Stanford medical professor Jay Bhattacharya faces his first confirmation hearing to lead the National Institutes of Health next week, but his predecessor – who once dismissed Bhattacharya as a “fringe epidemiologist” for opposing COVID-19 lockdowns – is still a lightning rod for controversy and could even find himself in legal trouble.
Lawyers for Francis Collins, the longest-serving director in NIH history, protested the “material misrepresentations” about COVID mitigations and himself in the final report of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, which said the feds lacked evidence for “broadly requiring masking,” before it shuttered last year.
Yet Collins himself made material representations to the subcommittee in a Dec. 3 Arnold & Porter law firm letter, according to Paul Thacker, a former Senate investigator of drug industry bribery, who published the letter Thursday.