Francis Collins was head of the National Institutes of Health – Anthony Fauci’s parent bureaucracy – during the wreckage caused by the Covid response. Ultimately, Dr. Collins bears a huge measure of the responsibility for the disaster, even if he played the role of the stooge.
It was he who wrote Fauci with the demand for a “quick and devastating takedown” of the Great Barrington Declaration, a statement that merely reasserted traditional public health wisdom in the midst of an insane science experiment being conducted on the whole population.
Five months ago, an organization that seeks political consensus hosted him for some frank talk about what happened. Here is what he had to say:
This is absolutely astonishing
— Erich Hartmann (@erichhartmann) December 28, 2023Francis Collins admits the massive, unnecessary "collateral damage" from their botched covid public health response was due to an elitist beltway-centric myopic POV …oopsie! pic.twitter.com/ofXggcz5jB
There is a sense in which he didn’t need to say this at all. We all knew it. They were thinking only about New York City. The rest of the country never had anything approaching a crisis. The Government, under Collins, emptied hospitals out from coast to coast to reserve them for Covid patients who only arrived much later and never came close to overwhelming health care services.
Meanwhile, the entire country was plunged into a grave crisis at every level – a man-made crisis of the worst sort.
Nor did they think about anything other than this one pathogen. It was a wild fanaticism that seized the whole of the ruling class for the better part of two years. None of it made sense, but those who objected could hardly get a hearing. Instead, they were smeared, censored and often fired for non-compliance.
Even as late as December 2021, Collins was still fear-mongering. He told NPR concerning Christmas celebrations: “We were planning to invite some of the trainees at NIH, who are far from home, to come for a brunch on Christmas Day at our house if they’re all fully vaccinated and boosted. Still planning to go forward, very carefully, with a small group, and everybody will be wearing masks except when they’re eating.”
Note that Collins doesn’t apologise. He takes no responsibility. He just continues his masquerade as a tennis-shoe wearing, guitar-strumming, Jesus-loving grandpa who is open and broad-minded, never mind that he wielded absolute power over all our lives only a few years ago.
Later in the interview, he is singing hosannas to the glorious vaccines and how perfectly they worked. We are nowhere near approaching the point where people like this, tell the truth. It’s almost like they cannot bear it.
Even in this interview, Collins’s nonchalant delivery is infuriating. You want to scream back: You wrecked the lives of hundreds of millions of people! And no one ever gave you the authority to do so!
Meanwhile, it was incredibly obvious to many at the time that disaster would be the only result of lockdowns. The bit about masking was never serious; no one in the know seriously believed these things would protect anyone from a tiny pathogen with an animal reservoir. The only solution was the traditional one from public health wisdom: Preserve normalcy, treat the sick with known therapeutics and alert the vulnerable to stay away from large crowds until the virus becomes endemic.
Collins directly attacked this solution and demanded that government attack it and ultimately censor it!
As we approach the end of the year, we are surrounded by a cultural and economic darkness this generation has never seen before. Most incredibly, public health itself is wrecked.
Let’s just count the ways. Each consequence dates from the beginnings of the lockdowns. That was the turning point, the end of innocence, the great reset, the moment when the choice between freedom and despotism weighed heavily in the most inhumane direction.
Consider:
Homeless people are everywhere at record highs (650K), stemming from rampant mental disorder, substance abuse and incredibly tight leasing standards stemming from the eviction moratorium.
The middle class can no longer afford to buy a home thanks to high rates from the Fed, deployed in an attempt to mitigate against inflation which is still running hot.
Every merchant has hidden fees in everything, struggling to find some way to hide the hot potato of inflation that has eaten 20-plus percent of the dollar’s purchasing power since 2019.
Shoplifting is a major national problem to the point that thousands of stores have closed.
Shrinkflation affects everything. The groceries have shrunk and the bills have soared – a direct consequence of some $8 trillion in stimulus and money printing.
