MICHAEL BARONE: COVID-19: Another fail-safe institution proves not so safe.
At the time, I thought this was a good idea. Hadn’t health research produced cures and improved treatments for many diseases and conditions? Wasn’t health research the best thing for the government to spend money on after national defense?
Now I’m not so sure. After watching the public health agencies flounder and flail during the COVID-19 epidemic, and in light of testimony and retrospective evidence coming mainly out of Republican-run House hearings, it has struck me that putting all those huge piles of money in a small cluster of government bureaucracies was not such a good idea.
Centralization is supposed to prioritize competence and produce efficiency. But it can also squeeze out intellectual diversity and serve the selfish interests of those in charge.
Case in point: The question of whether COVID-19 resulted from a leak from the Wuhan, China, communicable diseases laboratory financed in large part by Francis Collins’s NIH and Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. I’ve returned to this matter multiple times, in June 2021, March 2023, July 2023, November 2023, December 2023, and February 2024.
Obviously, Fauci and Collins’s centralized control over vast sums of research money produced this change of view among scientists with professional credentials but the personal ethics characteristic of a much older profession. Then, with breathtaking dishonesty, Fauci referred the press to the article as if he had nothing to do with it.
The question remains open, although it seems increasingly likely that a lab leak was responsible. However, given Chinese secrecy, there isn’t and may never be an indisputable answer. Nevertheless, Fauci and Collins sought to supply one almost instantly. They instructed NIH-supported scientists, including some who thought the lab leak theory likely, to write a “scientific” paper claiming that a lab leak was not “plausible.” Facebook and other social media platforms chimed in to suppress and discredit the disfavored theory.
Why the lies and dissembling? The facts point to the conclusion that Fauci, with Collins in tow, wanted to divert attention from the “gain of function” research that NIAID had sponsored and financed at the Wuhan laboratory in the past.
That’s because they’re terrible, horrible, awful people.