Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a physician, epidemiologist, and economist, faces a “glide path” to confirmation as director of the National Institutes of Health. On the other hand, former NIH Director Francis Collins has been contending that the Bhattacharya nomination represents an attack on science itself.

On March 7, Collins appeared at a “Stand up for Science” rally, where he sang “For All the Good People,” accompanying himself on guitar. The former NIH boss contended that an “appropriate mantra” for the federal agency would be “First, do no harm.” That citation of the Hippocratic Oath recalls Collins’s alliance with Dr. Anthony Fauci who headed the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for nearly 40 years.

Dr. Bhattacharya contended that Dr. Fauci’s lockdowns did indeed do harm, especially to schoolchildren. The Stanford professor was aware of studies contending that masks, quarantines, and lockdowns are of limited effectiveness; that the fatality risk for older people was much higher than for young children; and that the COVID virus was less menacing than portrayed by the media.

Dr. Bhattacharya made that case in the Great Barrington Declaration, co-authored by Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta, and joined by hundreds of medical scientists, most if not all as qualified as Fauci and Collins. Instead of debating these medical scientists, Collins tasked Fauci with a “quick and devastating published take down” of the “fringe epidemiologists.” Suppression of debate is not part of the scientific method, and Dr. Fauci took it to another level.