Editor’s note: For further discussion of the record of Francis Collins, check out John West’s forthcoming book Stockholm Syndrome Christianity (forthcoming, February 2025). If you pre-order now, you can get several free digital downloads, including a book about C. S. Lewis.

President-elect Donald Trump recently announced the nomination of Stanford University epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya to head the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

It’s a striking turn of events.

Bhattacharya was one of the scientists disparaged by former NIH-head Francis Collins after Bhattacharya co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration. Written during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Declaration argued against lockdowns for everyone and suggested that public health policies should be focused on the most vulnerable instead. At the time, Collins privately dismissed the distinguished and well-published Bhattacharya as a “fringe” epidemiologist. 

Now Bhattacharya will be the one leading the NIH. 

He should be a breath of fresh air. Like Collins, Bhattacharya is a committed Christian. Unlike Collins, he is committed to transparency and open debate in science. Presumably Bhattacharya will help policymakers critically assess what we should do differently during the next pandemic.

Disturbing Recommendations

Bhattacharya’s nomination provides a good occasion to scrutinize Collins’s own disturbing recommendations for how to handle future public health emergencies. 

A year ago, a video clip featuring Collins sparked controversy online because in it Collins admitted that government officials had enacted policies to fight COVID-19 without much concern for the “collateral damage”:

As a guy living inside the beltway… we weren’t really… considering the consequences in communities that were not New York City or some other big city… If you’re a public health person and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is… you attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recover.

After this clip circulated, some praised Collins for his seeming change of heart. Others thought his mea culpa was too little, too late.

A Far Different Message

What most people failed to realize is that the brief comments quoted from Collins were highly misleading. They came from his remarks at a 2023 Braver Angels event, and his full remarks communicated a far different message. 

In fact, they revealed that Collins has proposed some pretty frightening recommendations for the next pandemic.

At the 2023 event, Collins wasn’t primarily concerned about the “collateral damage” imposed by the government during COVID. He was concerned that the government hadn’t been powerful enough to exercise effective control. And he wanted to make sure that this wouldn’t be a problem the next time around.

I first decided to revisit Collins’s 2023 remarks after reading his new book, The Road to Wisdom, this fall. As I’ve written elsewhere, Collins’s book launches a misguided attack on intelligent design as well as conflating “science” with Collins’s own political agenda. The book also discusses Collins’s participation at the 2023 Bravers Angels event and reiterates some of his comments from it. But in the book, Collins tones down or removes some of the recommendations he offered at the event. I thought it would be useful to examine his earlier comments — comments that most people still don’t know about.

Perhaps Collins’s most dramatic recommendation at the 2023 event was that we should bestow even more power on the federal public health bureaucracy. 

“I got to say, if there’s one thing that maybe a country ought to do across the whole nation in a uniform way, it’s public health, but we don’t,” he lamented. He went on to argue that we should treat public health in the same way as we treat national defense:

I think you can make a case [that] public health is our domestic defense. We have external enemies that have weapons and guns and then we have, potentially, an internal enemy that has a spike protein that’s coming for us. Why should we not have just the same kind of resources and intention and coordination for our domestic defense? We don’t have it, and so if we think there are some things the government really should be responsible to do, isn’t that one of them? In which case, shouldn’t we do a better job of giving the resources that need to be there?

Startling Implications 

Pause and reflect for a moment on the startling implications of Collins’s analogy. We have secured our national defense by creating a costly and controlling federal bureaucracy authorized to use draconian powers. It can bomb cities into oblivion. It can kill combatants without a trial. It can forcibly take over people’s homes and businesses. It can impose martial law and suspend civil rights. In wartime, it is not responsive to the ordinary means of dissent. Indeed, the right to openly criticize the military during a war is often ruthlessly suppressed. 

Of course, the military is supposed to exercise its draconian powers outside the United States with the authorization of Congress and the President. Yet Collins offers the defense establishment as his model for what the U.S. government should do within the U.S. to fight public health emergencies. I suspect Collins himself did not think through the logic of his own analogy. But how you frame something matters. Analogizing public health to national defense opens Pandora’s Box.

But there’s more.

During the same Braver Angels event, Collins also discussed the role of debate and dissent. He wasn’t concerned that government and big tech had censored free speech. He was concerned they didn’t go far enough in controlling the flow of information. He condemned dissenting voices for raising division when they should have been “a calming influence”:

I’m talking about politicians and I’m talking about the media, and certainly social media. China didn’t have a problem with politicians disagreeing with the leadership, nor did they have a media problem. But we sure had every possible voice, many of them with all kinds of intentions that were not noble, ready to capitalize on a circumstance where there was uncertainty and resentment and anger and fear, and whip that up in the biggest way.

China as a Model

Re-read the above comments carefully. After complaining about open debate by politicians, the media, and social media in America, Collins declares: “China didn’t have a problem with politicians disagreeing with the leadership, nor did they have a media problem.”  The video of the event shows Collins telling this line jokingly with a gentle laugh.

