|
|
posted: November 29, 2025
tl;dr: Francis Collins’s naïveté and gullibility permeate this exceedingly pedantic tome...
I’ve had a particular fascination with Francis Collins, who was (in theory) Anthony Fauci’s boss before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, while Collins was NIH Director and Fauci was head of NIAID. See my four-post series Parsing Francis Collins’s comments on what happened in Wuhan and my post Parsing Francis Collins’s comments on what happened in D.C. In reality, of course, Fauci was Collins’s boss, given Fauci’s long tenure, much higher compensation, and dual-role as head of NIAID and director of the U.S.’s biodefense/bioweapon/biowarfare program. Collins’s recent book The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust firmly establishes why Collins was the perfect boss for Fauci, who had no desire for any interference as he pursued gain-of-function (a.k.a. death-maximizing) virus research. If you are Fauci, you either want a boss like President Joe Biden, who suffered from diminished mental capacity (dementia?) and was unable to manage his employees, or like Collins, who was so naïve, gullible, and trusting as to never interfere with or impede anything Fauci wanted to do.
Collins does admit to some failures in The Road to Wisdom, but funding gain-of-function research in Wuhan under abysmal safety conditions and transferring Ralph Baric’s chimeric virus assembly technology to the Chinese Communist Party is not one of them. Collins says his first scientific project was “a complete and utter failure”. He admits that science, in general, has poorly designed studies, fruitless studies, imperfect peer reviews, and poor reproducibility. He describes a scandal in his own lab in which one of his students fabricated results. He also describes how later, as NIH Director, an NIH-funded scientist violated an explicit congressional ban on research with embryos. Do all these failures cause Collins to realize that scientists might pursue gain-of-function virus research that crossed ethical and legal lines? Did Collins put in place safeguards to prevent this? Of course not. Collins has an inherent faith that science is good and scientists are wonderful people. He loves Anthony Fauci, describing him as the best public servant he’s ever known. What a nice thing for a boss to say (sarcasm alert)!
Collins has spent more time studying the Bible and religious tracts than he has spent investigating the cause of the greatest pandemic in a century. He claims The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2 paper was a textbook example of rigorous science. He falsely says U.S. intelligence agencies all say the virus wasn’t engineered. He cites the Huanan Seafood Market double spillover paper, and blames raccoon dogs on the west side of the market for the pandemic. He never mentions the DEFUSE proposal, the Furin Cleavage Site, the de-barred Pater Daszak, the now-shuttered Eco Health Alliance, or his February 2020 email thread with Fauci and Jeremy Farrar expressing concern about chimeric viruses being made in Wuhan under BSL-2 biosafety conditions (“Wild West”!). Of course he never mentions his A flu virus risk worth taking paper he co-authored with Fauci. Collins only mentions the phrase “gain-of-function” once, when listing topics that someone else brought up in a conference he attended.
Collins commits many other pandemic-era errors in The Road to Wisdom. He claims there was “rigorous testing” of the “two COVID-19 vaccines” and ”scrupulously conducted” trials. That’s entirely debatable given the accelerated timeframe of Project Warp Speed, which allowed for no long-term testing. What’s not debatable is that there were three vaccines that received Emergency Use Authorization: Moderna, Pfizer-BioNTech, and Johnson & Johnson, which was later pulled from the market. Collins says “we didn’t expect the emergence of variants” when explaining the unforeseen need for boosters and vaccine modifications - he really didn’t expect a respiratory virus to mutate?
Collins claims that Trump told the American people to inject bleach, whereas Trump never said the word “bleach”. Collins says it was right to sacrifice kids’ education, small businesses, and mental health to respond to COVID-19. He claims that Sweden was a failure based on COVID-19 death rates compared to Norway (which avoids comparing Sweden to non-Scandinavian countries and the U.S.), and never mentions Sweden’s excellent performance on excess deaths from all causes. The one mistake that Collins admits to is “admittedly intemperate language” in an email in which he called current NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya and two others “fringe epidemiologists”. They will be pleased to know that they have been upgraded in the book to “apparently respectable epidemiologists”.
Francis Collins actually knows what the intermediate host of SARS-CoV-2 was: ACE-2 transgenic mice in a BSL-2 lab
The only accountability Collins has faced for his litany of mistakes is from his participation in Braver Angels and a debate he had with “deplorable” Wilk Wilkinson, where he “had to admit that Wilk had a lot of good points”. Collins mentions Braver Angels throughout the book and continually brings up the name of his “buddy” Wilk. Clearly Collins feels as though he’s done his penance and now presents himself as a shining example of someone who has reached across the American political divide. The Road to Wisdom closes with a pledge Collins wrote and had published on the Braver Angels website, asking Americans to follow his example. The pledge again demonstrates Collins’s complete naïveté. Collins doesn’t realize that it is much easier to get fifty-one former intelligence officers to sign a letter claiming Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation than it is to get them to sign and adhere to his pledge.
Collins believes politics and religion cause mistrust in science and not science itself, outside of poor communication with the public. He laments the decline in the public trust of experts, and criticizes people who do their own research. He rails against “unregulated sites” as sources of misinformation (that’s how Collins would dismiss this post and site), but to his credit he does not call for a government Ministry of Truth. He instead urges people to get their news from his five favorite mainstream newspapers, four of which buried the Hunter Biden laptop story: USA Today, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal (whose sister publication, the New York Post, broke the story). Collins truly is his parents’ son: they worked for Eleanor Roosevelt during the Depression, so Collins is from a family of FDR Democrats. He says “I am not a partisan,” but it is clear he can’t stand Trump, several times not mentioning him by name but instead referring to him as the president who lies.
The Road to Wisdom may have cured me of my fascination with Collins. He’s neither intelligent nor well-read, aside from swallowing whatever the mainstream narrative is. The book demonstrates that he’s in the 99th percentile for naïveté and gullibility, as I’ve suspected for quite some time. Collins tenure as NIH Director was a disaster that resulted in a pandemic that had a terrible response, killing millions and wreaking havoc around the world. Collins should have spent less time studying the Bible and more time looking into what Fauci was doing. Like Biden, Collins was the perfect boss for underlings with their own agenda: he was completely oblivious to what was really going on in his own organization.