MLB trade rumors and news: We’ll have 28-man rosters in April and the ghost runner for all of 2022
Kelley L Cox-USA TODAY Sports
Doubleheaders will be back to nine innings this year, and there’s a new rule that will benefit Shohei Ohtani. Thought MLB had already finished making changes for the 2022 season? Think again. Accord…
Doubleheaders will be back to nine innings this year, and there’s a new rule that will benefit Shohei Ohtani.
Thought MLB had already finished making changes for the 2022 season? Think again. According to a report from the New York Post’s Joel Sherman on Tuesday, several adjustments are in store this year, with most of them being made in an effort to keep players healthy following the lockout and a shortened spring training.
Teams will have 28-man rosters in April, a key adjustment as pitchers continue to get built up after an unusual offseason. While teams will be limited to 13 pitchers when rosters return to their usual 26-man limit in May, teams will be able to carry as many arms as they want for the season’s first month. While doubleheaders will return to nine innings, which seemed likely once teams resumed scheduling split twin bills and giving fans less bang for their buck, the ghost runner on second base in extra innings will remain in place this season. MLB says that change is only for 2022, though we’ve heard that same refrain to some extent in each of the past two seasons.
Finally, in the only long-term measure of the bunch, starting pitchers who bat for themselves will remain in the DH slot even when their day on the mound is over. That’s significant for Shohei Ohtani, who awkwardly moved from the mound to the outfield on several occasions last season as the Angels tried to get him another at-bat.
- Tuesday was the deadline for players and teams to exchange arbitration figures, inspiring most clubs to reach deals with their arbitration-eligible players. Here’s all the info on which players settled and which ones appear to be headed to trial.
- As part of the arbitration deadline happenings, Juan Soto agreed to a one-year, $17.1 million deal with the Nationals, Trea Turner got a one-year, $21 million deal with the Dodgers, and the Blue Jays bought out the remainder of Matt Chapman’s arbitration-eligible years with a two-year, $25 million extension.
- The Rockies made an interesting long-term investment, signing infielder Ryan McMahon to a six-year, $70 million extension.
- In a deal going down 2AM EST and shocking most, the Minnesota Twins have signed Carlos Correa to a monster three-year, $105.3M contract (that contains opt-outs after the first two seasons, just in case).
- The Braves, who literally cannot be stopped nor contained, have signed reliever Kenley Jansen to a one-year, $16M deal.
- The Phillies have signed Nick Castellanos, who was kind enough to break his own relocation with an artsy Instagram shot of Philadelphia. The slugger heads there by way of a five-year, $100M deal, which absolutely makes hearing “wutter” for the next half a decade worth it.
- In a very interesting and possibly drama-laden turn of events, the Yankees have traded Luke Voit to the Padres for pitching prospect Justin Lange.
- Freddie Freeman was not the only top player to find a new team. Kris Bryant finally got his payday as the Rockies signed him to a seven year deal worth $182 million. A nice payoff for a guy whose service time was shamelessly manipulated by the Cubs.
- The Phillies find themselves in a very tough division with both the Mets and the Braves making big moves. However, the Phillies are always willing to spend to try and keep pace and they did so as they signed Kyle Schwarber to a four year, $79 million contract.
- We all remember Joctober and how important Joc Pederson was to the Braves turning around their season and making their World Series run. Now, Joc is headed back to the west coast as the Giants signed him to a one year deal.
- A federal judge has ruled that minor league players are MLB employees throughout the year, rather than seasonal apprentices as the league claimed, meaning that plaintiffs in the trial are entitled to nearly $2 million in damages. This could be a major development in minor leaguers’ lengthy quest to be paid a living wage.
- The Yankees have brought back Anthony Rizzo on a two-year, $32 million deal with an opt-out after 2022 — certainly a solid deal for the three-time All-Star, but probably not nearly what he thought he’d get a couple years ago.
- As if the World Series champion Braves weren’t already intriguing enough, they went out and signed one of baseball’s best relievers in 2021, agreeing to a two-year, $10 million deal with right-hander Collin McHugh.
- The Brewers, who always seem to have four or five starting-caliber outfielders, added former MVP Andrew McCutchen to their outfield mix. He’ll join Christian Yelich, Lorenzo Cain, Tyrone Taylor, and Hunter Renfroe on a club that is looking to replace slugger Avisaíl García.
