Former National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director and Biden administration science adviser Francis Collins is back in the limelight with a new book, The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust. Presumably an effort to repair Collins’ tattered reputation post-Covid, the book is written in a winsome style, and those who admire Collins will likely love it.
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But don’t expect many mea culpas from Collins about his time at NIH. He offers no apology for funding the harvesting of body parts from late-term aborted babies for medical research. Or for financing research that used gender-destructive puberty blockers on young people. Likewise, he fails to acknowledge his past promotion of the failed Darwinian idea that our genome is swamped with “junk DNA.”
Nor does Collins take real ownership of his most significant missteps during Covid. During the rollout of the Covid vaccines, Collins falsely assured the public that mRNA from the vaccines wouldn’t stay in the body “beyond probably a few hours.” A subsequent study showed that the mRNA could persist in a person’s lymph system some two months after vaccination. Collins’ promotion of misinformation has been memory-holed. So has his emphatic promise in April 2021 that “There’s not going to be any mandating of vaccines from the U.S. government, I can assure you.” A few months later, Collins was praising the imposition of mandates as a “forceful, muscular approach” and demonizing those who didn’t want to take the vaccines as killers on the wrong side of history.
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The problem is he largely conflates science with his own political agenda. By the end of the book, it becomes clear that for him “science” has become a convenient club to bludgeon people who disagree with him. If you disagree with him on climate change, or Covid policy, or Darwinian evolution, or think the 2020 presidential election was unfair, you are part of the anti-science bogeyman.
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According to Collins, you don’t have to consider the arguments being made if you have “pre-bunked” the motives of the people making them. Tellingly, Collins doesn’t suggest questioning the motives of those he agrees with on global warming. His “pre-bunking” is entirely one-sided. His goal is to shut down critical inquiry, not cultivate it.
