Latest news with #Kulldorff
Yahoo
25-03-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
ASU to host guest presentation on COVID-19 pandemic aftermath
SAN ANGELO, Texas (Concho Valley Homepage) — Dr. Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist and founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Academy of Public Health, will give a guest presentation at Angelo State University regarding 'the lasting effects of the COVID-19 pandemic,' according to ASU. The presentation will take place beginning at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 27. It will be held in the Carr Education-Fine Arts Building's Eldon Black Recital Hall, located at 2602 Dena Drive. The event is free and open to the public. It is sponsored by the Texas Tech University Free Market Institute at Angelo State University. ASU stated that the presentation, titled 'Five Years Since 'Two Weeks to Flatten the Curve': Reflections on the COVID-19 Pandemic,' will see Kulldorff 'discuss how due to school closures, lockdowns, masking and vaccine mandates, evidence-based medicine and basic principles of public health were thrown out the window during the pandemic, while alternative views were censored.' ASU to host lecture on West Texas legend The university said Kulldorff 'will also present his views on how this caused both short- and long-term collateral public health damage that we must now live with, and die with, as well as how it has also generated distrust in the areas of medicine and academia, as it should, with less public support for scientific research.' 'While he says the mess was created by a small group of scientists in medical leadership positions, Kulldorff will argue that it falls on all of us, including rank-and-file academics in every field, to restore academic freedom and the integrity of the scientific enterprise,' ASU said. Also a biostatistician and a founding fellow at Hillsdale College's Academy for Science and Freedom, Kulldorff is a member of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee. He is also a former member of the Vaccine Safety Subgroup of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Previously a professor of medicine at Harvard University for 13 years, Kulldorff has also worked at Uppsala University in Sweden and the National Institutes for Health. He is a co-author of the 'Great Barrington Declaration,' which ASU said advocates 'for a pandemic strategy of focused protection rather than lockdowns.' Kulldorff earned his doctorate in operations research at Cornell University. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Fox News
11-02-2025
- Health
- Fox News
Trump nominees debut new science journal aimed at spurring scientific discourse, increasing transparency
President Donald Trump's nominees to run the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are part of a group of scientists who just launched a new research journal focused on spurring scientific discourse and combating "gatekeeping" in the medical research community. The journal, titled the Journal of the Academy of Public Health (JAPH), includes an editorial board consisting of several scientists who complained of facing censorship during the COVID-19 pandemic. JAPH's co-founders include Martin Kulldorff, a former Harvard Medical School professor who is a founding fellow at Hillsdale College's Academy for Science and Freedom, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of health policy at Stanford University who is also Trump's nominee to be the next NIH director. Kulldorff and Bhattacharya became known during the pandemic for authoring The Great Barrington Declaration, which sought to challenge the broader medical community's prevailing notions about COVID-19 mitigation strategies, arguing that – in the long run – the lockdowns that people were facing would do more harm than good. Dr. Marty Makary, a surgeon and public policy researcher at Johns Hopkins University, who is Trump's nominee to be the next director of the FDA, is on the journal's editorial board as well. JAPH is adopting a novel approach by publishing peer reviews of prominent studies from other journals that do not make their peer reviews publicly available. The effort is aimed at spurring scientific discourse, Kulldorff said in a paper outlining the purposes of the journal's creation. The journal will also seek to promote "open access" by making all of its work available to everyone in the public without a paywall, he said, and the journal's editorial leadership will allow all scientists within its network to "freely publish all their research results in a timely and efficient manner," to prevent any potential "gatekeeping." "Scientific journals have had enormous positive impact on the development of science, but in some ways, they are now hampering rather than enhancing open scientific discourse," Kulldorff said. "After reviewing the history and current problems with journals, a new academic publishing model is proposed – it embraces open access and open rigorous peer review, it rewards reviewers for their important work with honoraria and public acknowledgment and it allows scientists to publish their research in a timely