 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, well, go ahead. 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 to 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 born 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 measles and sometimes it just protects you from severity of disease the next time you get infected which is the case for coronaviruses 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 the student 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 a 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 who 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 this was a shortage of vaccines you're depriving the vaccine from people who need it and who benefit from it by forcing mandate aid 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 they're at 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 rather 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. So, and it's less than the average influenza year during the last two decades. We're usually about 200, 2000 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 myocarditis which is 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 master and Brigham fired me a little bit two years ago. Okay. And then Harvard Medical School put me on leave for two years. Wow. 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 worked with on a regular basis. The leaderships of Harvard's master and Brigham did not like for example, when I did interviews with about the Great Bank's regulations. 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 were 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. There were no takers on the other side? No, they didn't want to debate me. But they were making that law 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. Yeah, 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. Hey, thanks for watching that clip from our show, Just Asking Questions. You can watch another clip here or the full episode here and please subscribe to Reason's YouTube channel and the Just Asking Questions podcast feed for notifications when we post new episodes every Thursday.