Newly-released emails show that Dr. Anthony Fauci colluded with Francis Collins, the head of the National Institute of Health (NIH), to discredit experts who were trying to end lockdowns.

The Daily Mail reported that the emails show Fauci and Francis Collins trying to coordinate a “devastating takedown” of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD). This declaration, which was sponsored by the libertarian think tank AIER, basically abandons lockdowns in favor of a herd immunity strategy that allows life to return to normal.

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Collins emailed Fauci on October 8 of 2020 to describe the GBD as being the work of “three fringe epidemiologists” that “seems to be getting a lot of attention.” The NIH head went on to say that “there needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises. I don’t see anything like that online yet – is it underway?”

Fauci replied hours later with a Wired op-ed that refutes the notion of herd immunity putting an end to the COVID-19 pandemic. Collins then sent back another op-ed published by The Nation that blasted GBD.

Days after that, Collins sent an email to Fauci that included a Washington Post op-ed he’s quoted in headlined “Proposal to hasten herd immunity to the coronavirus grabs White House attention but appalls top scientists.” Collins, who was working under Donald Trump at the time, told Fauci that “my quotes are accurate but will not be appreciated in the [White House].”

“They are too busy with other things to worry about this. What you said was entirely correct,” Fauci emailed in response.

The GBD was written by Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University, Sunetra Gupta of the University of Oxford and Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University. It calls for people who have a significantly lower risk of dying from COVID-19 to be allowed “to resume living their normal lives.” Bhattacharya explained that the main part of it is to increase protection of the vulnerable older population, who are more than a thousand times more likely to die of COVID-19 than the young.

“So now I know what it feels like to be the subject of a propaganda attack by my own government. Discussion and engagement would have been a better path,” Bhattacharya tweeted in response to the release of these emails.

This comes as Joe Biden is expected to announced new COVID-19 measures Tuesday in response to the spread of the new omicron variant.

This piece was written by James Samson on December 20, 2021. It originally appeared in RedVoiceMedia.com and is used by permission.

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