At a recent conference held in Gettysburg, Penn., Collins told the room that "public health people" like himself made a "really unfortunate" mistake in failing, he claims, to properly assess the societal impact of business lockdowns, school closures, mask mandates and other harsh impositions.
It is not so much that Collins et al. wanted to hurt anyone, he now argues. No, it was just one big accidental oversight that everyone needs to just laugh off and move on from, letting bygones be bygones.
"We weren't really considering the consequences," Collins claimed at the event, which was sponsored by Braver Angels, an organization that aims to "bridge the political divide" in America by encouraging civil conversations between people with differing ideologies and political beliefs.
"If you're a public health person, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is, and that is something that will save a life," Collins continued. "[It] doesn't matter what else happens."
(Related: Be sure to check out our earlier coverage about why Collins resigned from the NIH: He was exposed for lying about his involvement in illegal gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses.)
Just an accidental oversight? Yeah, right
Collins would go on during his speech to vouch for his fellow public health authorities, many of whom became medical tyrants the moment then-President Donald Trump declared COVID to be a "pandemic."
"You attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life," Collins explained about how "public health people" like himself think.
"You attach a zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people's lives, ruins the economy and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never might quite recover from."
Looking at human life in this bizarre way is apparently how the nation found itself in a COVID mess with millions being told to stay home, get "vaccinated," and shut up until the government told them what to do next. Valuing the idea of a "statistical life" over an actual life is why tyrants like Collins decided to punish healthy people in the first place.
"The folly of attaching 'infinite value' to a life saved by government regulation should be obvious," writes Jacob Sullum for The New America. "Economists and regulators, after all, routinely and rightly seek to balance the costs of new rules against their expected benefits, a calculation that entails estimating the 'value of a statistical life.'"
"If that value were infinite, it would justify any policy that promises to save lives, regardless of the cost. A universal speed limit of 25 miles per hour (or, more ambitiously, a ban on automobiles) would reduce traffic deaths, for example, but at a cost that few of us would consider acceptable."
The problem with Collins' argument is that there was never a consensus among "public health people" to take the failed approach that he and others did. There were many skeptics and outspoken opponents of COVID tyranny within the public health realm that were called "science deniers" for opposing the lockdowns, school closures and mask and jab mandates that effectively destroyed the nation in just a few short years.
Epidemiologists Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University, Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford and Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University together issued the Great Barrington Declaration, which advised allowing "those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally." Collins mocked Kulldorff and others back in October 2020 by describing them as "fringe epidemiologists," but more recently referred to Kulldorff and the others as "very distinguished."
The latest news about the fallout from the COVID "pandemic" can be found at Plague.info.
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