But the underlying message he is communicating isn’t a joke. Collins is implying that China did things better in how it managed public discussions of pandemic policies. China is a totalitarian country that suppresses dissent by compulsion, including the implementation of a social credit system. Collins laments that unlike China, America “had every possible voice” chiming in, as if that were something terrible. In America, the right of everyone to his or her mind used to be considered a good thing. 

Collins also criticized politicians who dared to disagree with government policies rather acting as a “calming influence.” How dare they! Who do these politicians think they are? 

They are the people elected by their constituents to represent them. Collins, by contrast, was an unelected bureaucrat.  If you want a snapshot of the arrogance prevalent in much of the federal science bureaucracy, you need look no further. 

Despite Collins’s concerns about unrestricted debate during COVID, we now know that the U.S. government did quite a lot to control public discussions and censor dissenting voices. Earlier this year, Meta/Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg informed Congress that “senior officials from the Biden Administration… repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content” in 2021. 

Interestingly, one more example of government efforts to control public discussion during COVID came to light recently, and it involved Collins himself. 

In early 2022, federal officials convened a private meeting with four experts in immunology and virology to determine whether a previous COVID infection should exempt people from vaccine mandates. One of the participants, vaccine expert Paul Offit, revealed last month that the experts deadlocked 2-2 on the question, but not because of the science. According to Offit, they all agreed that exemptions for natural immunity made sense as a matter of science. The experts disagreed on policy grounds, worried that people might find ways to game the exemption. Notably, Francis Collins was one of the government officials in this meeting. Rather than publicly disclose what the experts had told the government, officials like Collins continued to downplay the significance of natural immunity in their public comments. They wanted to stage-manage what the public (and public officials) were allowed to discuss. 

Not Far Enough

But, according to Collins, the efforts to control public debate during COVID didn’t go nearly far enough: 

Circles were being run around the government’s communication effort by all kinds of other sources, some of which were helpful and a lot of which were not… We should have had a much better plan about how to prepare for that kind of assault on truth. We were continually just trying to catch up with something that had already gone viral. Sort of the retrospective scope on this is, if we ever have another circumstance, and I’m sorry, we probably will, then the communication effort about science has to be much more nimble than it has been.

More nimble? What exactly does that mean? More censorship and control? China-like restrictions on dissent? Collins didn’t spell it out in his 2023 comments, other than saying that in the next crisis the government needs to engage in “prebunking” views it considers wrong. As I have explained in another article, what Collins means by prebunking according to his new book is poisoning the well: Smear the motives of those you disagree with so that the public won’t feel they need to even consider their arguments.

I can understand why Collins and others in the science bureaucracy would favor that approach. It’s always easier to poison the well than to answer tough questions from those who disagree with you. That’s why during the pandemic, you didn’t find Collins spending much time answering the serious concerns being raised by fellow experts. He preferred instead to seize on wild conspiracy theories like Bill Gates using the COVID vax to insert microchips into people. Intended or not, Collins’s not-so-subtle message was that those raising objections to the vaccines were nutcases. And, of course, you don’t need to pay attention to nutcases. Similarly, when credible scientists like Bhattacharya raised serious objections to COVID lockdowns, he tried to marginalize them rather than engage them in open dialogue. As I document in my upcoming book Stockholm Syndrome Christianity, Collins pursued the same approach years earlier in his efforts to marginalize scientists who think there is evidence of intelligent design in biology.

An Intriguing Suggestion

Collins did make one intriguing suggestion in his 2023 remarks that I think was admirable. He raised the possibility of a truth and reconciliation commission to bring closure for those harmed by government COVID policies: 

[T]he alternative is to do what was done in South Africa after apartheid, where you have a truth and reconciliation opportunity, and that means people coming forward and confessing what they did that was harmful in public, and asking for forgiveness. That’s very different than just amnesty, everything’s fine. Something along those lines. It’d be really hard to organize, but it might be worth considering as a way to get us past what otherwise is just going to be continual grievance, animosity, and vitriol.

Collins reiterated this proposal in his recent book, and I laud Collins for suggesting it. If he is serious about the proposal, it shows some awareness on his part of the harms inflicted by government policies and a willingness to face those who were hurt. Perhaps Bhattacharya and others in the new administration will pursue Collins’s proposal. I hope so.

But apologies alone won’t be enough to bring about healing. If you lost your job due to COVID mandates, or were injured by a COVID vaccine, or had your business destroyed by government shutdowns, there will need to be more. There should be restitution, and if government officials broke laws, they should be fired and/or prosecuted.

I know there are still lots of people, especially evangelical Christians, for whom Francis Collins remains a beloved figure. And still others may think we should let bygones be bygones since he is no longer the leader of a federal agency.

The problem is that Collins is still a public figure who wants to provide input on public policies relating to science and health. That’s the point of his new book. So it’s worth understanding what he really advocates. Collins also provides a window into the mindset of many other federal bureaucrats still in the federal science bureaucracy. We ignore their views at our own peril.