Dr. Kulldorff

Canceled: LinkedIn Joins The Fun, Shuts Down One Of Florida Gov. DeSantis’ Favorite Scientists

The social media crackdown on the COVID-19 dissenters is metastasizing, coming from one of the least likely platforms and in the process coming for one of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s favorite scientists.

Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a top epidemiologist at Harvard University, saw two of his recent posts on LinkedIn axed because he didn’t toe the line on COVID, according to the Brownstone Institute, a think tank where Kulldorff is senior scholar.

Both posts were made on Thursday.

One involved an interview Kulldorff gave to Jan Jekielek of The Epoch Times, in which Kulldorff criticized vaccine mandates and passports as well as lockdowns.

On passports and mandates, Kulldorff noted, “This coercive thing is turning a lot of people away from vaccines, and not trusting them for very understandable reasons. Why do you have to force somebody to take the vaccine, if it’s so beneficial to you?”

“Those who are pushing these vaccine mandates and vaccine passports — vaccine fanatics, I would call them — to me they have done much more damage during this one year than the anti-vaxxers have done in two decades. I would even say that these vaccine fanatics, they are the biggest anti-vaxxers that we have right now. They’re doing so much more damage to vaccine confidence than anybody else.”

Even if they manage to coerce somebody to get the COVID vaccines,” he added, “it will turn them off from public health. It will make them distrust public health and turn them off from other vaccines that are not mandatory.”

Kulldorff is a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, a document released last October that called for protecting the most vulnerable but allowing those least at risk to live normal lives and work toward natural herd immunity.

Dr. Sunetra Gupta, an Oxford University epidemiologist, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor at Stanford University Medical School, also drafted the declaration. Both of them have been advisers to DeSantis as well.

That matters because the other Kulldorff message that LinkedIn took down was a reposting of a link made by Iceland businessman and author Thorsteinn Siglaugsson.

Siglaugsson had noted an interview last week in which Iceland’s top epidemiologist praised vaccines for stopping the spread of serious illness, but insisted that COVID was too widespread to be contained or eradicated, and so achieving herd immunity naturally was the best option.

The Brownstone Institute noted that LinkedIn’s message to Kulldorff was the same both times: “It’s been removed because it goes against our Professional Community Policies.”

“So here we have a major social media portal for professionals taking down comments by the chief epidemiologist of an entire country,” Brownstone observed.

LinkedIn’s actions do not bode well for having any kind of scientific debate about COVID – even if Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Biden administration, and its allies in media, business, and other levels of government were honest enough to allow that.

“LinkedIn has generally been a safe option for scientists and others who have looked for a means by which to share information when so many other venues have become closed to debate and discussion,” Brownstone concluded.

“The newest actions by this platform suggest that it too has enrolled in the strategy of shutting down alternative voices, even when they are highly credentialed and have important information to share as it relates to public health policies.” 

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