Opinion
Editor’s Note: Oh, this is ironic compared to the same demands of gun banners. Do you think we will ever get this admission from those who scream “do something” and “if it saves just one life” in the name of gun control? Let us know in the comments below.
As federal officials considered how the government should respond to an emerging pandemic in 2020, Francis Collins recalled last year, “we weren’t really considering the consequences” of extreme measures such as business shutdowns, school closures, and stay-at-home orders.
It was a startling admission from Collins, who played a major role in those conversations as director of the National Institutes of Health.
Collins, whose July 2023 comments recently attracted online attention, confessed that “public health people” made a “really unfortunate” mistake by ignoring the devastating side effects of the interventions they believed were necessary to curtail COVID-19 transmission. That mistake carries important lessons not just for future responses to communicable diseases but also for a wide range of public policies that inflict harm in the name of saving lives.
Collins, who ran the NIH from 2009 to 2021, was speaking at a Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, conference sponsored by Braver Angels, an organization that aims to “bridge the political divide” by encouraging civil discussion between people with different ideologies and partisan allegiances. During a session with Wilk Wilkinson, a Minnesota trucking manager and podcast host who is sharply critical of the political reaction to COVID-19, Collins tried to explain the perspective of the scientists who shaped that response.
“If you’re a public health person,” he said, “you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is, and that is something that will save a life. [It] doesn’t matter what else happens.”
That seemingly noble impulse, Collins noted, encouraged public health specialists to overlook the unintended but foreseeable costs of the policies they recommended.
“You attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life,” he said. “You attach a zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never might quite recover from.”
The folly of attaching “infinite value” to a life saved by government regulation should be obvious. Economists and regulators, after all, routinely and rightly seek to balance the costs of new rules against their expected benefits, a calculation that entails estimating the “value of a statistical life.”
If that value were infinite, it would justify any policy that promises to save lives, regardless of the cost. A universal speed limit of 25 miles per hour (or, more ambitiously, a ban on automobiles) would reduce traffic deaths, for example, but at a cost that few of us would consider acceptable.
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 takedown 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.
About Jacob Sullum
Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason magazine. Follow him on Twitter: @JacobSullum. During two decades in journalism, he has relentlessly skewered authoritarians of the left and the right, making the case for shrinking the realm of politics and expanding the realm of individual choice. Jacobs’ work appears here at AmmoLand News through a license with Creators Syndicate.
Francis Collins as well as Anthony Fauci are both to blame along with countless federal, state and local politicians and many corporate CEOs who bought into the panic, the extreme mandates and the power that came with that and literally ruined, or even ended, people’s lives. I’m in my 60s and refused the “vaccines” and never got sick either, though my physician found antibodies in my blood in early 2021 that indicated I must have contracted the Covid virus at some point, but my immune system took care of it. The way that the general public was treated during this… Read more »
My wife and I are in our 80’s and we never followed the mandates. I had the roads to my self and visited all the gun stores and markets in the area.
When they came out with an experimental vaccine we said we will wait to see what happens also we never wore a mask. Our son’s family, daughter’s family including us never got the Clot Shot. None of us got the Covid-19 bug.
In response to the question posed in the beginning, not a single gun ban person will ever admit they were wrong. They can’t afford to do that. The house of cards upon which gun control is built would collapse instantly.
The educated “heath care professionals” seemed to have forgotten basic biology 101, I wonder if they were influenced by all the freaking money? No couldn’t have been that….. right. These people should be in prison for a very long time.
It’s only a regret because they are a ex-NIH director.
Are you kidding me!! This guy Collins along with Fauci are now playing cover their “rears” they are lying now and they they were lying at the time, these guys were directly responsible for shaping the Covid response and they know what they did was criminal, don’t buy his BS that he was just wrong, they went out of their way to discredit the many highly educated doctors and scientists that signed on to the “Great Barrington Declaration” they also deployed the main stream media to attack the signers, we can debate the reasons as to why they worked so… Read more »
NO. none of this was a mistake. it had been discussed and planned for a few years before. look at the WEF speeches and the ‘brainstorming’ sessions of the ‘what if’ scenarios. to add to the case, for weeks before Trumps recall vote everyone (fauci, pelosi, et al) said there was nothing to worry about the virus from China, go to china town, enjoy the new year parade, Trumps a racist for shutting down flights, etc. when the remove Trump effort failed, which it almost did not, they flipped the switch overnight and suddenly it was a pandemic. fauci’s congressional… Read more »
I was 73 when covid hit the fan. The first covid shot I took made me sick to the point I spent the better part of 5 days sleeping in bed or on the couch or lounge chair. The second one was of no consequence. I took the first booster because CDC mandated it for all cruise line passengers. The Pfizer booster gave me a blood clot in my brain that almost killed me. I spent 3 days in intensive care while a super clot buster drug dissolved the clot. I have not taken any more of the mRNA poison… Read more »
Coerced into taking two COVID shots by my doctor son and his med school rommie, now head of local major hospital, my blood pressure jumped 25+ points after following their learned advice. Just summer of 2023 did pressure return to pre-shot levels. Son and DIL, finally went on an Alaska cruise in 2022, thinking risk level acceptable. Of course they were vaxed to the max. Returned with COVID. So much so listening to God’s Mr. Goodwrenches……
“…Economists and regulators, after all, routinely and rightly seek to balance the costs of new rules against their expected benefits, a calculation that entails estimating the “value of a statistical life.”
That’s not just a lie, it’s a damn lie.