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A former Harvard Medical School professor who claims he was fired for refusing to receive the Covid-19 vaccine was appointed on Wednesday to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s advisory panel for immunization policy.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ’76 tapped Martin Kulldorff — who was first put on a leave of absence from Harvard in November 2021 — along with seven other physicians and researchers to replace roughly half of the 17 members he fired from the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.

Kulldorff, who held a faculty position at Harvard and worked as an epidemiologist at Mass General Brigham, argued in an op-ed in the right-wing magazine City Journal last year that the two institutions fired him because he “objected both publicly and privately” to vaccine mandates during the Covid-19 pandemic.

In October 2020, Kulldorff co-wrote a memorandum which argued that institutional lockdown policies prior to the development of a vaccine would “cause irreparable damage, with the underprivileged disproportionately harmed.” His co-authors were Oxford epidemiologist Sunetra Gupta and Stanford professor Jay Bhattacharya, who now serves as the director of the National Institutes of Health.

The memorandum, which the trio titled “The Great Barrington Declaration,” recommended that all workplaces and schools fully reopen to allow the United States to achieve “herd immunity,” which is when a virus stops circulating because a sufficient number of individuals develop immunity.

And in 2021, Kulldorff wrote in a post on X that “thinking that everyone must be vaccinated is as scientifically flawed as thinking that nobody should.”

An overwhelming majority of experts disagreed with the trio’s argument, saying that herd immunity could only be achieved with a vaccine, and that revoking immunization mandates and lockdown restrictions would only lead to more deaths.

Kulldorff also objected on personal grounds to being vaccinated himself. He wrote in City Journal that the vaccine had not been properly tested in people with a genetic immune deficiency that he has, and claimed that immunity from when he was infected with Covid-19 in early 2021 would better protect him than a vaccine. He cited widely criticized conclusions from a study that claimed mRNA Covid-19 vaccines failed to reduce mortality.

Though Kennedy said last week he would not appoint “ideological anti-vaxxers” to the CDC panel, half of his appointees — Kulldorff along with three others — have advocated against vaccines to some degree. The remaining 11 experts have yet to be named.

Kennedy’s decision to tap individuals with a history of challenging vaccines drew condemnation from infectious disease and vaccine experts, who accused the secretary of reneging on his promise.

Kennedy said in a Monday op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that the decision to re-staff the committee would restore public faith in immunisations.

But his move to fire all of the committee’s members has sparked fierce criticism. When Kennedy dismissed the experts, he claimed that the sitting panelists had financial conflicts of interest due to their ties with pharmaceutical companies.

In fact, members are screened for conflicts of interest and barred from serving on advisory committees if they have connections to vaccine manufacturers. If members do have a conflict of interest, they are required to disclose it and recuse themselves from related votes.

Kulldorff has formerly worked on scientific advisory panels at the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration. He currently works as a fellow for the Academy for Science and Freedom, a center at the conservative Hillsdale College.

Kulldorff earned thousands of dollars as an expert witness in a suit against Merck over its Gardasil vaccine, Reuters reported Thursday. Gardasil protects against sexually transmitted strains of human papillomavirus, a major cause of cervical cancer.

He did not respond to a request for comment.

—Staff writer William C. Mao can be reached at william.mao@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @williamcmao.

—Staff writer Veronica H. Paulus can be reached at veronica.paulus@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @VeronicaHPaulus.