philly1121 said:
Why wouldn't I double down? What i don't do is Monday Morning QB something.
And I think Collins, who was a great director of NIH, and I think now works for the Biden Admin, acknowledges that, looking back, they should have done things differently. But he, Fauci, you or I did not have the benefit of doing that when thousands of people were dropping dead in New York. In short, I think he acknowledges that big city strategy doesn't necessarily work in rural communities. Moreover, most school superintendants agree that the lockdown and closing of schools set kids back in terms of benchmarks for math and reading. Indeed some students have NEVER returned to class. They simply dropped out. But again, I ask, what kind of choice was there in March 2020? 3, 4, 6 months afterwards?
Interestingly, Collins wanted to fund a project by the NIH to improve transparency and accountability in the decision-making processes of the Institute. Sadly, his predecessor did not fund the project.
This is not Monday morning quarterbacking. At the time, there were many dissenting views. Collins and Fauci went out of their way to silence and deplatform any dissent, all in the name of "science' and saving lives.
As Sycasey pointed out, by six months in (possibly earlier), it was clear the zero covid policies - which Collins acknowledged - were doing tremendous harm.
From WSJ 2021 -
https://www.wsj.com/articles/fauci-collins-emails-great-barrington-declaration-covid-pandemic-lockdown-11640129116"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. "
"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.
Dr. Fauci replied to Dr. Collins that the takedown was underway. An
article in Wired, a tech-news site, denied there was any scientific divide and argued lockdowns were a straw manthey weren't coming back. If only it were true. The next month cases rose and restrictions returned.
Dr. Fauci also emailed an article from the Nation, a left-wing magazine, and his staff sent him several more. The emails suggest a feedback loop: The media cited Dr. Fauci as an unquestionable authority, and Dr. Fauci got his talking points from the media. Facebook censored mentions of the Great Barrington Declaration. This is how groupthink works.
On CBS last month, Dr. Fauci
said Republicans who criticize him are "really criticizing science, because I represent science. That's dangerous." He isn't "science." And it's also dangerous for scientific officials to mobilize to quash dissent, without which it's easy to make tragic mistakes. A scientific debate over pandemic policy was and still is in the public interest, especially during a once-in-a-century plague."
Here is another more recent link:
https://www.ocregister.com/2024/01/04/better-late-than-never-former-nih-director-francis-collins-admits-covid-mistakes/"During the pandemic, the wisdom of weighing costs against benefits was not just forgotten but explicitly repudiated. Andrew Cuomo, then New York's governor, insisted that the goal was to "save lives, period, whatever it costs," because "we're not going to accept a premise that human life is disposable."Although Collins portrays that attitude as characteristic of "public health people," there were dissenters even among experts who fell into that category. In October 2020, for example, three epidemiologists Harvard's Martin Kulldorff, Oxford's Sunetra Gupta and Stanford's Jay Bhattacharya issued the Great Barrington Declaration, which recommended taking steps to protect people who were especially vulnerable to COVID-19 while allowing "those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally."At the Braver Angels conference, Collins described Kulldorff et al. as "very distinguished." He was less respectful in an October 2020 email to White House COVID-19 adviser Anthony Fauci, saying "this proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists" demanded "a quick and devastating published take down of its premises.During his exchange with Wilkinson, Collins explained that he was "deeply troubled" by the Great Barrington Declaration, which he viewed as reckless. "I regret that I used some terminology that I probably shouldn't," he said.
Collins also regrets that he and his colleagues paid insufficient attention to the "collateral damage" caused by restrictions on social, economic and educational activity. "We probably needed to have that conversation more effectively," he said. Better late than never."
