How Fauci and Collins shut down COVID debate
In public, Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins urge Americans to “follow the science.” In private, the two sainted public-health officials schemed to quash dissenting views from top scientists. That’s the troubling but fair conclusion from emails obtained recently via the Freedom of Information Act by the American Institute for Economic Research.
The tale unfolded in October 2020 after the launch of the Great Barrington Declaration, a statement by Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff, Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta and Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya against blanket pandemic lockdowns. They favored a policy of what they called “focused protection” of high-risk populations such as the elderly or those with medical conditions. Thousands of scientists signed the declaration—if they were able to learn about it. We tried to give it some elevation on these pages.
That didn’t please the lockdown consensus enforced by public-health officials and the press. Dr. Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health until Sunday, sent an email on Oct. 8, 2020, to Dr. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
“This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists . . . seems to be getting a lot of attention – and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises,” Dr. Collins wrote. “Is it underway?”
These researchers weren’t fringe and neither was their opposition to quarantining society. But in the panic over the virus, these two voices of science used their authority to stigmatize dissenters and crush debate. A week after his email, Dr. Collins spoke to the Washington Post about the Great Barrington Declaration. “This is a fringe component of epidemiology,” he said. “This is not mainstream science. It’s dangerous.” His message spread and the alternative strategy was dismissed in most precincts.
There is no evidence that covid-19 is substantially more contagious or deadly than a normal flu, which infects some 9 to 45 million Americans each year. There is no evidence that wearing a paper or cloth mask stops the spread of a 20-nanometer coronavirus particle. But scientists, flanked by leftist politicians and progressive media, pushed these drastic, catastrophic interventions with stunning self-assurance, quashing any dissenting concerns about the broader consequences.
Those broader consequences were colossal. In addition to the financial and economic disruptions, and the physical and mental health problems caused by compulsory social isolation, these lockdowns helped politicians push last-minute changes to mail-in ballot rules that helped throw the 2020 presidential election into chaos.
Is it a coincidence that the dire predictions pushed by scientific experts have had major political ramifications? Is it a coincidence that the solutions demanded by the press and the political left are massive socialistic interventions? Or is it more reasonable to think that the scientific community is just as fallible—even biased and politically motivated—as every other government institution?