- The Mariners acquired one of baseball’s best hitters in a deal that was essentially a salary dump, as Cincinnati sent Jesse Winker to Seattle and shed the remaining three years and $35 million on Eugenio Suárez’s contract in the process. The Mariners’ lineup gets significantly better with the addition of Winker, who posted a .949 OPS last season, and though Suárez struggled to make contact and get on base in 2021, he still provides some intrigue after hitting 31 homers for the season and posting a 1.268 OPS in September and beyond. The Reds get right-hander Justin Dunn, outfielder Jake Fraley, and minor league lefty Brandon Williamson in return.
- Fernando Tatis Jr., who apparently had several minor motorcycle accidents this offseason, suffered a fractured wrist at some point during the lockout. His inability to communicate with the Padres’ medical staff while the league was shut down delayed a resolution to the issue, but now it appears he’s headed for surgery and could be out as long as three months.
- The Cardinals have signed Drew VerHagen to a two-year, $5.5 million deal.
- The Cubs have given manager David Ross an extension through at least 2024.
- The Giants signed Carlos Rodon to a two-year, $44 million deal.
- Rejoice Dodgers fans! Los Angeles is bring Clayton Kershaw back on a one-year deal.
- The Rangers have acquired Mitch Garver from the Twins for Isiah Kiner-Falefa and Ronny Henriquez.
- The Blue Jays have signed Yusei Kikuchi to a three-year, $36 million deal.
- They did a thing! The Mets have acquired Chris Bassitt in a trade with Oakland.
- In a move shocking literally no one, the Nationals are determined to extend young phenom Juan Soto.
- The Nationals have signed veteran slugger Nelson Cruz, who is going to be so fun to watch this year in the NL East.
- The Yankees have acquired Josh Donaldson, Isiah Kiner-Falefa, and Ben Rortvedt from the Twins in exchange for Gary Sánchez and Gio Urshela.
- Apple and Major League Baseball announced that two games will air exclusively on Apple TV+ each Friday night beginning this season. It’s another obstacle to MLB fans being able to watch their teams’ games, as the games will be blacked out on MLB.tv and will only be available through the $4.99/month streaming app. However, it gives the league another infusion of cash and was likely a factor in MLB’s decision to increase their offers in CBA negotiations.
- After just four seasons running the Marlins, Derek Jeter has stepped down as CEO and will sell his stake in the team. It’s a surprisingly quick end to what seemed to be a long-term vision for Jeter in Miami.
- The Red Sox have signed right-hander Tyler Danish to a minor league contract, Tim Dierkes of MLB Trade Rumors reports. The contract contains an invitation to Boston’s big league Spring Training camp. The RHP adds some low-risk, high-reward depth to Boston’s staff. The 27-year old has sparsely seen time on a major league mound, making only 11 appearances between 2016-2018, pitching a 4.85 ERA over 13 innings. He did, however, strike out 11 batters in those 13 innings, a promising glimmer of what the Red Sox hope is a diamond in the rough.
- Ryan Zimmerman, the only player from the inaugural Washington Nationals roster who still remained with the team — and, in fact, the only player from that team who was in the majors at all — announced his retirement last week. Zimmerman, 37, made his major league debut less than two months after becoming Washington’s first-ever draft pick in 2005, and he spent the entirety of his 17-year career in D.C. (though he opted out of the 2020 season due to the COVID-19 pandemic). Zimmerman finishes his career as a two-time All-Star, two-time Silver Slugger, and 2019 World Series champ. In 1,799 career games, he posted a .277/.341/.475 slash line, and he finished his career on a strong note, hitting .243/.286/.471 with 14 homers over 110 games in a part-time role.
- Trevor Bauer will not face criminal charges in the Los Angeles court system resulting from a sexual assault case that was opened last year. While the decision likely increases his chances of pitching at some point in 2022, MLB’s investigation of the incident remains open and is unlikely to be resolved before the end of the lockout.
- David Ortiz was the lone player elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame by the BBWAA. Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Curt Schilling, all of whom have hovered near the 75% induction threshold in recent years, did not receive the necessary voting total in their final year on the ballot, and now the only chance for any of them to be enshrined in Cooperstown is through a veterans committee.
- MLB has killed a deal that would have split the Rays’ time between Tampa Bay and Montreal.
- Amid a flurry of hirings and promotions, the Dodgers announced that they have promoted assistant GM/vice president Brandon Gomes to general manager. He’ll report to the president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman and is the first person to hold the Dodgers’ GM title since Farhan Zaidi left for San Francisco after the 2018 season. The hiring of Gomes, who pitched for the Rays from 2011-15, continues a recent trend of MLB teams re-integrating former players into senior management roles. He joins Phillies GM Sam Fuld, Rangers GM Chris Young, Athletics VP of baseball operations Billy Beane, and Mariners president of baseball operations Jerry Dipoto as former major leaguers who are now in front-facing executive roles.
