Dr. Francis Collins testified before the House about his role as the National Institutes of Health director during the Covid-19 pandemic, echoing Dr. Anthony Fauci’s recent testimony on social-distancing guidelines, gain-of-function research, and the lab-leak theory.
Collins agreed with Fauci that the six-foot social-distancing recommendation was likely not based on any scientific data, despite the policy being heavily promoted by federal health officials during the pandemic, the GOP-led House Select Coronavirus Subcommittee revealed Saturday morning.
The panel questioned Collins for seven hours behind closed doors on Friday, following a similar transcribed interview with Fauci on Monday and Tuesday.
The former NIH director, who presided over Fauci, led the federal agency’s pandemic response before stepping down in December 2021. Fauci retired at the end of 2022, ending his tenure as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical advisor under the Trump and Biden administrations.
Like Fauci, Collins played semantics with congressmen over the definition of gain-of-function research to avoid conceding that the NIH funded potentially dangerous research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China that is believed to have been the source of the pandemic’s outbreak. Gain-of-function research refers to making viruses more infectious or deadly for laboratory study, which Collins nor Fauci could admit this week.
Fauci previously denied that the NIH funded such research in Wuhan.
During his own transcribed interview, Collins agreed with Fauci’s admission that the lab-leak hypothesis is not a conspiracy theory after all, despite trying to disprove it with the March 2020 “Proximal Origin” scientific paper. Collins also acknowledged Fauci invited him to attend the February 1, 2020 conference call that prompted the writing of Nature Medicine’s “Proximal Origin” publication.
Notably, Collins was copied on Fauci’s email following the conference call that stated they were already aware of the gain-of-function research taking place in China. Fauci backpedaled on that past statement this week, saying he should not have stated the Wuhan lab’s involvement as “fact” in the email.
“The suspicion was heightened by the fact that scientists in Wuhan University are known to have been working on gain of function experiments to determine the molecular mechanisms associated with bat viruses adapting to human infection, and the outbreak originated in Wuhan,” Fauci wrote in the February 2020 email to his colleagues.
Lastly, Collins reaffirmed his previous statements attacking the Great Barrington Declaration — an October 2020 open letter that encouraged protection for vulnerable populations while recommending limited Covid-19 restrictions for young, healthy Americans. In an email to Fauci, written days after the Great Barrington Declaration’s publication, Collins said he wanted a “quick and devastating published takedown of its premises.”
Fauci’s closed-door testimony earlier this week “uncovered drastic and systemic failures in America’s public health systems,” according to the House coronavirus subcommittee. The retired public-health official claimed he “did not recall” important Covid-19 information or conversations over 100 times and refused to explain the rationale for how the social-distancing recommendation of six feet came to be.
“The social distancing recommendations forced on Americans ‘sort of just appeared’ and were likely not based on scientific data,” subcommittee chairman Brad Wenstrup (R., Ohio) said in summary of Fauci’s concession, following the two-day, 14-hour transcribed interview.
A public hearing with Fauci is planned to take place sometime this year. No date has been scheduled yet.