Former National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins has admitted that tunnel vision handicapped the development of public policy to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Collins, who stepped down at the end of 2021, was the superior of former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Anthony Fauci, who along with Collins proposed and supported lockdowns as the major policy element to deal with the pandemic.
During the recently unearthed interview, interviewer Wilk Wilkinson bemoaned the fact that too few open discussions took place about the pandemic and the lockdown policy.
Collins said putting public health bureaucrats in charge meant that a one-dimensional policy would ensue.
“As a guy living inside the Beltway, feeling a sense of crisis, trying to decide what to do in some situation room in the White House with people who had data that was incomplete,” Collins said.
“We weren’t really thinking about what that would mean to Wilk and his family in Minnesota, a thousand miles away from where the virus was hitting so hard. We weren’t really considering the consequences in communities that were not New York City or some other big city,” he said.
Collins said that health experts never considered the ripple effects of their decisions.
“The public health people — we talked about this earlier and this really important point — 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; it doesn’t matter what else happens,” he said.
“So you attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach 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 quite recover from. So, yeah, collateral damage,” he said.
“This is a public health mindset and I think a lot of us involved in trying to make those recommendations had that mindset and that was really unfortunate. It’s another mistake we made,” he said.
