Outgoing National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins said on Sunday that he’s “sorry” the Wuhan lab-leak theory has become such a “huge distraction” for the country, even though there is “no evidence” to support it.
After more than a decade on the job, Collins dodged questions about his attempt to discredit the lab-leak theory at the beginning of the pandemic, reiterating that the most likely explanation is that the virus spread through animal-to-human transmission.
“I’m really sorry that the lab leak has become such a distraction for so many people because frankly, we still don’t know,” Collins said.
“There is no evidence really to say. 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.”
In October of this year, Collins said that claims about the agency’s involvement in gain-of-function research and the Wuhan Institute of Virology had “absolutely” nothing to do with his resignation.
Regardless there are emails between Collins and Dr. Anthony Fauci suggesting a deliberate effort to downplay theories that the coronavirus originated in the Wuhan lab and, whether deliberately or, their funding had any involvement.
“We won’t know unless China decides to open up on this which they have not done, and shame on them for that,” Collins said, “this has been a huge distraction” for the scientific community.
“We in this country have somehow gotten all fractured into a hyperpolarized politicized view that never should have been mixed with public health,” Collins said. “It has been ruinous and history will judge harshly those people who have continued to defocus the effort and focus on conspiracies and things that are demonstrably false. Shame on all of us that we’ve gotten into this kind of pickle.”
Friday the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis released an email where Collins expressed deep concerns about the herd immunity strategy being advocated by “fringe epidemiologists,” and called for “a quick and devastating published takedown” of the three experts promoting the herd immunity strategy known as “The Great Barrington Declaration.”
Collins told Baier that he is “not going to apologize,” for his words, arguing that “hundreds of thousands of people would have died if we had followed that strategy.”
“I did write that, and I will stand by that,” Collins said. “Basically, these 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 would have had it and everything will be okay.”
The United States recently surpassed 50 million COVID-19 cases and 800,000 deaths since the onset of the pandemic. Even facing those numbers, Collins maintained that “hundreds of thousands of people would have died if we had followed that strategy.”
“So I’m sorry I was opposed to that, I still am, and I’m not going to apologize for it,” he said.
As for the new omicron variant, Collins said the U.S. should brace for a “world of trouble” the next couple of months, based on its higher transmissibility than the previous strains, which “pale by comparison.”
Baier pointed to recent data out of South Africa that could point to milder symptoms and fewer hospitalizations from omicron.
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