“Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

A telling observation attributed to Lord Acton, it appeared in the first episode of Star Trek, which I’m old enough to have watched during its first TV broadcast on September 8, 1966. It would seem the more power and the faster it’s given to small minds, the greater and more rapid the corruption, as Mary Katherine Ham observes at Outkick.com:

Speaking in 2023 at a gathering of Braver Angels, a non-profit designed to lessen American political polarization by bringing people of differing viewpoints together, [Dr. Francis] Collins admitted that considering other viewpoints outside a certain zip code wasn’t part of his job description. Here’s how he described his and other public health officials’ response to the Covid 19 pandemic.

“As a guy living inside the Beltway feeling a sense of crisis trying to decide what to do in some Situation Room in the White House with people who had data that was incomplete, we weren’t really thinking about what that would mean to [a] family in Minnesota, a thousand miles away from where the virus was hitting so hard. We weren’t really considering the consequences in communities that were not New York City or some other big city.”

Image: NIAID. Wikimedia Commons.org. CCA2.0 Generic.

This kind of hubristic, willful blindness explains a great deal about Covid mandates and lockdowns.  Perhaps Collins and his fellow “scientists” shouldn’t have been upending lives and the economy based on “incomplete data?”  I seem to recall something about a “scientific method.”

“If you’re a public health person and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is and that is something that will save a life. It doesn’t matter what else happens.” 

It obviously didn’t, not to Collins, Fauci and the rest.  Hamm continues:

Again, a frank admission of a bad way of thinking. Many of us suspected this was the case, and criticized public health officials like Collins for exactly this myopia in 2020. Later in the discussion, Collins says he’s learned “how critical it is for those kinds of policy decisions to reflect the realities of each community,” eschewing “blanket recommendations” for a vast and diverse nation in the future. One can hope, but in 2020, those criticisms were met with disdain and censorship, particularly for the public-health dissidents of the Great Barrington Declaration, whom Collins himself tried to discredit in concert with Anthony Fauci, according to his emails and public statements. He now calls its authors “very distinguished in their credentials,” but at the time called them a “fringe component of epidemiology” and their ideas “dangerous” to The Washington Post as he orchestrated a “quick and devastating published take down.”

Ethical scientists don’t act on incomplete data. They respect contrary opinions. Of course, that requires scientists that follow the scientific method, which examines contrary evidence and relies on rigorous, reproducible, standards of proof.  They certainly don’t enlist the media to engage in personal attacks on others.

“So you attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life,” Collins told this gathering. “You attach a zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recovered.”

“This is a public health mindset,” Collins concluded, then acknowledging it was a mistake that lost trust. But what has been done to fix it? 

Doing away with every Covid mandate? A weary and angry public dealt with those. Restoring trust in “the science?” Essentially nothing, and late, arrogant pseudo-apologies aren’t helping.

Collins is obviously a charter member of the Self-Imagined Elite (SIE), Public Health Division. Few of the SIE are more prone to corruption than medical doctor bureaucrats given the power to ruin a nation. Their self-imagined morality is limitless. Collins was among that cadre that knew no decency or concern for the lives of others. It has often been said one death is a tragedy, but a million are statistics. One might be forgiven for thinking Collins cared for neither. Dealing with pandemics requires flexible minds able to keep in perspective medicine, and those upon who it is inflicted.

In this, Collins is exactly like other Beltway politicians and bureaucrats. As much as they claim to care for individual lives, they truly see them as abstractions, which individuals discover whenever they ask the SIE to acknowledge or uphold their rights or lives. Collins forgot the essence of the Hippocratic Oath, which requires practitioners to do no harm.

Collins, Fauci and their bureaucratic colleagues put personal power above lives and the nation. It’s going to take decades, if it’s at all possible, to restore public trust. Collins might hasten that process by shutting up and going away.

Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.