and efficient manner without wasting valuable scientist time and resources." Kulldorff, Bhattacharya, Makary and others on the new journal's leadership team have complained that their views about the COVID-19 pandemic were censored. These were views that were often contrary to the prevailing ideas put forth by the broader medical community at the time, which related to topics such as vaccine efficacy, natural immunity, lockdowns and more. "Big tech censored the [sic] all kinds of science on natural immunity," Makary said in testimony to Congress following the pandemic. During his testimony, Makary also shared how one of his own studies at Johns Hopkins during the pandemic that promoted the effectiveness of natural immunity, which one scientific journal listed as its third most discussed study in 2022, "was censored." "Because of my views on COVID-19 restrictions, I have been specifically targeted for censorship by federal government officials," Bhattacharya added in his own testimony to Congress the same year. Kulldorff, who has also complained about censorship of his views on COVID-19, argued he was asked to leave his medical professorship at Harvard that he held since 2003, for "clinging to the truth" in his opposition to COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccine mandates. "The JAPH will ensure quality through open peer-review, but will not gatekeep new and important ideas for the sake of established orthodoxies," Andrew Noymer, JAPH's incoming editor-in-chief told Fox News Digital. "To pick one example, in my own sub-field of infectious disease epidemiology, we have in the past few years seen too little published scholarship on the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID. Academic publishing as it exists today is too often concerned with preservation of what we think we know, too often to the detriment of new ideas." Bhattacharya and Makary did not wish to comment on this article.
WIRED
06-02-2025
- Health
- WIRED
Donald Trump's NIH Pick Just Launched a Controversial Scientific Journal
Emily Mullin Matt Reynolds Feb 6, 2025 6:25 PM The journal's editorial board includes multiple scientists, such as Trump health nominees Jay Bhattacharya and Marty Makary, who opposed Covid public health measures. Photo-Illustration:President Donald Trump's nominees to lead the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration, Jay Bhattacharya and Marty Makary, are among the editorial board members of a newly launched scientific journal that includes a group of scientists who promoted herd immunity for Covid-19, criticized pandemic-era public health measures, and downplayed the virus. Some experts are worried that the journal, which has links to the right-wing news site RealClearPolitics, could become a scientific mouthpiece for the Trump administration and a platform that these experts allege could publish dubious research. Dubbed the Journal of the Academy of Public Health, it was cofounded by Bhattacharya, a health economist at Stanford University, and Martin Kulldorff, formerly a professor of medicine at Harvard University and biostatistician at Mass General Brigham. The journal is associated with the newly formed Academy of Public Health. 'This seems like more of a club newsletter than a scientific journal,' says Gigi Gronvall, an immunologist and professor at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Bhattacharya and Kulldorff were two of the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, a manifesto published in October 2020—months before a Covid-19 vaccine was widely available in the United States—in response to the Covid pandemic that called for an end to lockdowns and school closures in favor of pursuing a policy they called 'focused protection.' It advocated for herd immunity by allowing those at minimal risk to immediately resume life as normal. Bhattacharya and Kulldorff also publicly objected to Covid vaccine mandates, a position Kulldorff claims led to his dismissal from Harvard and Mass General in 2024. On its website, the Academy of Public Health says it is 'an international association of public health scholars, researchers and practicing professionals in the field of public health and its many specialties.' The Academy and its associated journal are both funded by the Real Clear Foundation, which also owns RealClearPolitics and awarded Bhattacharya its first annual Samizdat Prize in 2023, an award 'for journalists, scholars, and public figures who have resisted censorship and stood for truth,' according to the organization. Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X, is among this year's winners. In a February 5 press release, the Real Clear Foundation calls the journal 'revolutionary,' saying it will publish 'cutting-edge, peer-reviewed, and open access research from the world's leading scholars of epidemiology, vaccinology, global public health, health policy, and related disciplines.' In its bylaws, the Academy of Public Health says only members can publish in the new journal. To join, you must be nominated by a current member. Articles published so far include a review of a paper examining the association between vaccines and asthma, a critique of Covid vaccine trials, and a study that concluded that masks were not associated with lower Covid case rates. The journal also published an editorial from Kulldorf arguing that in some ways scientific journals 'are now hampering rather than enhancing open scientific discourse.' Carl Bergstrom, a theoretical and evolutionary biologist, believes the journal is part of an ongoing effort to cast doubt around established scientific consensus. 