A Harvard University professor of medicine delivered a stinging — and very funny — takedown of “vaccine fanatics” during a House select subcommittee roundtable on examining COVID-19 policy decisions Tuesday.
What happened?
The professor in question — Dr. Martin Kulldorff — is on leave from Harvard but is a biostatistician and epidemiologist and possesses “expertise in detecting and monitoring infectious disease outbreaks and vaccine safety evaluations,” according to the Great Barrington Declaration, a document he co-authored that questions COVID policies.
Toward the end of the roundtable, Kulldorff engaged in a discussion about COVID vaccines and natural immunity with Republican U.S. Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa.
Kulldorff said, “By forcing children to have a vaccine that they don’t need because they already had the disease, that undermines the trust in other vaccines like the measles vaccine or the polio vaccine, and that’s very, very serious. I think during the last several decades … the never-vaccinate people, the anti-vaccine people had tried to undermine the trust in vaccines but with very little success. But the vaccine fanatics who want to vaccinate every person in this country … even though they’ve already had COVID, that has undermined the trust in other vaccines … creating enormous vaccine hesitancy.”
Miller-Meeks replied, “So not allowing their provider or physician to determine the risk and the benefit?”
Kulldorff continued, “Yeah, and also people themselves, because people know about immunity. We learned that in school. People know that if you’ve had a disease —”
Miller-Meeks — who’s also a physician — interrupted Kulldorff with a smiling, good-natured quip: “It wasn’t until I came to Congress that I found out infection-acquired immunity was a novel concept.”
“Yeah,” Kulldorff replied before proceeding to raise the trolling ante considerably. “I guess we knew about it since 430 B.C. — the Athenian plague — until 2020. And then we didn’t know about it for three years, and now we know about it again …”
Here’s the clip:
How are folks reacting?
You might say that more than a few Twitter commenters were in standing ovation mode over Kulldorrf’s takedown:
- “Just brilliant!” one commenter said.
- “Boom!” another user declared.
- “Actually not surprising considering for the first time in human civilization marriage is not just between man and woman,” another commenter wrote. “We are in full-blown post-rationalism, and the slippy slope is vertical.”
- “Martin just pouring out molten satire is a beautiful thing to see,” another user observed.
Anything else?
The idea of acquiring natural immunity to COVID for the young and healthy became an almost taboo subject in the early stages of the pandemic — but recently has found its way back into the list of subjects you’re allowed to discuss without getting canceled list.
A recent study published in the Lancet — one of the oldest and most respected medical journals in the world — concluded that natural immunity provides “at least as high, if not higher” levels of protection against COVID-19 as two doses of an mRNA vaccine.