Martin Kulldorff Has Become the Vince Russo of American Medicine
Historical Parallels in Arrogance & Incompetence
Last week, the "new" Centers for Disease Control's Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices (ACIP) held a… “historic” meeting. Now, the ACIP has historically been a pretty quiet operation, one of which most Americans never heard of prior to 2021: a collection of independent medical experts working together to safeguard Americans' health by recommending lifesaving vaccines. This new iteration is precise opposite of that, and this meeting was not historic in a good way. People much smarter and more qualified than me have already written up a solid summary:
Unfortunately, with the COVID-19 pandemic, certain voices saw the global disaster as an opportunity to promote themselves, instead of contributing to lifesaving efforts. To build their personal brand and grow a following through social media through sensationalist antics and personal attacks. This wasn't enough for many. They craved political power - and through a second Trump Administration, they got what they wanted: a big-boy job with real-world responsibility, and a paycheck bankrolled by the American taxpayer.
With no relevant experience or qualifications, disgraced ex-Harvard anti-vaccine online petition author Martin Kulldorff wound up head of an ACIP stocked with reprehensible cranks. What followed shouldn't be shocking - this is a narrative that has played out time and time again in American culture. Most notably, with the downfall of professional wrestling promotion World Championship Wrestling.
Enjoy a condensed history:
I. The Murder of WCW by the Coward Vincent Russo
In the mid-1990s, World Championship Wrestling (WCW) was the world's leading professional wrestling promotion. Mid-carders Kevin Nash and Scott Hall had crossed over from WCW's biggest competitor, and as "The Outsiders," terrorized the roster. With the explosive rise of Goldberg, and the shocking debut of professional wrestling's biggest star "Hollywood" Hogan, head booker Eric Bischoff was on top of a "new World order." However, no boom period lasts forever.
Backstage politics began to get in the way. You see, professional wrestlers are considered "independent contractors," trapped in a paradox. Their first priority is getting time to put on a great match, win over the fans, and work the merch table to get as much money in their wallet as possible. Yet, a professional wrestling match is a two (or more) person endeavor, requiring teamwork to keep one another safe and put on an entertaining show. This is a hard concept for some to wrap their head around.
Big names like Kevin Nash and Hogan lobbied to keep themselves dominant in the primetime slots, while up-and-coming wrestlers like Chris Jericho (who went on to become a megastar in WWE) found themselves relegated to cannon fodder. Eric Bischoff wrote himself into the show as an on-screen character. The "New World Order" wound up with nine separate spinoff factions: a gaggle of irrelevant shmucks. By the fall of 1999, World Championship Wrestling became the joke of the industry.
Desperate for a savior, Bischoff was sent packing, and a new lead writer was brought in: Vince Russo, a writer for World Wrestling Federation (WWF) magazine before writing storylines for television. What a lot of fans nostalgic for the "Attitude Era" of WWF Raw and Smackdown won't tell you is that a lot of what Russo wrote wasn't... good. Certainly doesn't hold up today.
However, Russo was very good at misrepresenting his contributions and promoting himself. When WCW was desperate for their knight in shining armor, Russo came running. Except, Vince Russo hated professional wrestling. More specifically, the art of storytelling in wrestling. Russo had nothing but contempt for fans of professional wrestling. His vision on how to turn WCW around was... “borderline experimental.”
What followed would go down in history as some of the legendarily worst television ever broadcasted. Wrestling on the... professional wrestling show... was deprioritized for countless skits and ridiculous gimmicks. Rejecting the century-old tried-and-true formula of "babyfaces" versus "heels," Russo's writing was wildly incoherent and impossible to follow "shades of grey." Even worse, Vince had an obsession with breaking the 4th wall. Insider terms such as "work" and "shoot" became commonplace on live broadcasts, destroying any and all suspension of disbelief.
With all the chaos, ratings and ticket sales continued to steadily decline. Vince Russo went on internet radio and proceeded to blame everyone else, including the Standards & Practices division of the television network. He would be booted from the company and eventually return to work alongside Bischoff just months later. In the leadup to the release of the wrestling comedy flick Ready 2 Rumble, a real stinker, Russo unveiled another legendary idea.
