‘Politicized’ views on COVID are ‘ruinous’: NIH Chief Dr Francis Collins

According to Dr. Francis Collins, the outgoing director of the National Institutes of Health, the “hyper-polarized, politicised view” of the COVID pandemic in the United States is “ruinous,” and “history will judge harshly” those who have stood in the way of an effective response. 

Despite the fact that over 60% of Americans are completely vaccinated and the government provides booster injections, COVID cases are rapidly increasing in the United States, with the arrival of the Omicron strain, which is expected to overwhelm health systems and result in hundreds of millions of additional cases.

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Asked about people who say, “What happened to vaccination being the solution to getting back to normal life?” Collins told Fox News, “Vaccinations are going to be very much part of our solution here, and everybody should take advantage of them, but they’re not perfect. This is where I get upset because people point to anecdotes of somebody who got sick even though they had been vaccinated and say: ‘There, you see, it doesn’t work.’ That’s way too simplistic.”

He also stated that if a person contracts COVID after receiving a vaccination, the disease is likely to be “pretty mild.”

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“You’ll have the sniffles maybe or sick for a day or two with a fever but you won’t be in the ICU. The vaccinations are really good at protecting against severe disease. We should all take advantage of them.”

Collins said that taking Omicron seriously was his bottom line message when asked.

“Yes, we’ve got to remember, this is the enemy. It’s not the other people in the other political party. It’s not the people on Facebook who are posting all sorts of crazy conspiracies. This is the enemy; we in this country have somehow gotten all fractured into a hyper-polarized, politicized view that never should have been mixed with public health. It’s been ruinous and history will judge harshly those people who have continued to defocus the effort and focus on conspiracies and things that are demonstrably false.”

He predicted that the United States will be in “a world of trouble” in the coming months, but added that “this is not one of those situations where we’re just helplessly facing the oncoming virus.”

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“We have things we can do, and especially those are vaccines and boosters and being careful about masking again. And I know people are sick of hearing this, but the virus is not sick of us, it’s thrown us a new curveball and we got to be ready to hit it.”

He called it “frustrating” that despite all of America’s technical achievements, nearly 50 million people are still unvaccinated. 

Collins inquired as to how this occurred, as well as what part social media, misinformation, and political disputes had. 

Collins cited early South African data indicating fewer hospitalizations and serious cases with Omicron compared to earlier COVID waves when asked if he could declare unequivocally that it is less severe than past variants. 

However, he cautioned that, due to demographic differences, these findings may not apply to other countries, including the United States. He pointed out that South Africa’s average age was lower than that of the United States, and that many people in the country had the Delta variation, which meant they were immune to Omicron.

“They don’t have boosters there, so we have that on our side. I just think we ought to be careful not to extrapolate from what we’ve seen, but I’m hopeful that that is an indication that while incredibly contagious, this virus is maybe a bit less likely to make people really sick and, obviously, that’s something we’ve got to hope for or our health systems are going to be overwhelmed,” Collins added.