- The Yankees have hired Rachel Balkovec as manager for their low-A team, the Tampa Tarpons, making her the first female skipper in affiliated professional baseball. The 34-year old has already made a massive name for herself in the baseball world, starting out as a strength and conditioning coach for the St. Louis Cardinals in 2012. In 2016, she made the jump to the Houston Astros as Latin American strength and conditioning coordinator—a position she learned Spanish for. From there she moved on to become the strength and conditioning coach for Double-A Corpus Christi and has served as a hitting coach in the Yankees organization for the last three seasons.
- When Fanatics came somewhat out of nowhere to snag the MLB license to make baseball cards out from under Topps, the writing was on the wall for the future of Topps as a company. Without the MLB license, Topps did not really have anything going for it except name recognition and that would not be able to compete with actual licensed cards. As a result, it was announced that Fanatics is buying Topps outright, which should make the transition much smoother and could preserve many of the Topps brands fans have grown to love.
- The Athletics have hired Mark Kotsay as the team’s latest manager. Kotsay played for the team from 2004-2007, diving into coaching after retiring in 2013. After spending some time as San Diego’s hitting coach, Kotsay took on the bench coach role for Oakland, following that up with positions as quality control coach and first base coach.
- The Mets have hired Buck Showalter as their new manager. The 65-year-old has a 1,551-1,517 career record, and will be taking his place in Queens for the next three years. He’ll be the Mets third manager in five years, and just like he was able to do in Baltimore, can hopefully bring some hope to a team whose has fighting chance potential.
- Six new members have been elected to the National Baseball Hall Of Fame, revealed by today’s special selection committee meetings. Cooperstown will now have new residents Bud Fowler, Gil Hodges, Jim Kaat, Minnie Miñoso, Tony Oliva, and Buck O’Neil, who will be officially inducted on July 24 along with the players to be voted in by the standard writers’ ballot.
- One of the easier types of deals to do when faced with a hard deadline like the expiration of the CBA is to bring back a player that was on your team last year. Without concerns about medicals or background checks, there are far fewer hurdles for the moves like the Dodgers bringing back Chris Taylor on a four year deal to overcome with a tight window.
- The Giants continued assembling their 2022 rotation, signing right-hander Alex Cobb to a two-year, $20 million deal with a club option for 2024. Cobb has largely struggled since leaving the Rays following the 2017 season, but he was pretty good over 18 starts for the Angels in 2021, throwing for a 3.76 ERA with 98 strikeouts and 33 walks in 93.1 innings. The Giants are betting on Cobb getting the same San Francisco boost that pitchers like Kevin Gausman, Drew Smyly, Anthony DeSclafani, and Alex Wood have received over the past two seasons.
- The Rangers have been arguably the most aggressive team in free agency this offseason. After already locking in Marcus Semien to a seven year deal among other moves, the Rangers got another high profile infielder as they signed Corey Seager to a massive 10 year, $325 million deal.
- Everyone has been waiting for months for the fate of Marcell Ozuna in the wake of the domestic violence charges against him. After a winding tale during the legal process that saw his charges downgraded and saw him enter a diversion program, the league finally weighed in as they gave him a 20 game retroactive suspension. He will not miss a game during the 2022 season.
- Normally, the reigning Cy Young award winner signing with a new team would be the headline for most baseball news cycles. That it wasn’t speaks volumes to how crazy it was on the transaction front. Robbie Ray does, in fact, have a new squad as the Mariners inked him to a five year, $115 million.
- The Rangers are close to signing Jon Gray to four-year deal. The 30-year old showcased some amazing breaking pitches before his success trailed off at the end of the 2021 season. But for the Rangers right now, any kind of pitching is good pitching.
- Kevin Gausman has agreed to a five-year, $110 million deal with Blue Jays. While Gausman struggled in the second half of last season, posting a concerning 4.42 ERA after the All-Star Break, he still finished sixth in Cy Young voting and was undoubtably the Giants’ ace at one point. We all go through rough patches, right?
- Marcus Semien has signed a seven-year deal with the Rangers. The star infielder put on quite the show last season, slashing .265/.334/.538 with 45 home runs. Now, the Rangers have locked him down until 2028 — the year he turns 38.
- The Twins signed Byron Buxton to a massive seven year, $100 million extension,because ‘tis the season for astronomical contracts. The Twins are rolling the dice on their homegrown talent — while Buxton is a powerhouse of a player, he is beyond injury prone. If Minnesota can keep him healthy for more than 90 games a season, their risk will be well worth it.