When people watch professional wrestling, they're generally tuning in to watch a theatrical stage show of highly athletic competitors engaging in physical combat, often battling over possession of some championship title. Vince Russo instead elected to put the WCW World Heavyweight Championship around the waist of rather forgettable, athletically unimpressive Hollywood comedian and Ready 2 Rumble star David Arquette. For quite some time, Vince Russo had struggled with the concept that professional wrestling fans wanted to watch...professional wrestling…on the... professional wrestling show.
WCW's Director of Research, Matt Williams, spent a year polling fans, including those who stopped watching Thunder and Nitro ages ago. They wanted to see more wrestling on the wrestling show. When Williams presented this research to Russo, his work was thrown out and Williams quit the company.
After putting the championship title on an unqualified Hollywood comedic actor failed to turn things around, Vince Russo had another even brighter idea. He decided to, in a convoluted series of events, book himself as the next great heavyweight champion of World Championship Wrestling, something no wrestling fan ever wanted to see. After losing over $60 million dollars in 2000 alone, WCW would be bought out by Vince McMahon the following year.
Vince Russo wasn't interested in actually doing his job of writing great, much less competent, wrestling television. He wanted to be seen and respected as a creative genius, and later on, the star of the show - with all cameras focused on him. When given the opportunity to prove himself, Russo completely failed, going down in television history as a central lynchpin in the death of his employer. All while blaming everyone else for his shortcomings.
We are watching this exact narrative play out all over again in our federal public health agencies. Most notably with the Center for Disease Control's Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices.
The Temptations of Anti-Vaccine Stardom
We've profiled Martin Kulldorff, head of the ACIP before. He's a morally reprehensible quack that did nothing for five years but dance in pom-poms and a miniskirt as a cheerleader for SARS-CoV-2 infecting unvaccinated children.
Like Vince Russo, Martin Kulldorff's primary focus was promoting himself above all else, even if it meant directly misrepresenting his qualifications and basic facts. For his loyalty to the modern anti-vaccine movement and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Martin was rewarded with the leadership of the ACIP, now gutted and replaced with unqualified anti-vaccine quacks that did nothing for the past five years but publish inflammatory conspiracy theory garbage.
This second ACIP meeting did not go well. After years of claiming how he would have led such a masterful response to COVID-19, Martin Kulldorff could not run a simple meeting. It’s become undeniable that Martin is not interested in taking the responsibilities of his new job seriously.
Multiple times, the committee couldn’t figure out what it was voting on. The majority of votes were outside of their legal purview. Committee members made absurd, inflammatory comments & ridiculous demands. Credible experts found their mics muted. Obscene conspiracy theories that the COVID-19 vaccine has killed people were tweeted out by the official CDC account, as if somehow legitimate. Kulldorff himself admitted that he and his fellow panelists were unqualified "rookies."
While Vince Russo didn't get anyone killed except nearly himself, Martin Kulldorff's years of spewing anti-vaccine disinformation contributed to the needless deaths of countless Americans. The unprofessional, unscientific, and utterly childish garbage Kulldorff has spewed since taking over the ACIP will only get American children killed. Now the ACIP has zero credibility. Half the country and the nation's leading medical societies has turned their back on the antics of Kulldorff and his fellow ACIP members. The ACIP has become a horror show of incompetence, a deeply embarrassing reminder of why we can never let narcissists whose first priority is themselves make public health decisions for our children.
Martin Kulldorff, it’s time to face the truth: You have become the Vince Russo of American medicine, and this is all you will be remembered for in the history books. Nothing you do from here on out will change the fact that you are simply a creepy old pervert who is comfortable sacrificing the health and lives of American children, just so you can play pretend as some sort of respected medical expert. The best thing you can do right now, Martin? Retire. Walk out of the public sphere and pray that you are soon forgotten that the spotlight can instead be focused on someone who has actual real-world contributions to celebrate beyond a useless online petition.
You wasted your entire life, Martin. As embarrassing as that is for you to realize, you aren't entitled to waste the life of a single American child because you helped deny them a lifesaving vaccine to satisfy your perverse, narcissistic fantasies. End of story.
