Newly released emails show Anthony Fauci and his boss at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) wanted to conduct a “quick and devastating” take-down of health experts who proposed a lockdown-free Covid-19 control strategy.
The emails, released on Friday by the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis, show retiring NIH Director Francis Collins telling Fauci in October 2020 to discredit the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD) – a statement that proposes working towards achieving herd immunity through “focused protection” of the most vulnerable.
Days after the GBD was released, Collins notified Fauci and other health officials about how the proposal from “three fringe epidemiologists” was getting a “lot of attention” and called for a “quick and devastating published take down of its premises.”
Thread summarizing what we've learned so far of the Fauci/Collins email dump on the Great Barrington Declaration:
It starts on 10/14/20 when Collins instructs Fauci and his staff to "take down" the GBD and the "fringe" scientists behind it. pic.twitter.com/XyTWINMOnG
— Phil Magness (@PhilWMagness) December 18, 2021
A short time later, Fauci emails Collins an op-ed from Wired magazine that “debunks this theory” and calls out the three scientists – Martin Kulldorff, an epidemiologist at Harvard University, Sunetra Gupta, an epidemiologist at Oxford University, and Jay Bhattacharya, a public health policy expert at Stanford University – for touting an approach without “following the scientific method” for peer-reviewed hypotheses.
After Collins lauds this “excellent” response, Fauci sends him another op-ed in The Nation magazine that “[refuted] the herd immunity approach.” Collins replies agreeing with article that the idea is a “deadly delusion.”