Emails Released on Friday by a House Committee Show Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins Scheming to Discredit the Great Barrington Declaration

the staff of the Ridgewood blog

Washington DC, Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins, his boss at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), have been outed as smear artists for their efforts to do a “quick and devastating” take-down of three noted health experts who proposed fighting COVID-19 without crippling lockdowns.

Emails released on Friday by a House committee and show the two men scheming to discredit what they called the “fringe epidemiologists” behind the Great Barrington Declaration. The GBD was a statement signed by thousands of scientists that called for “focused protection” of the most vulnerable while avoiding severe lockdowns that would contribute to bad health outcomes such as fewer elective surgeries and substance abuse.

Collins warned Fauci and other health officials about how the proposal from Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard University, Sunetra Gupta, an epidemiologist at Oxford University, and Jay Bhattacharya, a public health policy expert at Stanford University might gain traction with the public. They exchanged articles debunking it from left-wing publications like The Nation and Wired magazine.

Kulldorff and Bhattacharya have written about the extent of the NIH campaign against them. “We did not expect a multi-pronged propaganda campaign that gravely distorted our arguments and smeared us,” they write in the aptly named Spiked magazine.

The smear campaign against the Great Barrington Declaration

Collins (who is retiring this month) defended his smear tactics to “take down” the GBD’s arguments, claiming they were “crazy proposals (made) on the basis of pseudoscience“ and would have led to “hundreds of thousands of additional deaths.” https://www.foxnews.com/transcript/fox-news-sunday-12-19

They have no explanation for why states that didn’t lockdown their economies had no worse health outcomes than states that did lockdown, small businesses, restaurants, schools, churches, and parks.

Sweden now ranks 56th in overall Covid deaths per capita since early 2020, the start of the pandemic. And, unlike the countries ranked above them (such as the U.S. at 20th place), Sweden didn’t lockdown, enforce mask mandates, or close businesses or schools. After an early slip-up in which it failed to protect nursing home patients, it focused on protecting the most vulnerable parts of its population and did so without economic or mental health devastation.
We think the disastrous groupthink in the U.S. scientific community stemmed directly from Fauci and Collins – who control billions of tax dollars of grant money, on which nearly every expert depends. This is more evidence that government is distorting the “scientific consensus” on almost every issue. It is why Americans have lost trust in government and science.