I wouldn’t rush to read a book with a preening title like The Road to Wisdom. What are the odds that that someone who calls attention to his own supposed wisdom that way really has much wisdom to offer? Such is Francis Collins, whose new book John West reviews at The Federalist.

You might wonder if the “wise” Dr. Collins learned much from the experience of Covid, with the lockdowns, the vaccine and mask mandates, the closed schools, the ruined businesses, the ruined city centers, the push to silence skeptics, to intimidate the public, that entire fiasco that did so much to discredit science in the public eye. It seems not:

Former National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director and Biden administration science adviser Francis Collins is back in the limelight with a new book, The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust.

Presumably an effort to repair Collins’ tattered reputation post-Covid, the book is written in a winsome style, and those who admire Collins will likely love it…

But don’t expect many mea culpas from Collins about his time at NIH. He offers no apology for funding the harvesting of body parts from late-term aborted babies for medical research. Or for financing research that used gender-destructive puberty blockers on young people. Likewise, he fails to acknowledge his past promotion of the failed Darwinian idea that our genome is swamped with “junk DNA.”

Nor does Collins take real ownership of his most significant missteps during Covid. During the rollout of the Covid vaccines, Collins falsely assured the public that mRNA from the vaccines wouldn’t stay in the body “beyond probably a few hours.”  A subsequent study showed that the mRNA could persist in a person’s lymph system some two months after vaccination. Collins’ promotion of misinformation has been memory-holed. So has his emphatic promise in April 2021 that “There’s not going to be any mandating of vaccines from the U.S. government, I can assure you.” A few months later, Collins was praising the imposition of mandates as a “forceful, muscular approach” and demonizing those who didn’t want to take the vaccines as killers on the wrong side of history.

Collins does acknowledge problems with government messaging during Covid and the “collateral damage” inflicted on ordinary Americans by various policies. But he calls the collateral damage “inevitable.”…

Yet Collins’ failure to take responsibility for his record isn’t the most serious flaw of his new book.

The most serious flaw is Collins’ core message. He frets about the politicization of science and the growing distrust of claims made in the name of science. He wants to restore public trust in “science” and the experts.

The problem is he largely conflates science with his own political agenda.

Read the rest — of Dr. West’s review, I mean. He has done us a favor by reading Collins’s book so we don’t have to. Dr. Collins “really hasn’t learned anything,” says West. And the book is misnamed. It’s “not the road to wisdom. It’s a road to folly.” Yep. Honestly, how does someone as inept as Francis Collins (and I’m being charitable) have the gall to tell anyone else how to become wise?