The head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory panel warned the scientific community must work to address concerns about how it approached COVID-19 if it wishes to regain the public’s trust.
Dr. Martin Kulldorff, who chairs the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, or ACIP, raised questions about the decline of trust in federal health officials during an interview with Politico published Wednesday. He weighed in on the matter as data shows nearly three-fifths of the U.S. population does not trust the CDC “a great deal” or “a fair amount” to make the right recommendations on health.
“If you look at public health as a whole, the goal — in politics — is to get 51 percent support from the population or the public. But in public health, that’s not enough. You need to have way above 90 percent,” Kulldorff said, adding there is “a need to reestablish both the integrity and trust of public health.”
“And trust is going both ways. If CDC wants to be trusted, CDC also has to trust the public. If you do that, then you have to address not just those people who already trust the CDC or trust the government. You have to address the perspective of those who do not trust the CDC and ask them why is that,” he continued.
Kulldorff, a former Harvard biostatistician who was fired from the Ivy League Institution after criticizing its vaccine mandates and pandemic policies, suggested the government’s handling of COVID was partly responsible for the decline in public trust.
“The big reason — a very good reason — is because CDC was not truthful during the pandemic. They said things that were wrong,” the APIC chair said.
“More generally about mandates, I think mandates of the Covid vaccine were very detrimental, and I think that’s one of the big driving forces behind what we see now in public health. Those mandates were both unscientific and unethical,” he added.
The former Harvard professor was known for signing the Great Barrington Declaration, an anti-lockdown document also endorsed by NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya. The declaration, signed by nearly one million infectious disease epidemiologists and public health scientists, argued that lockdowns were “producing devastating effects on short and long-term public health.” The health experts pressed officials to instead institute “Focused Protection” policies sustaining protections for the elderly while allowing less vulnerable populations to develop herd immunity through resuming normal activities.
Kulldorff’s latest condemnation of how government health agencies handled the pandemic comes after medical leaders who spearheaded COVID policy during the pandemic have undergone sweeping scrutiny for their actions, including recommending controversial mass lockdowns.
The CDC has been accused of misinforming the public as to the very nature of how the virus spreads, switching course repeatedly before stating in 2022 that the coronavirus was airborne, as opposed to being spread through droplets, as the agency initially stated.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, who led the bulk of COVID-19 policy as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and chief medical adviser to the president during the pandemic, has likewise faced scathing criticism from Republicans who have gone so far as accusing him of helping to spark the pandemic.
After conducting a two-year investigation, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released a 520-page report in December 2024, concluding that COVID-19 was likely leaked from a scientific research lab in Wuhan, China, where U.S. researchers were working on bat coronavirus research that was funded by government grants. The committee accused the lab of leaking the virus after using controversial gain-of-function research paid for in part by funding from the NIAID, which was led at the time by Fauci.
“The virus possesses a biological characteristic that is not found in nature,” the report read. “Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) researchers were sick with a COVID-like virus in the fall of 2019, months before COVID-19 was discovered at the wet market.”
As the doctor-in-chief tasked with shepherding the country through the pandemic, Fauci has also faced scrutiny over repeatedly pivoting on what it would take to bring the U.S. out of the pandemic and recommending broad vaccine mandates.
“It’s less of a political issue, and it’s more of a societal issue that a lot of what we see going on now is driven by the public who do not trust public health and don’t trust the scientific community,” Kulldorff said this week.
“I don’t think [ACIP] should be involved at all in mandating any vaccines. That’s not our role,” he added.
In May 2021, Fauci promised that if 70% of Americans got at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine by July 4, the U.S. would avoid a surge. At the time, he expressed confidence that if the Biden administration reached its goal of vaccinating 70% of the population with at least one dose by that date, it could turn COVID-19 surges into “blips.”
However, by November of that year, the U.S. was confirming an average of almost 83,500 new COVID-19 cases each day over the past week, after over 70% of adults had been fully vaccinated against the virus.
By that month, Fauci was telling the public that booster shots were needed to control the virus, as the CDC recommended that certain groups of people receive another shot six months after their initial vaccination. In the fall of 2021, Fauci said that if the United States made boosters available for everyone, it would be possible for the country to get control of the virus by the spring of 2022.
“As every month goes by, the immunity [from a Covid vaccine] wanes more and more,” he told Axios. “So as time goes by, you’re going to see more vaccinated people” becoming more vulnerable to the virus.
COVID-19’S CONSEQUENCES STILL RIPPLE THROUGH SOCIETY 5 YEARS LATER
In February 2022, Fauci was saying people would likely need COVID boosters “only every four to five years.” A few months later, that had changed, as the Washington Post reported, “He believes we will eventually only need yearly shots.”
In June 2022, Fauci told the outlet the country was experiencing “the second-to-last spike,” while predicting another surge would come in the fall, “but will hopefully be accompanied by a variant-specific booster.”
