Impressive unable to understand anything other than his own wishful thinking
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Francis Collins Shows How Little Thought ‘Experts’ Gave To COVID Restrictions
Francis Collins was for most of the COVID pandemic one of the most influential and powerful health “experts” in the U.S. government. Collins, as head of the National Institutes of Health, wielded enormous amounts of control over both the political actions, restrictions, mandates and recommendations issued by the government, as well as the public communications made during the early parts of the pandemic.
And it’s clear that did not do a good job. When listening to his own words, it’s certainly evident why his time in the limelight was so disastrously harmful.
The
Wall Street Journal covered the panel and a portion of what Collins said.
Collins told the audience that public-health officials had placed “infinite value” on policies they thought would save lives and “zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives.” The Covid vaccine wasn’t yet available, and officials felt a moral imperative to slow the alarming number of deaths.
“We weren’t really thinking about what that would mean to Wilk (another panelist from the Midwest) and his family in Minnesota, 1,000 miles away from where the virus was hitting so hard,” Collins said.
There’s a lot to unpack in just these few sentences. Collins clearly admitted that a sense of self importance, hubris, personal fear and an obsessive focus on a few specific locations obscured how vastly different the situation and their responses would play across a massive, continent-sized country. That’s bad enough. But the first quote is much, much worse.
Collins also acknowledged that the public health profession, the profession he was effectively leading during the most important crisis of its modern existence, paid quite literally "zero” attention to what the ensuing trade offs would be from the immense and unconstitutional restrictions imposed on the public.
That’s correct, unprecedented, awe-inspiring restrictions on the freedom of movement, on the freedom of business owners to operate, the freedoms of children to attend school, of people to go about their days without the farcical theater of masking, attend events at full capacity — the freedoms we all take for granted that were removed for months, if not years on end, were enacted with “zero” consideration for the ancillary consequences and harms.
It’d be unbelievable, if it wasn’t such a perfect example of the ineptitude, incompetence, stupidity, and desire for control at the core of “public” health.
Those in charge apparently could not have cared less about the impact their mandates would have on the public. Their prime concern was implementing what they believed would be effective, despite a clear lack of supporting evidence in favor of their policies, which has unfortunately been reinforced over and over again in the post-pandemic era.
He wasn’t finished there.
Collins Lies About Sweden While Ignoring Their Example
Collins also unwittingly admitted how little attention he paid to his literal one job when it came to pre-pandemic planning.
According to his analysis, “public health people” were narrowly focused on any decision that “will save a life.”
“The public health people, we talked about this earlier, 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.
This, of course, ignores that a decision that may save a life due to a reduced spread of disease, may cost another person their life due to increased rates of abuse, obesity, loneliness or loss of income or employment.
Pre-COVID planning documents on how to handle pandemics often specifically mention tradeoffs. For example, the World Health Organization warns that school closures and border closures could cause severe harm, with little in the way of proven benefits. Had Collins, you know, done his job, he’d have evaluated risks and harms, as that is exactly what public health is supposed to do. But according to him, they ignored any trade offs in favor of unproven policies that may save lives.
Though very often they didn’t.
Similarly, he admitted that their advocacy for school closures and partnership with teachers unions on extending them, ensured that kids “never quite recovered.”
We’re all looking for the guy who did this, aren’t we?
And in perhaps an even more remarkably revealing example of disastrous incompetence, Collins openly lied (see Twitter link for video) about Sweden’s early COVID response.
Sweden, as a reminder, was one of the few countries to follow the pre-pandemic planning documents and consider the ancillary consequences of completely shutting down normal life, keeping kids out of school, recommending universal masking and imposing vaccine passports.
Collins though, desperate to avoid dealing with the ramifications of his own idiocy, claimed Sweden, due to a high rate of COVID mortality in the early days of the pandemic, was a failure. He, in fact, inaccurately said that Sweden, in the first few months of 2020, had a “higher death rate than anywhere else in Europe.”
This is demonstrably, horrifically false.
Here’s just one example; the UK had higher COVID mortality per 100,000 than Sweden
for the entire pandemic.
That gap started in 2020 and only increased over time despite the UK’s masks and lockdowns and eventual vaccine passports.
France had a higher COVID mortality rate for much of 2020 and 2021 too.
So did Italy. And Spain. And Belgium. The Netherlands 2020 peak was nearly identical. Portugal’s peak of COVID deaths, albeit a bit later, was
double that of Sweden’s.
You quite literally cannot be more wrong than Francis Colins has been when trying to defend his mistakes compared to Sweden’s more successful hands off approach. And with his inaccuracy, he involuntarily proved just how incompetent he and his professional cronies were during the early days of COVID, which unfortunately continues to this day.
It’s important to remind everyone that Sweden had among the lowest rates of excess mortality in Europe from 2020 to 2021.
And those numbers even improved among European countries throughout 2022.
Francis Collins isn’t someone to be taken seriously. Quite clearly, he advanced into his position through ambition, political skill and networking. Because if he had any relevant qualifications, expertise or awareness that would have served the American people during the biggest pandemic in a hundred years, we would have seen those capabilities in some action or statement during COVID.
Instead, he conspired with Fauci to inaccurately downplay the lab leak and insult anyone who disagreed with him. He helped spur on the disastrous series of mistakes that would cost the country incalculable amounts of money, mental health and educational progression and opportunity.
And even in the post pandemic period, he acknowledges how little he worried about all those lives he was upending, the children he hurt, the vast disparities in lifestyles between his small, insular world of Washington elites and those in the rest of the country, or the fact that his preferred mandates would have ancillary consequences, with literally nothing in the way of proven, evidence-based benefits.
His ignorance of Sweden’s overwhelming success is just one of the many disqualifying, offensive statements made during this panel discussion.
No matter how low our opinion is of the “expert” class, it’s clearly not low enough.