Collins created conundrum for Christians
Now retired NIH leader had appalling record at helm
Dr. Francis Collins, a Christ follower, led the National Institutes of Health from August 2009 two December 2021. Photo via the National Institutes of Health
Two things can be right at the same time: You can love and respect a brother in Christ, but rightly rebuke him when needed.
That’s the story of Dr. Francis Collins, the former head of the National Institutes of Health, a Christian who led an elite institution.
With Collins, we have a public record that is controversial and anything but praiseworthy. It puts Christ followers in a difficult position. You want to be generous to a brother in Christ. You want to give him the benefit of the doubt. However, Collins’ record demands careful and honest assessment and discernment.
For Christianity Today editor-in-chief Russell Moore, New York Times columnist David French, and the late Rev. Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Church in New York City who died in May 2023, it is enough that Collins led the NIH.
However, Collin’s record as head of the NIH deserves scrutiny.
Nate Fischer wrote a column for American Reformer on Oct. 7, 2021 regarding Collins’ defense of research using fetal tissue from aborted babies. Meredith Wadman and Jocelyn Kaiser reported for Science magazine in December 2018:
At the same time, fetal tissue ‘will continue to be the mainstay,’ he (Collins, emphasis added) said, adding: ‘There is strong evidence that scientific benefits come from fetal tissue research, [which] can be done with [an] ethical framework.’
Is that “ethical framework” science based or connected to image-bearing life?
Fischer wrote that NIH fetal tissue stem cell research resumed after a 2019 moratorium:
. . . This August, documents were released revealing that under his watch the NIH had given at least $2.7 million to researchers who sought out aborted babies (with a high quota of minorities) to harvest their organs.
. . . Even when they downplayed legal prohibition, most emphasized strong personal opposition to abortion, typically including derivatives like embryonic stem cell research. Thus Collins’s actions on this issue reflect a direct betrayal on the one issue Christians in these elite circles can point to where they retain a distinctively Christian ethical position.
As Fischer wrote, Collins added compromise on sexuality to compromise on abortion:
. . . In a June 2021 letter, Collins wrote that the NIH joins in celebrating Pride Month and recognizing the struggles, stories, and victories of those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and others under the sexual and gender minority (SGM) umbrella. I applaud the courage and resilience it takes for individuals to live openly and authentically…’
It’s hard to see how a faithful Christian can personally write this. That evangelical influencers continued to praise Collins as he committed these actions suggests there are few compromises with the establishment they would not tolerate for the sake of worldly status.
Even if these issues are explained away with following orders from the administration in power, which is unlikely since it was the Trump administration, it’s an appalling lack of moral clarity and failure to apply biblical truth on the sanctity of life and creation of males and females. Did he verbalize objections or opposition?
However, the questions with Collins’ NIH leadership do not end there.
This was the official logo for Operation Warp Speed produced by the U.S. Department of Defense.
Covid happened, and Collins was one of the faces of the nation’s response. Collins had problems with transparency and honesty.
In early 2020, his first act was to squash debate of a lab leak by pushing the bogus zoonotic origin of covid 19. The U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Accountability’s Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released key findings in July 2023 on covid pandemic origins. The following are the bullet points that had Collins’ name attached to them:
Former NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci and Former NIH Director Dr. Francis Collins were directly involved in the drafting, publication, and public promotion of Proximal Origin — a paper written to suppress the COVID-19 lab-leak hypothesis.
Scientific integrity was abandoned by Dr. Fauci, Dr. Collins, and the co-authors of Proximal Origin in favor of political expediency. Suppressing a legitimate scientific theory to advance the preferred narrative of senior government officials is egregious and must be fully investigated.
There is still more work to be done to hold public health officials accountable for their actions during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Select Subcommittee emphasizes its outstanding request for transcribed interviews and documents from Dr. Fauci and Dr. Collins.
Did that happen because they knew the NIH funded dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China–the likely driver for hatching the disease?
Additionally, when some scientists created the Great Barrington Declaration in fall 2020, a statement on focused protection of senior citizens and the most vulnerable, Collins destroyed their reputations as “fringe scientists.” One of those “fringe scientists,” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, ironically could be the next NIH director in the Trump administration.
While Operation Warp Speed, the rollout of covid therapeutics in late 2020, continues to be praised for their effectiveness, why is no one asking questions driven by the life insurance industry? You would expect deaths to go back to the historical baseline, but they haven’t.
Doug Bailey wrote the following for Insurance NewsNet on May 7:
The numbers for excess mortality luckily, in 2022, declined,” said Josh Stirling, founder and president of the Collaboration. “But you're still (at, sic) rates like 10%, 12%, 11%, 14% higher than normal. These are big numbers.”
A data analyst known as Ethical Skeptic has compiled many long analyses–here, here, and here–attributing the excess death data to the rollout of the covid jabs.
Also, Naomi Wolf and her Daily Clout investigators produced the research for the book Pfizer Papers: Pfizer’s Crimes Against Humanity. It includes the revelation that Pfizer failed to disclose the deaths of two women during their vaccine clinical trials. If that had occurred, would the FDA have rejected the emergency use authorization?
There are many unanswered questions following the rollout of Pfizer and Moderna covid therapeutics. We should get answers to those questions before we throw praise at Collins and others over Operation Warp Speed.
The man who was part of the human genome project did some excellent things as a scientist and at NIH, but these issues focus on truth and truth-telling.
Temper the praise of Collins because his NIH record reveals his actions spoke much louder than his words.
