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While The Republican’s recent coverage of Martin Kulldorff’s talk in Northampton might be considered balanced, because approximately the same number of words were used to describe the doctor’s and sponsor’s positions and then a counter position, it fell short of this practice.
The counter position in the article (”Martin Kulldorff, critic of COVID-19 lockdowns, will headline Northampton meeting,” May 18) undermines Kulldorff’s questioning of the pandemic practices and the lack of ethical public health principles and practices. These two perspectives, as well as others about the pandemic, need to be in dialogue with each other.
The Republican’s reporting of this event had potential to promote democratic conversation by representing its nuance and context. Jeff Jarvis, one of the founders of “dialogue-based journalism,” argues that, for journalism to maintain its democratic role in society, reporters need to build relationships rather than make content.
I offer nuance and context to foster questioning, dialogue, and action.
Kulldorff, an epidemiologist and co-author of “The Great Barrington Declaration,” presented research that questions vaccines, mask mandates, testing and contact tracing. Vaccine mandates destroyed many lives. People have died or suffered vaccine injury who didn’t need the vaccine because they had immunity from infection.
Many people lost their jobs or businesses. Many families, friendships, and communities became estranged.
Kulldorf questions the lockdown methods because the entire U.S. population did not need the same conditions. He maintains that most vulnerable populations like older adults and the family members and professionals who supported them should have been protected. Children and young adults (including college students) would have done well if they were able to participate in schools and other everyday activities. These younger populations were the least vulnerable to this virus.
We need to question why the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention routinely downplayed the natural immunity acquired from infections. We also need to question why the United States took a one-disease approach, that is, just focusing on COVID-19, while Scandinavian countries, for example, took a more balanced approach to public health.
Peoples’ other conditions, like diabetes and heart problems, were centered alongside the virus. The dissemination of one narrative about COVID-19 in the United States distorted our understanding of this virus.
The Northampton-Area COVID Truth & Action group, which sponsored Kulldorff’s talk, convenes gatherings to provide access to research that disturbs the “one narrative” about COVID-19. This work represents our questioning and resistance to COVID mandates as ill-informed reactions.
Many of us have been following “the science” on both sides of the debate as we critically read and listen across diverse news outlets.
I also want to clarify my colleagues’ quotes in the article. The “freedom” that one colleague refers to is health freedom. People were expected to get the jab without consent. Another colleague was centering the issue of censorship because conversations and debates were shut down as we moved through the pandemic with different perspectives and practices.
Kulldorff’s presentation did not suggest that COVID-19 is no longer. However, he and his colleague, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, recently published a call for a COVID Commission to conduct an open and comprehensive inquiry.
They propose many questions like, “Why did the CDC routinely downplay infection-acquired immunity, despite the robust scientific evidence demonstrating its importance?”
