Bioethicist Wesley J. Smith confesses that when the pandemic first struck, he held both Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci in high regard. Collins, after all, had led the team that sequenced the human genome and Fauci was a stalwart in crisis-managing AIDs. But, as their behavior around COVID comes to light, he is deeply disappointed in both:

As for Fauci:

Early on, Fauci insisted in a press conference that the overwhelming evidence — based on a peer-reviewed study, no less — pointed to the virus leaping from animals to people instead of being a lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. What Fauci failed to disclose was that the “study” — such as it turned out to be — was his idea. Emails obtained later showed that he not only prompted publication of the paper with the apparent purpose of discrediting the “lab leak” theory, but also helped edit it and had final approval of its contents.

Wesley J. Smith, “How Collins and Fauci Shattered Our Trust in Public Health,” National Review, May 21, 2024

More honest researchers were discredited for making those connections. And the health bureaucracy now admits that the U.S. was funding dangerous gain-of-function virus research at the Wuhan lab in inland China. More here.

And Collins? He helped organize a campaign to discredit leading epidemiologists who spoke against the government’s harmful lockdowns:

The duo also worked behind the scenes to generate “a devastating takedown” of the expert opinions of three leading epidemiologists publicly published in October 2020, known as the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD). The GBD argued that mass shutdowns were an epidemiological mistake and that the far-better approach to the dangers posed by the pandemic would be “focused protection” of the vulnerable, allowing the rest of society to return to normal functioning.

There was nothing wrong with Collins and Fauci disagreeing with the GBD. But rather than engage with its contents, both sought instead to discredit the GBD’s authors as “fringe,” a patent falsehood given that its authors were medical professors in elite medical schools with hundreds of published papers among them. Because of Fauci’s and Collins’ behind-the-scenes efforts, the GBD’s authors — Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, and Martin Kulldorff, then of Harvard (he was subsequently fired for refusing to be vaccinated) — soon found themselves subjected to media scorn, accused of being indifferent to Covid deaths, their reputations tarnished in the most public ways. (To hear Bhattacharya’s first-person description of that emotionally searing experience, hit this link to our interview on my Humanize podcast.

Smith, “Shattered Our Trust”

Smith is careful to point out that

Fauci and Collins are not solely responsible for the Covid-policy debacle. They could not have so dominated public responses to the pandemic but for the mainstream media’s abandoning all skepticism, the meek acquiescence by a myriad of elected officials, enforcement by corporations of authoritarian policies such as vaccine mandates, and the duplicity of teachers’ unions that insisted on school closings and sought to use the pandemic to achieve their overarching social agendas, among others.

Smith, “Shattered Our Trust”

Herer are some notes from the Mind Matters News files on who, besides Fauci and Collins, contributed to a justified loss of public trust:

● Mainstream media? They went along with it all because, as Paul Farhi puts it at The Atlantic, they are facing an extinction-level event. Most people curate their own news now via the internet so Big Media face collapsing circulations. They must hope that government will bail them out. And they will forever after be propaganda outlets for their government saviors, as in Canada.

● Bureaucrats in general? Yes. As a sympathetic witness noted in 2021, “bureaucracy’s structural predisposition towards complicated regulation and red tape has made it seem, rightly or wrongly, less surefooted than, say, the efforts of private industry which did so much to quickly produce a COVID-19 vaccine.” That’s a very kind way of putting it. Dr. Michael Egnor’s assessment of the huge spike in deaths in New York State nursing homes — as an apparent result of the state government forcing already infected COVID patients on the homes — is less charitable but probably closer to the mark.

● Big Pharma, with a lot at stake, played a role in suppressing information:

JUST NOW: Lee Fang testifies on how Moderna relaunched their censorship efforts last summer using the A.I. intelligence firm “Talk Walker” and also partnered with the Public Goods project again—the non-profit uncovered in the #TwitterFiles that stifles free speech.

“Logically… pic.twitter.com/uPi7i7VVuW— TexasLindsay™ (@TexasLindsay_) February 6, 2024

Going forward, it all led to a situation where the government was likely the top source of COVID misinformation, often censoring more accurate sources. And yet the same government wants to fight misinformation elsewhere…

As Smith puts it, now that we are finding out what really happened,“the credibility of our public-health systems” has been shattered. Some would add, And “Trust the science!” is becoming a joke.

It’ll be a long road back from this one.