Grand Inquisitor Says Oops
Francis Collins was head of the National Institutes of Health – Anthony Fauci’s parent bureaucracy – during the wreckage caused by the Covid response. Ultimately, Dr. Collins bears a huge measure of the responsibility for the disaster, even if he played the role of the stooge.
It was he who wrote Fauci with the demand for a “quick and devastating takedown” of the Great Barrington Declaration, a statement that merely reasserted traditional public health wisdom in the midst of an insane science experiment being conducted on the whole population.
Five months ago, an organization that seeks political consensus hosted him for some frank talk about what happened. Here is what he had to say:
There is a sense in which he didn’t need to say this at all. We all knew it. They were thinking only about New York City. The rest of the country never had anything approaching a crisis. The government under Collins emptied hospitals out from coast to coast to reserve them for Covid patients who only arrived much later and never came close to overwhelming health care services.
Meanwhile, the entire country was plunged into a grave crisis at every level – a man-made crisis of the worst sort.
Nor did they think about anything other than this one pathogen. It was a wild fanaticism that seized the whole of the ruling class for the better part of two years. None of it made sense but those who objected could hardly get a hearing. Instead, they were smeared, censored, and often fired for non-compliance.
Even as late as December 2021, Collins was still fear-mongering. He told NPR concerning Christmas celebrations: “We were planning to invite some of the trainees at NIH who are far from home to come for a brunch on Christmas Day at our house if they’re all fully vaccinated and boosted. Still planning to go forward, very carefully, with a small group, and everybody will be wearing masks except when they’re eating.”
Note that Collins doesn’t apologize. He takes no responsibility. He just continues his masquerade as a tennis-shoe wearing, guitar-strumming, Jesus-loving grandpa who is open and broad-minded, never mind that he wielded absolute power over all our lives only a few years ago.
Later in the interview, he is singing hosannas to the glorious vaccines and how perfectly they worked. We are nowhere near approaching the point where people like this tell the truth. It’s almost like they cannot bear it.
Even in this interview, Collins’s nonchalant delivery is infuriating. You want to scream back: you wrecked the lives of hundreds of millions of people! And no one ever gave you the authority to do so!
Meanwhile, it was incredibly obvious to many at the time that disaster would be the only result of lockdowns. The bit about masking was never serious; no one in the know seriously believed these things would protect anyone from a tiny pathogen with an animal reservoir. The only solution was the traditional one from public health wisdom: preserve normalcy, treat the sick with known therapeutics, and alert the vulnerable to stay away from large crowds until the virus becomes endemic.
Collins directly attacked this solution and demanded that government attack it and ultimately censor it!
As we approach the end of the year, we are surrounded by a cultural and economic darkness this generation has never seen before. Most incredibly, public health itself is wrecked.
Let’s just count the ways. Each consequence dates from the beginnings of the lockdowns. That was the turning point, the end of innocence, the great reset, the moment when the choice between freedom and despotism weighed heavily in the most inhumane direction.
Consider:
Homeless people are everywhere at record highs (650K), stemming from rampant mental disorder, substance abuse, and incredibly tight leasing standards stemming from the eviction moratorium.
The middle class can no longer afford to buy a home thanks to high rates from the Fed, deployed in an attempt to mitigate against inflation which is still running hot.
Every merchant has hidden fees in everything, struggling to find some way to hide the hot potato of inflation that has eaten 20-plus percent of the dollar’s purchasing power since 2019.
Shoplifting is a major national problem to the point that thousands of stores have closed.
Shrinkflation affects everything. The groceries have shrunk and the bills have soared – a direct consequence of some $8 trillion in stimulus and money printing.
Office real estate in large cities is approaching an accounting crisis because people are not returning to work, their routines totally shattered by lockdowns.
Travel is uncertain with endless delays and cancellations due to pilot shortages stemming from stay-at-home orders, vaccine mandates, and rampant illness.
The “great reset” is all around us, as we are constantly nudged to drive EVs, live without comforts, buy less meat, and even eat bugs.
A wide-open Southern border has created an immigration crisis as government neglected its core duties in favor of insane methods of virus control.
Restaurants are unaffordable for most people.
Dependency on government handouts is 28 percent higher than in 2019.
All stores close an hour or two earlier because they cannot get workers to stay later.
The learning losses among the kids are unfathomable, two years and rising, and perhaps an entire generation is lost.
There is a population-wide mental-health crisis in addition to rampant substance abuse.
The federal budget has been blown to smithereens.
Political divisions are festering as never before, with neither party willing to discuss the Covid elephant in the room.
Our conception of what it means to live in freedom with a government that knows limits to its power has slipped away.
Arts venues are struggling for dear life to survive.
World trade is shattered, with new trading blocs replacing the old ones.
The rise of maniacal gender dysphoria of the young is probably connected with this: endless hours online, loss of confidence in the world as it is, plus loneliness.
One could argue that even the war in Israel and Gaza is a result: security concerns were neglected in favor of microbial activism and shot mandates, and the loss of a moral center to policy then unleashed successive rounds of violence.
Finally, there is the loss of trust in everything: government, public health, pharmaceuticals, academia, science, media, and each other. Society cannot function without trust. Not even churches are immune from broad incredulity since most went along with the Covid response in every detail.
This only begins to scratch the surface of what we’ve lost and what has replaced it. Ultimately all such tragedies come down to individual lives. These days you hear them only among friends and families. And they are terrible stories of sadness and personal despair. The pain is only intensified by the silence on the part of all corporate media, government, and other commanding heights. Because of the news block on the whole topic, there is mass and festering anger beneath the surface.
And yet here is this granddad – the man ostensibly in charge over the whole operation – telling us old war stories of mistakes that were made. Does he have any idea of the carnage he caused? Does he even care?
In Dostoevsky’s version of the Grand Inquisitor, the nemesis predicts: “In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us.”
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Author
Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
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