How Collins and Fauci Shattered Our Trust in Public Health

The Covid pandemic was devastating, not only for society generally, but also to the reputations of our once-trusted health agencies. Two of America's once-leading public-health officials bear great responsibility for this debacle — former National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci, who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases between 1984 and 2022.

When the pandemic first struck, I held both in high regard. Collins successfully led the Human Genome Project that sequenced the human genome. Fauci had contributed greatly to ameliorating the AIDS crisis. So, there was reason to trust in their leadership. Alas, both squandered the opportunity.

Let's start with the cause of the pandemic. Early on, Fauci insisted in a press conference that the overwhelming evidence — based on a peer-reviewed study, no less — pointed to the virus leaping from animals to people instead of being a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. What Fauci failed to disclose was that the "study" — such as it turned out to be — was his idea. Emails obtained later showed that he not only prompted publication of the paper with the apparent purpose of discrediting the "lab leak" theory, but also helped edit it and had final approval of its contents.

Yet today, we know that the lab-leak hypothesis is a highly plausible explanation for the pandemic, a fact that even Collins recently admitted. Could Fauci have been more disingenuous?