Office real estate in large cities is approaching an accounting crisis because people are not returning to work, their routines totally shattered by lockdowns.
Travel is uncertain, with endless delays and cancellations due to pilot shortages stemming from stay-at-home orders, vaccine mandates and rampant illness.
The ‘Great Reset’ is all around us, as we are constantly nudged to drive EVs, live without comforts, buy less meat and even eat bugs.
A wide-open Southern border has created an immigration crisis as government neglected its core duties in favour of insane methods of virus control.
Restaurants are unaffordable for most people.
Dependency on Government handouts is 28% higher than in 2019.
All stores close an hour or two earlier because they cannot get workers to stay later.
The learning losses among the kids are unfathomable, two years and rising, and perhaps an entire generation is lost.
There is a population-wide mental-health crisis, in addition to rampant substance abuse.
The federal budget has been blown to smithereens.
Political divisions are festering as never before, with neither party willing to discuss the Covid ‘elephant in the room’.
Our conception of what it means to live in freedom with a government that knows limits to its power has slipped away.
Arts venues are struggling for dear life to survive.
World trade is shattered, with new trading blocs replacing the old ones.
The rise of maniacal gender dysphoria of the young is probably connected with this: Endless hours online, loss of confidence in the world as it is, plus loneliness.
One could argue that even the war in Israel and Gaza is a result: Security concerns were neglected in favour of microbial activism and shot mandates, and the loss of a moral centre to policy then unleashed successive rounds of violence.
Finally, there is the loss of trust in everything: Government, public health, pharmaceuticals, academia, science, media and each other. Society cannot function without trust. Not even churches are immune from broad incredulity since most went along with the Covid response in every detail.
This only begins to scratch the surface of what we’ve lost and what has replaced it. Ultimately all such tragedies come down to individual lives. These days you hear them only among friends and families. And they are terrible stories of sadness and personal despair. The pain is only intensified by the silence on the part of all corporate media, government and other commanding heights. Because of the news block on the whole topic, there is mass and festering anger beneath the surface.
And yet, here is this granddad – the man ostensibly in charge over the whole operation – telling us old war stories of mistakes that were made. Does he have any idea of the carnage he caused? Does he even care?
In Dostoevsky’s version of The Grand Inquisitor, the nemesis predicts: “In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, ‘Make us your slaves, but feed us.’”
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute, where this article first appeared.
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Mr Tucker has this pretty much spot on. The banality of evil, the unacknowledged consequences, the shattered trust.
An Obama appointed born again Christian.
As, in this country, so many dodgy public sector appointments lead back to Blair, so, in the U.S., they lead back to Obama…
Add in a dash of ‘What surprised us is that we hadn’t really thought through the economic consequences’ from Melinda Gates and you do, indeed, have a path to hell…..
Whatever the intentions, the public officials responsible must be held accountable.
This turns, now, in the U.S. and, consequently (embarrassingly) in this country as well, on the results of the U.S. Presidential election……
If a Republican candidate is successful and tears into the Democrats covid shambles, the excellent diversion will be to watch the ‘trimming’ that will take place amid the myriad panto dames within our own egregious, risibly silly, public inquiry.
And still, to this day, people write articles like this assuming there was some especially dangerous virus spreading around the world in 2020: “Nor did they think about anything other than this one pathogen”. Also the Great Barrington Declaration made this assumption, even though statistics data available at the time showed no unusual increase in deaths in many countries (those not implementing WHO guidelines).
“The Government, under Collins, emptied hospitals out from coast to coast …”. And there you have it. Now nobody can be surprised if the number of deaths suddenly increases.
When will people come to their senses and recognize that the so-called pandemic was never anything other than a criminal enterprise?
Just seems like reheated cockup theory to me. He talks about attaching an “infinite value” to “saving a life” (whatever that means) and claims this is how “Public health” people think. What utter drivel. They are not idiots and they know resources are not infinite and that there are always tradeoffs.
