Francis Collins is named in two episodes of The Bob Zadek Show, both concerning the COVID-19 pandemic. He is not the subject of either episode and does not appear as a guest. In the excerpts, he is identified by guests as the director of the National Institutes of Health at the time of the events discussed, and he figures in their accounts of how public health officials responded to dissenting scientists and to questions about the origins of the virus. The excerpts contain no biographical treatment of Collins, no discussion of his scientific career apart from the NIH post, and no statement from Collins himself.
The Great Barrington Declaration
In the April 18, 2022 episode, the guest was Dr. Jeffrey Singer, who described the origins of the Great Barrington Declaration. Singer said the statement was authored by Jay Bhattacharya, then a professor at Stanford Medical School; Martin Kulldorff, described as a professor at the time at Harvard Medical School and a professor of epidemiology; and Sunetra Gupta, a professor of epidemiology at Oxford University’s Center for Evidence-Based Medicine. According to Singer, the three met in Great Barrington, Massachusetts and wrote a statement signed by thousands of medical scientists across the world, including a recent Nobel Prize winner in chemistry. The statement argued that protection should be focused on those most at risk—people with certain immunodeficiencies and elderly people in nursing homes—while the least vulnerable should be allowed to resume as normal a life as possible, and it framed public health as involving mental health and socioeconomic determinants of health as well as virus control. Singer dated the statement to October 2020 and said its authors maintained that the virus could not be stopped and that the least vulnerable would eventually contract it and contribute to population immunity Free Speech & the Scientific Method (2022).
Singer then turned to the response the declaration received. He said the authors were attacked viciously, mainly not in the scientific literature but in mainstream publications such as The Nation, Atlantic Monthly and Wired, and that they were not attacked on the science. He said that Freedom of Information Act requests had revealed that when the document was released, Collins, whom he identified as the director of NIH at that time, emailed a couple of other members of the task force advising the presidency on COVID and said something had to be done—that they had to do a rapid takedown of these fringe scientists who were questioning their policy—and asked what was being done. Singer said a response came back stating that people were already about to write things, which he said were written in the lay press. Singer noted that the scientists in question were epidemiologists at distinguished institutions, and added that neither Dr. Fauci nor Dr. Collins was an epidemiologist Free Speech & the Scientific Method (2022).
Singer also relayed an account from Bhattacharya, whom he said he had heard speak the previous week. According to Singer, Bhattacharya said that when the Great Barrington Declaration was written it was not devised de novo but restated what had been the consensus among epidemiologists up until COVID-19 hit, through 2019, and that the idea of lockdowns—instituted initially in China and then adopted as a model elsewhere—had previously been considered a crazy idea. Singer said Bhattacharya described the declaration as a restatement of what epidemiologists had been taught to believe up until January 2020 Free Speech & the Scientific Method (2022).
The Rand Paul episode
Collins appears again in the November 20, 2023 episode featuring Senator Rand Paul. The episode’s framing concerned what Paul’s book describes as a coverup, and Paul discussed emails exchanged among Anthony Fauci, leading virologists and grant-makers in the early days of the pandemic. Paul named Jeremy Farrar in England as a key figure, describing him as the head of an organization and essentially the Anthony Fauci of England, and recounted Farrar’s account of buying a burner phone and of his wife advising him to speak to his family as if they might be his last words. Paul said four or five other virologists on a call had looked at the genetic sequence and found it suspicious, noting a special cleavage site that allows entry into human cells and does not exist in that family of coronaviruses in nature. He said that within about four or five days—from February 1st to February 4th—the same people were publicly calling anyone who believed the lab-origin theory a nut, a kook or a conspiracy theorist, signing letters to Lancet, and placing an article in Nature that Paul said was edited by Fauci. Paul said Fauci quoted a paper at the White House lectern to prove the virus could only come from animals, but that Fauci had written the paper, and that the person who wrote the letter saying there was nothing to see was the head of a group called EcoHealth Alliance, which Paul said funded the research in China Senator Rand Paul Exposes the Great COVID Coverup (2023).
Bob Zadek offered a summary of this material, asking whether the original sin was the first time someone in the group said he might have contributed to the outbreak, and whether the fear was that the public would discover that the government had funded in part the research that set it in motion—with no suggestion it was done as an attack—and that Fauci and others were determined to sever any possible connection between themselves and the occurrence. Paul agreed, saying it was initially fear of culpability, fear and guilt that they funded something that killed millions of people, though they did not yet know it would. Paul added that they were also worried about what he called the business of science—the millions and billions of dollars changing hands funding this type of research—and about damaging relations with China. In that context Paul said Collins, the head of the NIH, sent an email to Fauci saying that this would not be good for science, and Paul said they implied they were fully supportive of a sort of Platonic lie or noble lie, that the common people could not be told the truth about where this came from because it would damage their support for gain of function research Senator Rand Paul Exposes the Great COVID Coverup (2023).
Natural immunity
Later in the same episode, Zadek asked Paul about his book’s discussion of how aggressively Fauci and others suppressed discussion of the benefit of natural immunity. Paul said that at one point Fauci told Collins in an email that they needed to do a takedown of the scientists talking about natural immunity, naming the epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff and Jay Bhattacharya, who issued the Great Barrington Declaration. Paul said they did not want to mention natural immunity because they did not want to deter anybody from being vaccinated. He argued that when you are dishonest with people they tend to doubt everything you tell them, and that he was accused of spreading vaccine hesitancy even though he said he was telling people who are at risk that they should get vaccinated while not telling a six-month-old they need to be vaccinated. Paul said statistics showed that zero healthy children died from the disease, that about 140 children in the United States died with COVID while dying from other diseases, and that after being badgered the CDC released a study of a million people in California and New York finding that those who had not been vaccinated but had gotten the disease had protection twice as good as being vaccinated. He said the data for the whole country had still not been released, and that for people who have been both vaccinated and infected, the chance of going to the hospital or dying may approach zero if they do not have a significant health problem. Paul said the vaccine had mutated such that it is no longer as deadly as it was in 2020, that the risks of the vaccine for young people outweigh the benefits, and that medicine used to treat people individually rather than with a one-size-fits-all approach that seems to benefit billion-dollar pharmaceutical companies Senator Rand Paul Exposes the Great COVID Coverup (2023).
Across episodes
The two episodes treat the same question—how public health officials responded to scientists who dissented from official COVID-19 policy—and both name Collins in that connection. In the earlier episode, Singer’s account centers on the Great Barrington Declaration and the effort to discredit its authors; in the later episode, Paul’s account centers on the origins of the virus, gain of function research and natural immunity, and places Collins’s email to Fauci in that broader narrative. The later treatment is wider in scope and more accusatory in tone, but the excerpts show no direct exchange between the two guests and no development in the underlying claims about Collins himself.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state Collins’s field of training, the dates of his tenure at NIH, or any of his scientific work. They contain no response from Collins or from anyone defending him, and no document beyond the emails the guests describe. Nothing in the excerpts establishes the content of the emails as quoted, and the article records only what the guests assert about them.