As Liz Shield recently reported, National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Francis Collins, in an October 8, 2020 email, told Dr. Anthony Fauci “there needs to be a quick and devastating public takedown of its premises. I don’t see that on line yet. Is it underway?”
Collins’ target was the Great Barrington Declaration, signed by more than 60,000 epidemiologists and public health scientists to show concern about the damaging physical and mental health impact of government COVID policies.
The signatories included biophysicist Mike Leavitt, professor of structural biology at Stanford and the 2013 winner of the Nobel Prize for chemistry. Stanford Medical School professor Dr. Jay Bhattacharya also signed on, joined by Dr. Martin Kulldorf, professor of medicine at Harvard.
All three are experts in infectious disease, but Collins called them “fringe epidemiologists” and wanted Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984, to deliver a hit piece.
On October 19, 2020, MedPage Today posted a piece headlined “Who Are the Scientists Behind the Great Barrington Declaration?” As the article noted, “All three have advocated against lockdown measures since the start of the pandemic.”
On November 2, theconversation.com posted “5 failings of the Great Barrington Declaration’s dangerous plan for COVID-19 natural herd immunity.” On November 6, US News ran, “The Great Barrington Declaration: When Arrogance Leads to Recklessness,” by Brooks Gump, who earned a Ph.D. in psychology and a master’s degree in public health. As his bio explains, “Gump’s work has been supported by numerous NIH grants.” In effect, Gump was on Collins’ payroll.
On November 12, 2020, the MedPage Today site posted, “New Institute Has Ties to the Great Barrington Declaration.” The newfound Brownstone Institute for Social and Economic Research was “promoting some old, controversial ideas about COVID-19—and has strong ties to the parties involved in the Great Barrington Declaration,” they reported.
Those pieces constitute evidence that Obama appointee Collins, the only appointed NIH director to serve more than one president, got the hit pieces he wanted. As Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. explains in The Real Anthony Fauci, the NIAID boss also has clout with journalists.
As embattled Americans know, Collins and Fauci both lied about funding dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Americans also know that the lockdowns Fauci and Collins recommended inflicted untold suffering and loss.
Great Barrington signer Dr. Jay Bhattacharya contends that history “will judge those in charge of COVID policy, and it will not judge kindly.” In the quest for a true verdict, Congress should conduct a full and unfettered investigation of Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Francis Collins, and Dr. Nancy Messonnier the former director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD).
Dr. Messonier is a veteran of the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, tasked to keep dangerous viruses from arriving on American soil. In the case of COVID, the EIS failed. The American people deserve a full explanation.
