Interview with Martin Kulldorff

A look inside of IOM and NASEM reports

This past week I talked with Martin Kulldorff, infectious disease epidemiologist and biostatistician regarding the recent National Academies of Science, Engineering and Mathematics (NASEM) report that was released recently regarding COVID-19 vaccines and associated injuries.

Martin Kulldorff, previously employed by Harvard Medical School was terminated earlier this year.

My purpose for talking with Martin was for a different concern. But first read and listen to what others who talked to him.

You can read his blog and associated news articles about his termination.

You can listen to a few online interviews here. here

Martin Kulldorff was one of the three chief authors of the Great Barrington Declaration along with Dr. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford University. All three are very brave scholars and researchers. They paid a heavy price for being right and standing up against Pharma and Public Health officials.

My interests were different. I wanted to know about the process of reviewing existing research and studies then compiling into a report much like the Institute of Medicine (IOM) has done for so many years.

National Academies of Science, Engineering and Mathematics (NASEM), the new branded IOM, published a report April 2024 to examine any disease or medical condition associated with all the EUA licensed COVID-19 vaccines administered in the US.

NASEM / IOM has a long history of researching challenging questions of vaccine “safety” beginning with an assessment of the oral polio vaccine in 1977.

When Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986 (NCVIA) which created the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP aka The Vaccine Court), the Advisory Commission on Childhood Vaccines (ACCV) and National Vaccine Advisory Committee (NVAC) federal committees, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) system, it also charged the IOM with reviewing existing literature regarding adverse events associated with the vaccines covered in the NVICP.

Martin Kulldorff has contributed to a previous IOM report from 2013. That report, “The Childhood Immunization Schedule and Safety: Stakeholder Concerns, Scientific Evidence, and Future Studies.”

The IOM invited Martin Kulldorff to write a paper on the study designs for the current childhood schedule. He did. It was a 40-paper published with the IOM report as Appendix D.

Many of us have been confused about his work prior to COVID. Just mentioning anyone’s name associated with an IOM report could bring some negative thoughts.

His paper did not conclude about the safety of the schedule but rather, suggesting several methods to study the schedule effectively.

In the introduction segment of his paper, he writes the following: “Very few post marketing studies have evaluated whether the risk of adverse events depends on the scheduling of the vaccines.”

After the publication of the IOM 2013 report, there were public hearings with researchers. Martin Kulldorff participated in a hearing where the American Association of Pediatrics (AAP) criticized his report. The IOM staff aggressively defended Kulldorff. AAP is considered by many is one of the more aggressive lobby arms of Pharma.

I asked him if he knew why AAP opposed his work. He said that he did not.

My belief is that the AAP did not want people to know about the damaging effects of the schedule.

I turned the conversation back to the current report from NASEM. Kulldorff mentioned that the committee only reviewed the research and papers from the early days of COVID vaccines. Probably up until 2022 at the latest. It takes time to conduct a study, write it, go for peer-review and finally publish.

His conclusion is that the report is just a snapshot in time and NASEM needs to continue its work to review the many papers that have been published in the last couple of years.

It is vitally important that NASEM continues examining COVID-19 vaccine injuries. However, given the work history of how the IOM and NASEM publish material on any given topic, it might be several years before we hear from them again regarding vaccine injuries.

When reading the report, nearly 340 pages in length, and the conclusions in the report regarding COVID-19 vaccines causing myocarditis and related medical outcomes is solid. The committee examined the Vaccine Safety DataLink (VSD) and found an associated medical condition for the vaccine.

But why didn’t the committee used the same data source to review any other medical conditions such as stroke, blood clotting or neurological injuries? More to come in an upcoming article that takes a deeper dive into the report.

During the interview with Martin Kulldorff, I got the sense that he truly was trying to propose significant and logical methods to study the childhood schedule. His following answer to my question really jolted me.

Wayne: In your paper, you proposed several methods to study the childhood schedule in great detail. Those methods are listed in your 40 page report noted as Appendix D in the 2013 IOM report. Has there any research or studies conducted using your proposed methods?

Martin: Very little. Just one study of aluminum conducted by Matthew Daley.

The study, Association between Aluminum Exposure from Vaccines Before Age 24 Months and Persistent Asthma at Age 24 to 59 Months was published in 2022. Nearly 9 years after the IOM report.

So it is very apparent that the scientific world of vaccine safety research ignored Martin Kulldorff’s report. Maybe it is because they do not want to know and possibly preventing any credible study to educate the public on the childhood schedule.

We all owe Martin Kulldorff our gratitude and support.

In the near future, I will be following up with him to discuss in detail his role as a named plaintiff along with Aaron Kheriaty, Jim Hoft, Jay Bhattacharya, and Jill Hines in Murthy v Missouri, (formally known as Missouri v Biden) argued in The US Supreme Court March 2024.

Keep Learning, Keep Challenging Yourself and Always, Always Question Authority.

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Wayne Rohde, author of 2 books on The Vaccine Court.