Professor Martin Kulldorff behind the research call for closures

On January 19, the Riksdag Social Affairs Committee will meet with the Minister of Social Affairs Lena Hallengren (S) and the Director General of the Swedish Public Health Agency, Johan Carlson. There are many questions about the ongoing pandemic and the vaccines that have just started.

One member cites a US report that claims thousands of lives could have been saved if tougher restrictions had been imposed in early spring.

Johan Carlson dismisses the report from the US Infection Control Agency as “a very strange story.” Instead, he wants to draw the attention of the committee members to another study.

– There is a large study comparing Sweden and South Korea with several other European countries showing that they have not had success with closures, he says.

The members of the Social Affairs Commission don’t know, but one of the authors of the study is a highly controversial professor. Together with a Swedish colleague, he is behind a call that divides the world of research, is welcomed by both Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, and that once again sheds light on Sweden in the international debate on the pandemic.

Read more: Why researchers are divided on herd immunity

Approve the Great Barrington Declaration , which is named after the American city where it was written, is based on some simple principles. According to the initiators, very strong closures and restraints do more harm than good. They believe that those who do not belong to risk groups should live their lives as normally as possible. Schools, restaurants and workplaces must be open, while the elderly and infirm must be protected with far-reaching measures and restrictions.

Since its launch on October 4, 2020, the appeal has attracted a lot of attention and also resistance. Critics say it is not possible to protect risk groups while allowing the virus to spread among the rest of the population, which would lead to significantly more deaths and medical care failing under pressure from people. infected. American infection control expert Anthony Fauci has called it “nonsense” and “very dangerous.”

At the same time, more than 13,000 researchers from around the world have signed the petition, although reviews have shown that there were several fictitious names and people with dubious credentials among them.

Call initiator They are three professors from the prestigious universities of Harvard, Oxford and Stanford. One of them is American Jay Bhattacharya at Stanford, who is one of the researchers behind the closure study that Johan Carlson referred to on the social committee.

Another of the initiators is the Swedish professor Martin Kulldorff from Harvard Medical School. He is a biostatistician and epidemiologist who has been active in the United States for a long time, but has experience at Uppsala University.

He tells DN that he took the lead in the appeal because he felt it was difficult for those who opposed the closures to make their voices heard in the debate.

– It was a great impact, bigger than we expected. It showed that there were many who thought like us but did not dare to say it out loud.

He says criticism is often based on the misconception that the call advocates fully releasing the virus. “Let it rip” – which you think is as harmful as zippers.

– The point is that there must be more measures for the elderly who need protection, while there is no reason to have more restrictive measures for the youngest. For them, the negative side effects of the confinements are so severe that they suffer more than their minimal risk of covid.

Its critics say it would lead to congested healthcare and young people with long-term problems that we still don’t know enough about.

– We don’t know anything about long-term problems for more than a year. For natural reasons, we have no data in this regard. However, we know that the effects of indirect injuries from lockdowns, school closings, or postponement of care for other things, have very long-term consequences that will lead to death.

The criticism has not stopped that the appeal had a very big impact in some medical and political circles. Representatives from the then government of Donald Trump met with the initiators last fall and were reportedly impressed with their ideas.

In Britain, politician Nigel Farage has transformed his old Brexit party into an anti-blockade party. He too leans on the appeal and its conclusions.

“It is effectively practiced to a great extent in Sweden, with significant success,” he wrote in a debate article when the party was launched in November.

Martin Kulldorff only partially agrees, according to him, Sweden has successfully kept, for example, schools open, but at the same time has failed to protect the elderly.

In Sweden, the appeal has received relatively little attention. Only a dozen Swedish researchers are among those who signed it when this article was written. One of them is Jonas Ludvigsson, a pediatrician and researcher who was threatened after publishing a study indicating that primary school children and teachers have little risk of becoming seriously ill from the virus.

The ideas behind the Great Barrington Declaration have also been debated at the highest level in Swedish infection control.

Recently noticed an email exchange between state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell, Östergötland infection control physician Britt Åkerlind, and Johnny Ludvigsson, professor of pediatrics at Linköping University.

Johnny Ludvigsson, like his son Jonas, is one of twelve Swedish researchers who signed the Great Barrington Declaration. In the Sept. 16 email, he links to a video featuring Irish polemicist Ivor Cummins, a controversial biochemist with high impact on social media and a leading proponent of the call.

The clip claims that the high death rate in Sweden can be explained by last year’s mild flu season. Anders Tegnell will refer to him the next day in an interview with Svenska Dagbladet.

Tegnell responds to Ludvigsson: “Most things are pretty good, even if you sometimes make big changes with medium good data. But especially this with excess mortality feels heavy. “

But it’s the email response from infection control doctor Britt Åkerlind that has subsequently caught the eye:

“Like you two, I think Ivor Cummins is quite right. He believes that we must continue to ‘expose’ the population to this infection at the correct dose.”

Britt Åkerlind later said that she regrets the choice of words. She is not among the signatories to the Great Barrington Declaration, when contacted by DN for an interview on how she views the appeal, she refuses.

DN has been applied Johan Carlson, Managing Director of the Swedish Public Health Agency, to get an idea of ​​the Greater Barrington Declaration, the vision for the Swedish strategy and the study it brought up in the Committee on Social Affairs. Nor has he wanted to appear for an interview or leave a written comment.

Professor Jay Bhattacharya says the study is independent of his work on the Great Barrington Declaration, but also that its findings support the message of the call that closures are not effective. He says he has not had any contact with representatives of the Swedish infection control work.

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