Francis Collins, NIH Director During Covid, Admits "Mistakes"
Describes the mindset that led to disastrous consequences
Now that he has retired. Now that his pension is secure. Now that three years have passed and everyone seems to have moved on and is unwilling to reflect much on the Covid Response debacle, former NIH director Francis Collins feels comfortable enough to attend a conference and describe “mistakes” made by public health officials like himself.
It is a jaw-dropping admission…
(The video should begin at the 54:33 mark. Better… go to 49:00 to hear Collins describe his response to the Great Barrington Declaration, and then that conversation flowed into his admission of other mistakes…)
Francis Collins discussing his reaction to the publication of the Great Barrington Declaration:
I regret that I used some terminology that I probably shouldn’t.
Collins and Anthony Fauci literally conspired to execute “a devastating take-down” of the GBD and the doctors who advanced it. Collins now claims, disingenuously, that it was not really the content of the declaration that he differed with, but that Dr. Scott Atlas attempted to move the declaration into a policy setting without robust debate about it.
(As a reminder, the Great Barrington Declaration advised targeted protection of those vulnerable to covid while the healthy and the young - those effectively not vulnerable to covid - lived their lives as normally as possible, minimizing the “collateral damage” of the response to covid.)
Collins was not finished tying the rope around his own neck.
He continued into a further admission of guilt…
As a guy living inside the Beltway, feeling the sense of crisis, trying to decide what to do in some situation room in the White House with people who had data that was incomplete, we weren’t really thinking about what that would mean to [families] in Minnesota, a thousand miles away from where the virus was hitting so hard. We weren’t really considering the consequences in communities that were not New York City or some other big city…
If you're a public health person, and you're trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is, and that is something that will save a life. Doesn't matter what else happens, so you attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people's lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never might quite recover from. Collateral damage. This is a public health mindset. And I think a lot of us involved in trying to make those recommendations had that mindset -- and that was really unfortunate, it's another mistake we made.
Collins admits that the myopic view of public health officials disrupted lives, ruined the economy, and kept children out of school. He’s admitting the damage he inflicted on all of us.
And I will never forgive the public health officials, across federal, state, and local levels, who acted on Collins’ “expert” recommendations. Governors and mayors enacted lock down policies in reaction to the virus that then morphed into vaccine obligations leveraged against people using their jobs and denying them service in restaurants.
What Collins, Fauci, Birx, and yes Trump, did to the people of our country is simply unforgiveable. (This is only one reason I trust Donald Trump as far as I can throw him left-handed.)
About the GBD, I’ve previously written:
Early October 2020, Doctors Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, and Martin Kulldorff met in the tiny Massachusetts town of Great Barrington. There, the three planned to create a video-recorded discussion of a focused approach to respond to the covid threat. While preparing, they wrote a succinct, one-page statement to summarize their position.
“Focused Protection” leverages resources to the advantage of the most vulnerable while encouraging healthy people to maintain their lives normally.
With this declaration, people of the world had available to them a way forward that offered a balanced approach that maximized protection while minimizing medical, societal, and individual risk from covid.
The self-evident logic of the declaration is just unarguable.
IN HINDSIGHT, the Great Barrington doctors have been demonstrated correct, as no non-pharmaceutical covid intervention seems to have had any impact in containing the virus. It was wrong to close schools, to force masking, to stand six feet apart, to close theaters, to limit church attendance, to close businesses….
And it was certainly wrong to mandate vaccines for healthy people.
Even a simple-minded artist and handy man like me understood that the official response to covid was all wrong, that the wrong people were forced to suffer in the wrong ways… and if this simple guy could know, how could highly trained health officials not know?
My mindset:
It was intuitively apparent to me that discussions about broad-stroke responses to Covid were misdirected. A city can’t catch Covid, individuals do, and shutting down a city made no sense to me when I pondered on any individual’s vulnerability to a virus.
I’ve been very consistent about my reaction to the covid response. And I and others like me have been proven correct. Francis Collins himself has admitted we were correct.
I’ve published contemporaneous writing during covid:
Collins, Fauci, Birx and the rest committed crimes against humanity, and forgiving them, despite the new-found honesty embraced by some, is an inexcusable response, as is forgiving President Trump for shutting down the country, schools, and the economy, while never firing Anthony Fauci and his team. Trump continues to boast about his record with covid and the vaccines he championed.
Dr Collins should be in jail. And Donald Trump should be anywhere else besides the Oval Office.
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