Collins Emails Spotlight Bureaucracy's Attempted Subjugation of Science and Scientists

the Declaration's recommendations, but either because of, or in spite of, US policymakers following the recommendations of Collins, Fauci, and others.

The question isn't which set of recommendations would have produced better outcomes. It's whether science should be reduced to the status of handmaid to bureaucratic diktat, with scientists whose findings don't support that diktat marginalized through the influence of those same bureaucrats.

How "fringe" are the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration?

Sunetra Gupta is a professor of theoretical epidemiology at the University of Oxford. She earned a bachelor's degree in biology from Princeton and a PhD from Imperial College London (her doctoral thesis title: "Heterogeneity and the transmission dynamics of infectious diseases").

Jayanta "Jay" Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine at Stanford University, where he's earned four degrees, including an MD.

Martin Kulldorff is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, with a bachelor of science from Sweden's Umea University in mathematical statistics and a PhD from Cornell in operations research. He sits on scientific advisory committees for the US Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control.

Agree with their recommendations or not, neither their credentials nor their policy positions qualify as "fringe" by any reasonable definition. Their only real offense was disagreeing, on what they considered relevant scientific grounds, with policies advocated by Francis Collins.

"Francis Collins has spoken" was neither good science nor a good up-or-down test for determining the quality of public policy recommendations. Freedom of scientific inquiry and unconstrained public discussion of the alternatives are too important to sacrifice on the altar of technocracy.