I know tof, as you repeat frequently: there was no pandemic. But enough people thought so, and I feel the wreckage created as a consequence of their thoughtless overreaction is summed up quite neatly here.
Wreckage yes. Summed up yes. Thoughtless – I simply cannot believe that.
As I keep saying, focusing on the collateral damage is dangerous as people will just come up with ideas for mitigation next time. I don’t want mitigations, I want the whole thing to be recognised for what it was – a scam, a fake, a Big Lie. I really want the whole “public health” industry to f off and shrivel up and die and leave us all alone.
We’re a million miles from anyone but a few thinking about this fake pandemic in anything close to what I consider the “right” way. I am not even sure if we’re getting closer to that. I don’t see much sign of it.
Spot on ToF
Where’s the pandemic except when they killed a whole lot of old folk by shoving those with rebranded flu back into their old people’s homes?
Yes, but Collins is selling himself as someone who was just human, a really nice person and, like all of us, tragically capable of making mistakes. In the short video, he explains “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. It doesn’t matter what else happens. 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 quite recovered from.”
An incredible statement but that is his story, his excuse, the former head of the NIH, Fauci’s boss. As Fauci’s boss he also had no idea of the labs in Ukraine and the illegal Gain of Function research going on there and in China? Sure. And, as head of NIH he would know that in 2019 around 7,800 US citizens died each day but he wants the world to understand that his institute thinks along the lines of saving one life – at the cost of destroying the economy, etc..
The article does indeed a good job of listing the “collateral damage” and correctly slanders the guy but you still come away with the feeling it was all just a tragic mistake. “Does he have any idea of the carnage he caused? Does he even care?”
The question should really be why is he not serving a very long sentence behind bars?
Yes they are idiots and no they don’t understand trade-offs – they should but don’t.
Public Health officials are products of our education system, with its focus on humanities – easy subject – not science, doctrinaire, think only what they have been taught to think.
They believe in solutions, not trade-offs – and they have the solutions rooted in ‘liberal’, progressive fantasies which require central command and control over each individual.
“focus on humanities – easy subject – not science, doctrinaire, think only what they have been taught to think”
My scientific study stops at O level maths, but that is more than sufficient for understanding what needed to be understood regarding “covid”.
Of course they understand trade-offs – they have to limit their spending, so they will at least have to pretend to target it with a view to getting best value. It’s just that, for reasons we may never fully know, the “covid” budgetary and other constraints were effectively removed for a period of time, so they went full on.
I have met “idiots” – people with very low IQs. They can hardly string a sentence together. These people are political operators who have got to the top of the greasy pole, by reading situations accurately.
Some of them might actually believe in “solutions”, but I think the people who most believe in “solutions” re useful idiots who carry out and follow orders, not the ones giving the orders. I believe they sell “solutions” because that is what people seem to want and if you are selling “solutions” not “trade-offs” you get more leeway and power.
Not entirely accurate, we’re all responsible for letting these people do this. The propaganda is required to keep the majority on-side.
I’m not responsible for any of this.
I will never forget what they did …. and I will never forgive them.
He admitted that he failed Maths back in March 2020.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/interview-francis-collins-nih/608221/
Narrow focus? But Public Health is about wide focus, the health of society at large.
In times of epidemic the whole society is considered, so infectious individuals or their contacts may be quarantined to keep them away from the infected.
But with CoVid the uninfected were quarantined to keep them away from the infectious, whilst the infectious were shovelled in among uninfected people in care homes and general hospital wards.
Public Health has been colonised by those who think it’s about private health, and a political and ideological function to alter the behaviour of individuals supposedly to provide some communal benefit: eat less; stop smoking.
But in fact their meddling has more to do with protecting institutions, like hospitals or saving the NHS and power and control.
The people in Public Health do not understand what it is and are not competent to do the job – it is not an activist operation.