- The Rays and Wander Franco both took major gambles, agreeing to an 11-year extension with a club option for a 12th year that will pay Franco a guaranteed $182 million. If all goes right for the Rays, they’ll control a generational superstar through his age-33 season. They’re betting big on a player who has played in just 70 major league games, though, while Franco is sacrificing the possibility of signing a deal that could be twice as big in exchange for more financial certainty now.
- The Giants had themselves a busy day as they, at least partially, sought to get the band back together for next season. They were successful on a couple fronts as they inked starting pitcher Anthony DeSclafani to a three-year deal and shortly after that, his fellow member of the Giants’ 2021 rotation, Alex Wood, joined him on a two-year deal.
- Despite all of the drama surrounding the tenure of manager Alex Cora with regards to the sign stealing scandal that impacted both his time with the Astros and Red Sox, Boston seems very keen on keep the manager on that won them a World Series title AND helped them put together a surprising run this season deep into the playoffs as they went ahead and exercised their options on his deal for 2023 and 2024.
- Giants first baseman Brandon Belt was the only player in the majors to accept the one-year, $18.4 million qualifying offer from his previous club, and he’ll return to a San Francisco team that he helped propel to 107 wins in 2020.
- Justin Verlander rejected the qualifying offer, but he quickly re-upped with the Astros, agreeing to a one-year, $25 million deal with a $25 million player option for 2023. That’s an impressive commitment on the part of the Astros, who will bring back a future Hall of Famer but will gamble on an aging starter who has pitched in just one game over the past two seasons.
- The Mets tendered the one-year, $18.4 million qualifying offer to Noah Syndergaard, but instead of sticking with the club he’s spent his entire major league career with, the oft-injured starter opted to take on a new challenge and a slightly more lucrative deal, signing a one-year, $21 million deal with the Angels. After making just two appearances over the last two years, Syndergaard is gambling that he can stay healthy in 2022 and help turn around a franchise that has struggled badly at evaluating free agent pitchers in recent seasons.
- The Blue Jays turned some heads when they gave up highly-regarded prospects Simeon Woods-Richardson and Austin Martin to acquire starter José Berríos at the trade deadline this year, but now they’re in it for the long haul with the former Twins starter after signing him to a seven-year, $131 million extension.
- The Mets have pretty famously struggled to find someone to take their general manager job. After getting turned down by a number of candidates, New York offered the position to former Angels GM Billy Eppler, and he accepted the job.
- The Giants have extended Gabe Kapler’s contract through 2024. It makes sense for the Giants to keep the party going with Kapler; he’s taken a team that was seemingly short on talent in 2020 and transformed them into the most winning team in 2021 (107, to be exact).
- Starting in the 2022 season, all 30 teams will now be required to provide housing to all minor league players, ESPN.com’s Jeff Passan reports. Last month team owners held a vote on the subject that passed unanimously. The intricacies are still being worked out on if teams will be giving players stipends for housing or if they will provide it directly. Considering the conditions that an overwhelming amount of minor leaguers have been subject to, this is a welcome improvement to the quality of their lives.
Government
Mistakes Were Made
Mistakes Were Made
Authored by C.J.Hopkins via The Consent Factory,
Make fun of the Germans all you want, and I’ve certainly done that…
Authored by C.J.Hopkins via The Consent Factory,
Make fun of the Germans all you want, and I’ve certainly done that a bit during these past few years, but, if there’s one thing they’re exceptionally good at, it’s taking responsibility for their mistakes. Seriously, when it comes to acknowledging one’s mistakes, and not rationalizing, or minimizing, or attempting to deny them, and any discomfort they may have allegedly caused, no one does it quite like the Germans.
Take this Covid mess, for example. Just last week, the German authorities confessed that they made a few minor mistakes during their management of the “Covid pandemic.” According to Karl Lauterbach, the Minister of Health, “we were sometimes too strict with the children and probably started easing the restrictions a little too late.” Horst Seehofer, the former Interior Minister, admitted that he would no longer agree to some of the Covid restrictions today, for example, nationwide nighttime curfews. “One must be very careful with calls for compulsory vaccination,” he added. Helge Braun, Head of the Chancellery and Minister for Special Affairs under Merkel, agreed that there had been “misjudgments,” for example, “overestimating the effectiveness of the vaccines.”
