By Ian Miller at Brownstone dot org.

[This article was originally published in December 2023.]

There's long been a debate among pandemic realists as to what levels incompetence, malice, and power-seeking played in our Covid response.

We'll never know for certain, though there are certainly strong arguments on both sides, particularly with politicians who seized their opportunity to enforce pointless, authoritarian mandates. And this included "experts" who after years of toiling in obscurity decided to impose their values and views on others.

Most famously this would prominently feature Dr. Anthony Fauci, who went from quickly dismissing masks to becoming tyrannically obsessed with demonizing anyone who criticized him or questioned his status as The One True Representative of The Science.

Ironically, in 2023 we've now seen more research on the possibility that masks actually made Covid transmission and infection worse.

But now another important, influential "expert" has just spoken on a panel sharing what thoughts were going through the esteemed minds of some of our government officials and advisors during the early days of the Covid response. And in doing so, he unwittingly made a major admission illustrating, at the very least, his own incompetence.

Francis Collins Shows How Little Thought 'Experts' Gave To Covid Restrictions

Francis Collins was for most of the Covid pandemic one of the most influential and powerful health "experts" in the US government. Collins, as head of the National Institutes of Health, wielded enormous amounts of control over both the political actions, restrictions, mandates, and recommendations issued by the government, as well as the public communications made during the early parts of the pandemic.

And it's clear that did not do a good job. When listening to his own words, it's certainly evident why his time in the limelight was so disastrously harmful.

The Wall Street Journal covered the panel and a portion of what Collins said.

Collins told the audience that public-health officials had placed "infinite value" on policies they thought would save lives and "zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people's lives." The Covid vaccine wasn't yet available, and officials felt a moral imperative to slow the alarming number of deaths.

"We weren't really thinking about what that would mean to Wilk (another panelist from the Midwest) and his family in Minnesota, 1,000 miles away from where the virus was hitting so hard," Collins said.

There's a lot to unpack in just these few sentences. Collins clearly admitted that a sense of self importance, hubris, personal fear, and an obsessive focus on a few specific locations obscured how vastly different the situation and their responses would play across a massive, continent-sized country. That's bad enough. But the first quote is much, much worse.

Collins also acknowledged that the public health profession, the profession he was effectively leading during the most important crisis of its modern existence, paid quite literally "zero" attention to what the ensuing trade-offs would be from the immense and unconstitutional restrictions imposed on the public.

That's correct, unprecedented, awe-inspiring restrictions on the freedom of movement, on the freedom of business owners to operate, the freedoms of children to attend school, of people to go about their days without the farcical theater of masking, attend events at full capacity - the freedoms we all take for granted that were removed for months, if not years on end, were enacted with "zero" consideration for the ancillary consequences and harms.

It'd be unbelievable, if it wasn't such a perfect example of the ineptitude, incompetence, stupidity, and desire for control at the core of "public" health.

Those in charge apparently could not have cared less about the impact their mandates would have on the public. Their prime concern was implementing what they believed would be effective, despite a clear...