“There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown”
A previously unseen Oct. 2020 email from Dr. Francis Collins, the outgoing head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to his colleague Dr. Anthony Fauci is raising concerns about government-sponsored suppression of free speech—a direct violation of the 1st Amendment.
The email, which appears in a footnote of a Dec. 17 year-end staff report from House Democrats, shows the behind-the-scenes efforts from Collins and Fauci, who were pushing a fresh round of lockdowns, to discredit the Great Barrington Declaration and disparage its authors.
The Great Barrington Declaration was an Oct. 2020 letter that ran counter to the efforts of Fauci and Collins by declaring a unified opposition to broad-based lockdowns, and choosing instead to focus on the protection of vulnerable groups.
That declaration has been signed by many notable medical and epidemiological experts, including Harvard University epidemiologist Dr. Martin Kulldorff, University of Oxford epidemiologist Dr. Sunetra Gupta, Stanford Medical School epidemiologist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and Nobel Prize laureate Dr. Michael Levitt.
In the email, Collins told Fauci that “this proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists … seems to be getting a lot of attention,” adding that “there needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises. I don’t see anything like that online yet – is it underway?”
Collins’s directive to silence American scientists serves as a chilling reminder of the extent and intensity with which First Amendment rights have been undermined in the pandemic era.
Fauci appears to have been in full agreement with Collins’s proposal to take down the authors and their declaration, sending a one-line reply, “I am pasting in below a piece from the Wired that debunks this theory.” The article was essentially an op-ed castigating the declaration but lacking in any fundamental scientific rebuttal.
By Jeff Carlson and Hans Mahncke
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