This display of the German authorities’ unwavering commitment to transparency and honesty, and the principle of personal honor that guides the German authorities in all their affairs, and that is deeply ingrained in the German character, was published in a piece called “The Divisive Virus” in Der Spiegel, and immediately widely disseminated by the rest of the German state and corporate media in a totally organic manner which did not in any way resemble one enormous Goebbelsian keyboard instrument pumping out official propaganda in perfect synchronization, or anything creepy and fascistic like that.
Germany, after all, is “an extremely democratic state,” with freedom of speech and the press and all that, not some kind of totalitarian country where the masses are inundated with official propaganda and critics of the government are dragged into criminal court and prosecuted on trumped-up “hate crime” charges.
OK, sure, in a non-democratic totalitarian system, such public “admissions of mistakes” — and the synchronized dissemination thereof by the media — would just be a part of the process of whitewashing the authorities’ fascistic behavior during some particularly totalitarian phase of transforming society into whatever totalitarian dystopia they were trying to transform it into (for example, a three-year-long “state of emergency,” which they declared to keep the masses terrorized and cooperative while they stripped them of their democratic rights, i.e., the ones they hadn’t already stripped them of, and conditioned them to mindlessly follow orders, and robotically repeat nonsensical official slogans, and vent their impotent hatred and fear at the new “Untermenschen” or “counter-revolutionaries”), but that is obviously not the case here.
No, this is definitely not the German authorities staging a public “accountability” spectacle in order to memory-hole what happened during 2020-2023 and enshrine the official narrative in history. There’s going to be a formal “Inquiry Commission” — conducted by the same German authorities that managed the “crisis” — which will get to the bottom of all the regrettable but completely understandable “mistakes” that were made in the heat of the heroic battle against The Divisive Virus!
OK, calm down, all you “conspiracy theorists,” “Covid deniers,” and “anti-vaxxers.” This isn’t going to be like the Nuremberg Trials. No one is going to get taken out and hanged. It’s about identifying and acknowledging mistakes, and learning from them, so that the authorities can manage everything better during the next “pandemic,” or “climate emergency,” or “terrorist attack,” or “insurrection,” or whatever.
For example, the Inquiry Commission will want to look into how the government accidentally declared a Nationwide State of Pandemic Emergency and revised the Infection Protection Act, suspending the German constitution and granting the government the power to rule by decree, on account of a respiratory virus that clearly posed no threat to society at large, and then unleashed police goon squads on the thousands of people who gathered outside the Reichstag to protest the revocation of their constitutional rights.
Thousands gathered outside the Reichstag building in Berlin to protest the "New Normal" totalitarianism this morning, so the police declared the demonstration illegal and turned the water cannons on them ... are you satisfied yet, totalitarians? pic.twitter.com/j70CHsEWWM
— Consent Factory (@consent_factory) November 18, 2020
Once they do, I’m sure they’ll find that that “mistake” bears absolutely no resemblance to the Enabling Act of 1933, which suspended the German constitution and granted the government the power to rule by decree, after the Nazis declared a nationwide “state of emergency.”
Another thing the Commission will probably want to look into is how the German authorities accidentally banned any further demonstrations against their arbitrary decrees, and ordered the police to brutalize anyone participating in such “illegal demonstrations.”
Memories fade, and history is rewritten, so here's a 2.5 minute montage of goon squads in Germany (which, of course, bear no resemblance whatsoever to the SA, or the SS, or any other Nazi goons) enforcing compliance with official "New Normal" ideology during 2020-2022. https://t.co/GIrb4NCJcC pic.twitter.com/6BIOgLVLKx
— CJ Hopkins (@CJHopkins_Z23) March 10, 2024
And, while the Commission is inquiring into the possibly slightly inappropriate behavior of their law enforcement officials, they might want to also take a look at the behavior of their unofficial goon squads, like Antifa, which they accidentally encouraged to attack the “anti-vaxxers,” the “Covid deniers,” and anyone brandishing a copy of the German constitution.
Don't worry, Covidian Cultists ... German Antifa is mobilizing to unleash total war on "extremist neo-Nazi Corona Deniers" like the lady holding the copy of the German constitution in the lower right! pic.twitter.com/HkdXBxyaEJ
— Consent Factory (@consent_factory) December 12, 2020
Come to think of it, the Inquiry Commission might also want to look into how the German authorities, and the overwhelming majority of the state and corporate media, accidentally systematically fomented mass hatred of anyone who dared to question the government’s arbitrary and nonsensical decrees or who refused to submit to “vaccination,” and publicly demonized us as “Corona deniers,” “conspiracy theorists,” “anti-vaxxers,” “far-right anti-Semites,” etc., to the point where mainstream German celebrities like Sarah Bosetti were literally describing us as the inessential “appendix” in the body of the nation, quoting an infamous Nazi almost verbatim.
