As federal officials considered how the government should respond to an emerging pandemic in 2020, Francis Collins recalled last year, "we weren't really considering the consequences" of extreme measures such as business shutdowns, school closures, and stay-at-home orders. It was a startling admission from Collins, who played a major role in those conversations as director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Collins, whose July 2023 comments recently attracted online attention, confessed that "public health people" made a "really unfortunate" mistake by ignoring the devastating side effects of the interventions they believed were necessary to curtail COVID-19 transmission. That mistake carries important lessons not just for future responses to communicable diseases but also for a wide range of public policies that inflict harm in the name of saving lives.
