Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a physician, epidemiologist, and economist, faces a “glide path” to confirmation as director of the National Institutes of Health. On the other hand, former NIH Director Francis Collins has been contending that the Bhattacharya nomination represents an attack on science itself.

On March 7, Collins appeared at a “Stand up for Science” rally, where he sang “For All the Good People,” accompanying himself on guitar. The former NIH boss contended that an “appropriate mantra” for the federal agency would be “First, do no harm.” That citation of the Hippocratic Oath recalls Collins’s alliance with Dr. Anthony Fauci who headed the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for nearly 40 years.

Dr. Bhattacharya contended that Dr. Fauci’s lockdowns did indeed do harm, especially to schoolchildren. The Stanford professor was aware of studies contending that masks, quarantines, and lockdowns are of limited effectiveness; that the fatality risk for older people was much higher than for young children; and that the COVID virus was less menacing than portrayed by the media.

Dr. Bhattacharya made that case in the Great Barrington Declaration, co-authored by Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta, and joined by hundreds of medical scientists, most if not all as qualified as Fauci and Collins. Instead of debating these medical scientists, Collins tasked Fauci with a “quick and devastating published take down” of the “fringe epidemiologists.” Suppression of debate is not part of the scientific method, and Dr. Fauci took it to another level.

“Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science,” the NIAID boss claimed in 2021. “All of the things I have spoken about, consistently, from the very beginning, have been fundamentally based on science. Sometimes those things were inconvenient truths for people.” This is from a non-practicing physician whose bio showed no advanced degrees in molecular biology or biochemistry.

Dr. Fauci told people not to bother wearing a mask, later changed to one mask and then two masks. Last year, Dr. Fauci conceded that the six-foot distancing rule he promoted was “arbitrary,” and “sort of just appeared.” Francis Collins has yet to explain how Dr. Fauci’s statements and actions square with science. As Collins should know, bureaucracy runs on the Peter Principle, promoting people to their highest level of incompetence. Here Dr. Fauci has a problem.

Nobel laureate Kary Mullis, inventor of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique, contended that Dr. Fauci didn’t understand electronic microscopy, didn’t understand medicine, and “should not be in a position like he’s in.” That makes a case that Dr. Fauci, who never invented anything, should not have had the NIAID job in the first place.

Defending bureaucracy is not the same as defending science. Dr. Bhattacharya should ignore Francis Collins and get busy with reforms. Never again must the same people control public health policy and funding for medical research. The NIAID director should be a fully qualified medical scientist and limited to a single four-year term. All NIH grants should be posted online in real-time and downloadable form. That leaves a more pressing matter for Dr. Bhattacharya, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and possibly Pam Bondi at the Department of Justice.

On Jan. 20, Joe Biden pardoned Dr. Fauci but didn’t explain what crime he had committed. More than 50 years in government, with no accountability to the people, offers many possibilities. Consider also the NIH officials Biden failed to pardon.

Acting NIH director Lawrence Tabak suddenly resigned two days before RFK Jr. was confirmed. Tabak admitted that the NIH funded dangerous gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in Communist China, which Fauci had previously denied. In 2022, Tabak told Congress that, at the request of Chinese scientists, the NIH “eliminated from public view” data on the early genomic sequences of COVID-19.

Consider also James LeDuc, former director of the Galveston National Laboratory (GNL), who maintained that the COVID virus arose naturally in the wild and “the Chinese just happened to be in the place where this was discovered.” LeDuc signed agreements with three Chinese labs, including the WIV, giving China the power to destroy “secret files, materials, and equipment, without any backups.”

Those agreements could explain why LeDuc suddenly retired in 2021. So did the CDC’s Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the government’s first spokesperson on the pandemic and a veteran of the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS).

Dr. Messonnier’s press briefings in early 2020 echoed China’s talking point that the “novel virus” emerged in the “Wuhan market,” not the WIV or any laboratory. Dr. Messonnier told reporters she was not at liberty to discuss some matters about Wuhan but failed to reveal which government official was laying down the rules.

As he strives to reform the NIH, Dr. Bhattacharya should find out who that was. Given all they suffered during the pandemic, the people have a right to know.