And then there’s the whole “vaccination” business. The Commission will certainly want to inquire into that. They will probably want to start their inquiry with Karl Lauterbach, and determine exactly how he accidentally lied to the public, over and over, and over again …
And whipped people up into a mass hysteria over “KILLER VARIANTS” …
And “LONG COVID BRAIN ATTACKS” …
And how “THE UNVACCINATED ARE HOLDING THE WHOLE COUNTRY HOSTAGE, SO WE NEED TO FORCIBLY VACCINATE EVERYONE!”
And so on. I could go on with this all day, but it will be much easier to just refer you, and the Commission, to this documentary film by Aya Velázquez. Non-German readers may want to skip to the second half, unless they’re interested in the German “Corona Expert Council” …
Look, the point is, everybody makes “mistakes,” especially during a “state of emergency,” or a war, or some other type of global “crisis.” At least we can always count on the Germans to step up and take responsibility for theirs, and not claim that they didn’t know what was happening, or that they were “just following orders,” or that “the science changed.”
Plus, all this Covid stuff is ancient history, and, as Olaf, an editor at Der Spiegel, reminds us, it’s time to put the “The Divisive Pandemic” behind us …
… and click heels, and heil the New Normal Democracy!
Government
Harvard Medical School Professor Was Fired Over Not Getting COVID Vaccine
Harvard Medical School Professor Was Fired Over Not Getting COVID Vaccine
Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
A…
Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),
A Harvard Medical School professor who refused to get a COVID-19 vaccine has been terminated, according to documents reviewed by The Epoch Times.
Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist, was fired by Mass General Brigham in November 2021 over noncompliance with the hospital’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate after his requests for exemptions from the mandate were denied, according to one document. Mr. Kulldorff was also placed on leave by Harvard Medical School (HMS) because his appointment as professor of medicine there “depends upon” holding a position at the hospital, another document stated.
Mr. Kulldorff asked HMS in late 2023 how he could return to his position and was told he was being fired.
“You would need to hold an eligible appointment with a Harvard-affiliated institution for your HMS academic appointment to continue,” Dr. Grace Huang, dean for faculty affairs, told the epidemiologist and biostatistician.
She said the lack of an appointment, combined with college rules that cap leaves of absence at two years, meant he was being terminated.
Mr. Kulldorff disclosed the firing for the first time this month.
“While I can’t comment on the specifics due to employment confidentiality protections that preclude us from doing so, I can confirm that his employment agreement was terminated November 10, 2021,” a spokesperson for Brigham and Women’s Hospital told The Epoch Times via email.
Mass General Brigham granted just 234 exemption requests out of 2,402 received, according to court filings in an ongoing case that alleges discrimination.
The hospital said previously, “We received a number of exemption requests, and each request was carefully considered by a knowledgeable team of reviewers.”
“A lot of other people received exemptions, but I did not,” Mr. Kulldorff told The Epoch Times.
Mr. Kulldorff was originally hired by HMS but switched departments in 2015 to work at the Department of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, which is part of Mass General Brigham and affiliated with HMS.
“Harvard Medical School has affiliation agreements with several Boston hospitals which it neither owns nor operationally controls,” an HMS spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email. “Hospital-based faculty, such as Mr. Kulldorff, are employed by one of the affiliates, not by HMS, and require an active hospital appointment to maintain an academic appointment at Harvard Medical School.”
HMS confirmed that some faculty, who are tenured or on the tenure track, do not require hospital appointments.
Natural Immunity
Before the COVID-19 vaccines became available, Mr. Kulldorff contracted COVID-19. He was hospitalized but eventually recovered.
That gave him a form of protection known as natural immunity. According to a number of studies, including papers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, natural immunity is better than the protection bestowed by vaccines.
Other studies have found that people with natural immunity face a higher risk of problems after vaccination.
Mr. Kulldorff expressed his concerns about receiving a vaccine in his request for a medical exemption, pointing out a lack of data for vaccinating people who suffer from the same issue he does.
“I already had superior infection-acquired immunity; and it was risky to vaccinate me without proper efficacy and safety studies on patients with my type of immune deficiency,” Mr. Kulldorff wrote in an essay.
In his request for a religious exemption, he highlighted an Israel study that was among the first to compare protection after infection to protection after vaccination. Researchers found that the vaccinated had less protection than the naturally immune.
“Having had COVID disease, I have stronger longer lasting immunity than those vaccinated (Gazit et al). Lacking scientific rationale, vaccine mandates are religious dogma, and I request a religious exemption from COVID vaccination,” he wrote.
