In public, Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins urge Americans to “follow the science.” In private, the two sainted public-health officials schemed to quash dissenting views from top scientists. That’s the troubling but fair conclusion from emails obtained recently via the Freedom of Information Act by the American Institute for Economic Research.

The tale unfolded in October 2020 after the launch of the Great Barrington Declaration, a statement by Harvard’s Martin Kulldorff, Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta and Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya against blanket pandemic lockdowns. They favored a policy of what they called “focused protection” of high-risk populations such as the elderly or those with medical conditions. Thousands of scientists signed the declarationif they were able to learn about it. We tried to give it some elevation on these pages.

That didn’t please the lockdown consensus enforced by public-health officials and the press. Dr. Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health until Sunday, sent an email on Oct. 8, 2020, to Dr. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

“This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists . . . seems to be getting a lot of attention and even a co-signature from Nobel Prize winner Mike Leavitt at Stanford. There needs to be a quick and devastating published take down of its premises,” Dr. Collins wrote. “Is it underway?”

These researchers weren’t fringe and neither was their opposition to quarantining society. But in the panic over the virus, these two voices of science used their authority to stigmatize dissenters and crush debate. A week after his email, Dr. Collins spoke to the Washington Post about the Great Barrington Declaration. “This is a fringe component of epidemiology,” he said. “This is not mainstream science. It’s dangerous.” His message spread and the alternative strategy was dismissed in most precincts…read more.

This is an English translation of a letter by Guus Berkhout of CLINTEL that was published in De Telegraaf, the largest newspaper in The Netherlands earlier this week.

In recent years we have seen the strangest things happening to our universities. Professors must be extremely careful about what they teach. If they present scientific results that do not fit the ideology of activist movements, their lives are made difficult and they even run the risk of being excommunicated. Joining the consensus is by far the safest. The Boards of Governors do not protect their professors; on the contrary, they are solidly behind the activists.

The University of Amsterdam believes that every student should become ‘woke’. It is no longer about developing talents, but about making white, heterosexual, serious students feel guilty. After all, their ancestors have blood on their hands and they are the new generation of oppressors. Radboud University in Nijmegen has bowed to climate activism and has just decided that all students must be taught the sustainability narrative. The climate crisis is central to this, whether that is scientifically correct or not, that does not matter in Nijmegen.

My own university, TU Delft, has recently adopted the fashionable label ‘climate university’. This university also indoctrinates its students by telling them that there is a man-made climate crisis that must be solved with solar panels, windmills and biomass plants. Criticism is not tolerated. But I say to the Board of Governors, surely the university must be a sanctuary for the unbiased exchange of knowledge? How free is the discussion at TU Delft if everyone is pushed into an ideological straightjacket? Do you still want to send your child to such a university?…read more.

When the pandemic hit, America needed someone to turn to for advice. The media and public naturally looked to Dr. Anthony Fauci—the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, an esteemed laboratory immunologist and one of President Donald Trump’s chosen COVID advisers. Unfortunately, Dr. Fauci got major epidemiology and public health questions wrong. Reality and scientific studies have now caught up with him.

Here are the key issues:

Natural immunity. By pushing vaccine mandates, Dr. Fauci ignores naturally acquired immunity among the COVID-recovered, of which there are more than 45 million in the United States. Mounting evidence indicates that natural immunity is stronger and longer lasting than vaccine-induced immunity. [Eds.: Long-term trends are still unclear. A recent study reached the opposite conclusion, but was criticized by an author of this op-ed.] In a study from Israel, the vaccinated were 27 times more likely to get symptomatic COVID than the unvaccinated who had recovered from a prior infection.

We have known about natural immunity from disease at least since the Athenian Plague in 430 BC. Pilots, truckers and longshoremen know about it, and nurses know it better than anyone. Under Fauci’s mandates, hospitals are firing heroic nurses who recovered from COVID they contracted while caring for patients. With their superior immunity, they can safely care for the oldest and frailest patients with even lower transmission risk than the vaccinated…read more.