'If you can create the illusion that there is not a predominance of opinion that says, vaccines and masks are effective ways of controlling the pandemic, then you can undermine that notion of scientific consensus, you can create uncertainty, and you can push a particular agenda forward,' he says. Peer-reviewed papers, he says, can provide cover to politicians who want to make certain decisions and they can also be used in court. When reached by phone on Thursday, Kulldorff said Bhattacharya and Makary were approached to be on the editorial board before their nominations by President Trump. 'Right now, they are not active members of the board,' he said. (The journal's website lists Bhattacharya and Makary as 'on leave'.) He added that there is 'no connection' between the journal and the Trump administration. Kulldorff told WIRED that the journal will be a venue for open discourse and academic freedom. 'I think it's important that scientists can publish what they think is important science, and then that should be open for discussion, instead of preventing people from publishing,' Kulldorff says. Kulldorff and Andrew Noymer, an epidemiologist at UC Irvine who has been a proponent of the lab leak theory of Covid's origin, are named as the journal's editors-in-chief. Scott Atlas, who was tapped by Trump to serve on the White House Coronavirus Task Force in 2020, is also named as an editorial board member. Atlas, a radiologist by training, has made false claims that masks don't work to prevent the spread of coronavirus. In January Noymer, wrote an op-ed supporting Bhattacharya's nomination for NIH administrator. In it, he praised Bhattacharya for his open-mindness to different points of view. That op-ed was published in RealClearPolitics. Angela Rasmussen, an American virologist and research scientist at the University of Saskatchewan, says she worries that the journal could be used to prop up and legitimize pseudoscientific and anti-public health views. 'I don't think this is going to give them any credit with real scientists. But the public may not know the difference between the Journal of the Academy of Public Health and the New England Journal of Medicine,' she says. Taylor Dotson, a professor at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology who studies the intersection of science and politics, says there is a 'legitimate concern' that the journal could become a repository for evidence that bolsters arguments favored by people in the administration. If confirmed, Bhattacharya and Makary's boss could potentially be Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump's nominee to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, who is known for promoting a wide range of debunked scientific beliefs, including that there is a link between vaccines and autism and that AIDS is not caused by the HIV virus. Dotson warns that there is a risk that the existence of journals closely aligned with a certain political view might deepen the politicization of science. 'The worst case scenario is you start having the journals for the people who are kind of populist and anti-establishment and the journals for the people who also read NPR and The New York Times.' The Journal of Public Health is an open-access journal, which means that the articles are free for anyone to access. It also uses open peer review, where the names and comments of scientists who check articles prior to publication are also published along with the article. 'These are good steps,' says Dotson. 'It's good that it is trying to push against the power of the big scientific publishers.' But the researcher also warns that open-access studies might be more prominent and widely cited in the media just because they are easier to find, and not because they are necessarily more scientifically rigorous. Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta, the third author of the Great Barrington Declaration, published a controversial paper in March 2020 that argued that half of the UK population may have already been infected with Covid-19. That paper was a preprint that had not been peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal but was widely shared in the media and within government, despite proving later to be incorrect. Gupta is also on the editorial board of the Journal of the Academy of Public Health. But ultimately, Dotson says, the journal should be judged by the science it publishes and the editorial decisions of the people in charge. If they encourage their reviewers to be rigorous and publish a wide range of high-quality papers, these should be seen as positive signs. 'We need to wait and see, but there are reasons to be worried in our political environment,' Dotson says.