Both requests were denied.
Mr. Kulldorff is still unvaccinated.
“I had COVID. I had it badly. So I have infection-acquired immunity. So I don’t need the vaccine,” he told The Epoch Times.
Dissenting Voice
Mr. Kulldorff has been a prominent dissenting voice during the COVID-19 pandemic, countering messaging from the government and many doctors that the COVID-19 vaccines were needed, regardless of prior infection.
He spoke out in an op-ed in April 2021, for instance, against requiring people to provide proof of vaccination to attend shows, go to school, and visit restaurants.
“The idea that everybody needs to be vaccinated is as scientifically baseless as the idea that nobody does. Covid vaccines are essential for older, high-risk people and their caretakers and advisable for many others. But those who’ve been infected are already immune,” he wrote at the time.
Mr. Kulldorff later co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for focused protection of people at high risk while removing restrictions for younger, healthy people.
Harsh restrictions such as school closures “will cause irreparable damage” if not lifted, the declaration stated.
The declaration drew criticism from Dr. Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who became the head of the CDC, among others.
In a competing document, Dr. Walensky and others said that “relying upon immunity from natural infections for COVID-19 is flawed” and that “uncontrolled transmission in younger people risks significant morbidity(3) and mortality across the whole population.”
“Those who are pushing these vaccine mandates and vaccine passports—vaccine fanatics, I would call them—to me they have done much more damage during this one year than the anti-vaxxers have done in two decades,” Mr. Kulldorff later said in an EpochTV interview. “I would even say that these vaccine fanatics, they are the biggest anti-vaxxers that we have right now. They’re doing so much more damage to vaccine confidence than anybody else.”
Surveys indicate that people have less trust now in the CDC and other health institutions than before the pandemic, and data from the CDC and elsewhere show that fewer people are receiving the new COVID-19 vaccines and other shots.
Support
The disclosure that Mr. Kulldorff was fired drew criticism of Harvard and support for Mr. Kulldorff.
The termination “is a massive and incomprehensible injustice,” Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, an ethics expert who was fired from the University of California–Irvine School of Medicine for not getting a COVID-19 vaccine because he had natural immunity, said on X.
“The academy is full of people who declined vaccines—mostly with dubious exemptions—and yet Harvard fires the one professor who happens to speak out against government policies.” Dr. Vinay Prasad, an epidemiologist at the University of California–San Francisco, wrote in a blog post. “It looks like Harvard has weaponized its policies and selectively enforces them.”
A petition to reinstate Mr. Kulldorff has garnered more than 1,800 signatures.
Some other doctors said the decision to let Mr. Kulldorff go was correct.
“Actions have consequence,” Dr. Alastair McAlpine, a Canadian doctor, wrote on X. He said Mr. Kulldorff had “publicly undermine[d] public health.”
Uncategorized
Correcting the Washington Post’s 11 Charts That Are Supposed to Tell Us How the Economy Changed Since Covid
The Washington Post made some serious errors or omissions in its 11 charts that are supposed to tell us how Covid changed the economy. Wages Starting with…
The Washington Post made some serious errors or omissions in its 11 charts that are supposed to tell us how Covid changed the economy.
Wages
Starting with its second chart, the article gives us an index of average weekly wages since 2019. The index shows a big jump in 2020, which then falls off in 2021 and 2022, before rising again in 2023.
It tells readers:
“Many Americans got large pay increases after the pandemic, when employers were having to one-up each other to find and keep workers. For a while, those wage gains were wiped out by decade-high inflation: Workers were getting larger paychecks, but it wasn’t enough to keep up with rising prices.”
That actually is not what its chart shows. The big rise in average weekly wages at the start of the pandemic was not the result of workers getting pay increases, it was the result of low-paid workers in sectors like hotels and restaurants losing their jobs.
The number of people employed in the low-paying leisure and hospitality sector fell by more than 8 million at the start of the pandemic. Even at the start of 2021 it was still down by over 4 million.
Laying off low-paid workers raises average wages in the same way that getting the short people to leave raises the average height of the people in the room. The Washington Post might try to tell us that the remaining people grew taller, but that is not what happened.
The other problem with this chart is that it is giving us weekly wages. The length of the average workweek jumped at the start of the pandemic as employers decided to work the workers they had longer hours rather than hire more workers. In January of 2021 the average workweek was 34.9 hours, compared to 34.4 hours in 2019 and 34.3 hours in February.
This increase in hours, by itself, would raise weekly pay by 2.0 percent. As hours returned to normal in 2022, this measure would misleadingly imply that wages were falling.
