Why it’s always bad advice. Good for Francis Collins for his honesty, though it’s far too belated.
8 thoughts on ““Trust The Experts””
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Why it’s always bad advice. Good for Francis Collins for his honesty, though it’s far too belated.
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I will not give Collins a pass. His actions on Feb. 1 2020 and beyond speak for themselves. The boys from Bethesda indeed… Good riddance.
I wish I were making this stuff up. Select Subcommittee Report, specifically page 22. So much for an unbiased approach. Speaks for itself.
Yes. They were so concerned about how “the voices of conspiracy will quickly dominate” that they ended up making those voices the dominate ones because everyone else was silenced. Stupid.
I think these nerds were so caught up in finally being celebrities, and having fame for just being nerds, that they forgot that the job of an expert is to persuade the small group of people who will actually make the decisions based on their advice. Of course, it’s much easier to fool the mass of celebrity-worshipers who don’t know covid from cocaine than it is to fool people who deal in consuming and producing bullshit.
I suspected as soon as I learned than NIAID had funded the Wuhan Lab via ECO health Alliance that it was purely a CYA operation.
The true practicality of all this, whether CYA or scientists pretending to be diplomats, is that little to nothing has been done to discourage these experiments from being conducted in secret or by state laboratories in countries not open to international scrutiny. Perhaps Chairman Xi, having seen the devastation wrought on his own country has seen to it through his Red Army General in charge of the WIV that such experiments are not repeated. However, in the interim ECOHealth Alliance (an NYC based NGO) has moved on with funding research in other potentially non-transparent countries with little to no oversight that I am aware of. Worse I’ve seen no action by our own government to aggressively impede public tax dollars from going to such NGOs or other international entities doing such research. This seems like an undertaking that if pursued at all should be “Made in America” with all the precautionary strings attached for transparency and accountability.
Given what has transpired, I have no reason to believe in the “Full Faith and Credit” of the scientific community as managed by the NIH nor by White House Directives or Executive Orders.
To put it bluntly: Collins and Fauci you guys blew it.
I’ve learned subsequently that funding for ECOHealth was removed in the 2022 Defense Authorization Act but was restored by the NIH in May of 2023 with restrictions on where and how the money could be spent. We’ll see if those teeth hold up.
Sorry broken link try again:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01566-0
This is a pay-walled link but essentially lists the restrictions on the four-year $2.9M award as:
1) Performing any in-country research in China, including the WIV, or collection any new samples from vertebrates such as bats. [But what of Vietnam or Thailand?]
2) Greater scrutiny of ECOHealth’s finances.
3) Forbidden from performing any work HHS deems to have the potential to enhance the virulence or transmission of a virus.
Sounds good on paper. In practice? Who knows.
What I find particularly grating and exasperating are a couple of the comments from quoted virologists in the article, cheering on the decision to restore funding. Almost as if 2020 never happened. I have to wonder if the scientific mind requires a degree of ‘head-in-the-sand’ thinking, or maybe head stuck somewhere else…
Collins’ message is absolutely true and on point. Unfortunately, once offered the the power and glory, he failed to do the honorable thing. At least we are hearing it now, rather than more denials.