Martin Kulldorff said former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention directors should engage in an ‘open and honest’ debate with him.
The top outside vaccine adviser for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Sept. 18 called on critics to debate him.
As the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) opened its second meeting since being restructured, the committee’s chair, Martin Kulldorff, said that members of the public who are wondering whom to trust in the current discussions about vaccines should “only trust scientists who are willing to engage with and publicly debate the scientists with other views.”
“With such debates, you can weigh and determine the scientific reasoning by each side,” Kulldorff said. “But without it, you cannot properly judge their arguments.”
Kulldorff directly challenged the nine former CDC directors—including Dr. Mandy Cohen, the last director during the Biden administration—who wrote in a recent op-ed that new ACIP members are unqualified and hold “dangerous and unscientific views.”
Kulldorff is an epidemiologist who developed several programs that are used by health officials to monitor the safety of vaccines.
He worked with the CDC for years before he was removed in 2021 as a member of an ACIP subgroup because he advocated for keeping Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine available after the CDC paused its administration. Officials lifted the pause a short time later, although the shot was ultimately pulled from the market.
Kulldorff pointed to his past work, including dozens of articles he co-authored with government and university scientists. Most of the studies did not identify any problems with vaccines.
“By dismissing us as unscientific, the former CDC directors are de facto questioning not only us and our scientific research, but they are also questioning the safety of many childhood vaccines that we have shown to be safe,” he said. “The fact is that we are honest vaccine scientists that let the data speak whether the results go in one direction or the other. That is always how science should operate.”
