National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins appeared on Fox News Sunday with Bret Baier. During the interview, Collins shared that Sunday would be his last day on the job. He had announced his resignation in October, alerting the administration that his tenure would conclude at the end of 2021. In his final interview as NIH director, Collins pushed panic about the omicron variant, continued to smear the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, and downplayed the lab leak theory of COVID.
When Baier asked if the emergence of omicron was a step backward in the pandemic, Collins called the new variant a “serious challenge.” He noted the number of mutations and the increased transmissibility to support his assertion. Because of these factors, Collins asserted, “[We] are in for a world of trouble, I’m afraid, in the next month or two. But there are things people can do, and I hope we can talk about that because this is not one of those situations where we’re just helplessly facing the oncoming virus.”
Collins’s assessment neglected to mention the experience South Africa’s experience with the omicron variant. When Baier asked if Collins could definitively say omicron is less severe, his response was stunning. Collins said he could not say whether omicron was less virulent for the United States, as if Americans are a completely different species than the citizens of South Africa. He continued:
But remember, that’s a different population that’s generally younger. Most people in South Africa already had delta, so they have some immunity from that. They don’t have boosters there, so we have that on our side. I just think we ought to be careful not to extrapolate from what we’ve seen, but I’m hopeful that that is an indication that while incredibly contagious, this virus is maybe a bit less likely to make people really sick and, obviously, that’s something we’ve got to hope for or our health systems are going to be overwhelmed.
It is hard to decide where to begin. First, extrapolating from data on the ground to make recommendations is precisely what public health agencies are supposed to do. Making age-adjusted assessments and adjusting for other demographic differences such as the rates of comorbidities like obesity and diabetes is the job of these agencies. There is a wealth of real-world data on the ground in South Africa that the U.S. public health bureaucracy should be able to assess quickly and accurately.
Second, South Africa’s vaccination rate is under 30%. If the country is not having a surge in severe illness and the vaccines effectively prevent severe disease and death for Americans, it seems that there is a pretty safe assumption for Collins to make. Most Americans who catch omicron will suffer mild-to-moderate illness that does not require hospitalization. A hospital CEO from New York, where cases of the new variant are rising quickly, painted that picture on CNN.
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Michael Dowling from Northwell Health told host John Berman, “We’re doing very, very well. Very manageable. There’s no crisis. We have about 460 patients in our hospitals. That’s less than 10% of our overall capacity.” He noted that this number was about 15% of the hospitalizations in the first wave and less than half of that experienced during the peak of the delta wave. Dr. Afshine Ash Emrani, a cardiologist in Tarzana, California, shared his observations on Twitter. Most patients who are hospitalized have no need for supplemental oxygen. Most of his patients are experiencing symptoms similar to the common cold. It would seem our CDC and NIH could collect on-the-ground information like this pretty quickly.
Third, Collins noted that many residents of South Africa had recovered from the delta variant. It appears to be a tacit admission of the protective effect of natural immunity. Delta also ripped through the Southeast late in the summer. Does that mean Americans in that region can expect to weather omicron similarly to South Africa? Collins didn’t explain further.
Baier then asked about the prevalence of positive tests in the NFL, NHL, and NBA, where the majority of players and staff are vaccinated and boosted. Collins acknowledged that vaccination does not prevent breakthrough cases but provided an eye-popping statistic: “And for omicron, if you’ve had two doses of Pfizer or Moderna, you are somewhat protected against the breakthrough infection. If you have a booster, you’re much better protected, up there around the sort of 85 to 90% rate.”
That statistic has no basis in current assessments of vaccine efficacy. A recent study from the UK put a booster from Pfizer at 75% effective in preventing a breakthrough. On Dec. 20, a study showed the Moderna booster increased antibody levels by about 37-fold. However, if they are antibodies that omicron can evade, the number is irrelevant. In the last few days, multiple members of Congress, media personalities, and athletes who have been vaccinated and boosted have reported breakthrough infections. Anecdotal information from highly vaccinated populations creates a perception that challenges Collins’s assertion. It is also unclear whether the vaccines prevent severe illness or if omicron is just less virulent. That is the question the NIH should be answering.
When Collins complained about misinformation and the politicization of the pandemic, Baier challenged him. “Yes. Dr. Collins, we always hear, ‘Follow the science,’ and, you know, science is observation, description, experimentation, and explanation, but it seems that a lot of health policymakers have been trying to silence opposing views.” Baier then quoted emails from Collins directing a public takedown of the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration and asked Collins why he wrote them. Collins responded:
Let me explain. What was being proposed there was basically saying, let’s not worry about mitigation, let’s just let this virus rip. This is, of course, before we had vaccines and, basically, these — I will call them fringe epidemiologists who really did not have the credentials to be making such a grand sweeping statement — were saying, just let the virus run through the population and eventually then everybody will have had it and we’ll be OK.
That is a flat-out misrepresentation of the authors’ views and a mischaracterization of their professional credentials. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Dr. Martin Kulldorff, and Dr. Sunetra Gupta are faculty in good standing at Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford, respectively. Gupta is considered one of the leading epidemiologists in the world. Bhattacharya has worked on global health policy for decades, and Kulldorff has worked within the health bureaucracy serving on scientific advisory committees for the FDA and CDC. They advocated for a strategy of focused protection for the elderly and those who have medical conditions that put them at risk.
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After watching dozens of interviews with Bhattacharya and Kulldorff since October of 2020, it’s clear that their proposal called for innovation at the local level to keep those at risk safe and able to access what they needed. Offering specific hours for immunocompromised people to shop, creating groups to rotate responsibility for meeting the needs of elderly church members, and developing technology for social connectivity were all examples of what local communities could do to protect the vulnerable. At the same time, the rest of the country could go on with their daily lives.
Keep in mind, the authors made these recommendations after government mandates shuttered small businesses, children were not attending school in person, and entertainment venues remained closed in much of the country. The authors worried about the long-term effects on the nation’s physical and mental health along with the educational and developmental impacts on children. Many of their predictions about delayed medical treatment, mental health issues, loss of education, and the cognitive development of infants are just coming to light.
To put a cherry on top of his more than 40-year career in medicine and research, Collins closed the interview by calling the lab-leak theory a “distraction.” He asserted, “Most of the scientific community, myself included, think that is a possibility, but far more likely this was a natural way in which a virus left a bat, maybe traveled through some other species and got to humans, and there was no lab leak involved.” If he had said that most of the scientific community that depends on the NIH for research dollars think as he does, then his statement may have been more honest.
How seriously should we take Collins at this point? This interview followed his cringeworthy farewell to the National Institutes of Health with a pandemic version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Make your own assessment.
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