It is also worth noting that the fastest wage gains since the pandemic have been at the bottom end of the wage distribution and the Black/white wage gap has fallen to its lowest level on record.
Saving Rates
The third chart shows the saving rate since 2019. It shows a big spike at the start of the pandemic, as people stopped spending on things like restaurants and travel and they got pandemic checks from the government. It then falls sharply in 2022 and is lower in the most recent quarters than in 2019.
The piece tells readers:
“But as the world reopened — and people resumed spending on dining out, travel, concerts and other things that were previously off-limits — savings rates have leveled off. Americans are also increasingly dip into rainy-day funds to pay more for necessities, including groceries, housing, education and health care. In fact, Americans are now generally saving less of their incomes than they were before the pandemic.
This is an incomplete picture due to a somewhat technical issue. As I explained in a blogpost a few months ago, there is an unusually large gap between GDP as measured on the output side and GDP measured on the income side. In principle, these two numbers should be the same, but they never come out exactly equal.
In recent quarters, the gap has been 2.5 percent of GDP. This is extraordinarily large, but it also is unusual in that the output side is higher than the income side, the opposite of the standard pattern over the last quarter century.
It is standard for economists to assume that the true number for GDP is somewhere between the two measures. If we make that assumption about the data for 2023, it would imply that income is somewhat higher than the data now show and consumption somewhat lower.
In that story, as I showed in the blogpost, the saving rate for 2023 would be 6.8 percent of disposable income, roughly the same as the average for the three years before the pandemic. This would mean that people are not dipping into their rainy-day funds as the Post tells us. They are spending pretty much as they did before the pandemic.
Credit Card Debt
The next graph shows that credit card debt is rising again, after sinking in the pandemic. The piece tells readers:
“But now, debt loads are swinging higher again as families try to keep up with rising prices. Total household debt reached a record $17.5 trillion at the end of 2023, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. And, in a worrisome sign for the economy, delinquency rates on mortgages, car loans and credit cards are all rising, too.”
There are several points worth noting here. Credit card debt is rising, but measured relative to income it is still below where it was before the pandemic. It was 6.7 percent of disposable income at the end of 2019, compared to 6.5 percent at the end of last year.
The second point is that a major reason for the recent surge in credit card debt is that people are no longer refinancing mortgages. There was a massive surge in mortgage refinancing with the low interest rates in 2020-2021.
Many of the people who refinanced took additional money out, taking advantage of the increased equity in their home. This channel of credit was cut off when mortgage rates jumped in 2022 and virtually ended mortgage refinancing. This means that to a large extent the surge in credit card borrowing is simply a shift from mortgage debt to credit card debt.
The point about total household debt hitting a record can be said in most months. Except in the period immediately following the collapse of the housing bubble, total debt is almost always rising.
And the rise in delinquencies simply reflects the fact that they had been at very low levels in 2021 and 2022. For the most part, delinquency rates are just getting back to their pre-pandemic levels, which were historically low.
Grocery Prices and Gas Prices
The next two charts show the patterns in grocery prices and gas prices since the pandemic. It would have been worth mentioning that every major economy in the world saw similar run-ups in prices in these two areas. In other words, there was nothing specific to U.S. policy that led to a surge in inflation here.
The Missing Charts
There are several areas where it would have been interesting to see charts which the Post did not include. It would have been useful to have a chart on job quitters, the number of people who voluntarily quit their jobs during the pandemic. In the tight labor markets of 2021 and 2022 the number of workers who left jobs they didn’t like soared to record levels, as shown below.
The vast majority of these workers took other jobs that they liked better. This likely explains another item that could appear as a graph, the record level of job satisfaction.
In a similar vein there has been an explosion in the number of people who work from home at least part-time. This has increased by more than 17 million during the pandemic. These workers are saving themselves thousands of dollars a year on commuting costs and related expenses, as well as hundreds of hours spent commuting.
Finally, there has been an explosion in the use of telemedicine since the pandemic. At the peak, nearly one in four visits with a health care professional was a remote consultation. This saved many people with serious health issues the time and inconvenience associated with a trip to a hospital or doctor’s office. The increased use of telemedicine is likely to be a lasting gain from the pandemic.
The World Has Changed
The pandemic will likely have a lasting impact on the economy and society. The Washington Post’s charts captured part of this story, but in some cases misrepr
The post Correcting the Washington Post’s 11 Charts That Are Supposed to Tell Us How the Economy Changed Since Covid appeared first on Center for Economic and Policy Research.
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