Emails reveal government pushing reporters to smear scientists who criticize government COVID actions

“In public, Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins urge Americans to “follow the science.” In private, the two sainted public-health officials schemed to quash dissenting views from top scientists. That’s the troubling but fair conclusion from emails obtained recently via the Freedom of Information Act by the American Institute for Economic Research.”

The emails show that in October 2020, Dr. Collins and Dr. Fauci sought to compel media outlets to suppress, censor and ignore “the Great Barrington Declaration,” a statement by Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff, Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta and Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya against blanket pandemic lockdowns. Kulldorff, Gupta and Bhattacharya favored a policy of protecting high-risk populations such as the elderly but not otherwise restricting most individuals.

According to the Wall Street Journal, “That didn’t please the lockdown consensus enforced by public-health officials. . . .” Collins and Fauci “used their authority to stigmatize dissenters and crush debate.” Collins and Fauci went into action smearing the Declaration and its signatories as fringe elements. Dr. Bhattacharya—one of the targets of the smears—said in a recent interview that Collins “basically said that we wanted the virus to spread – rip through the population. And Dr. Fauci said the same thing . . .”

Bhattacharya points out that “Dr. Collins sits on top of over $40 billion worth of money that go to other scientists to fund research. When he says he wants a devastating takedown, well, he has the resources to go find people to do that. And you can see from the strategy that they use, they essentially went to friendly press, spread their propaganda and lies about the Great Barrington Declaration in order to not engage with the ideas in it.” “[M]illions of people are starving as a consequence of lockdown. They didn’t want to address those harms. And so instead they engaged a propaganda campaign.”