New documents show how Fauci discredited scientists opposed to lockdowns

Dr. Anthony Fauci worked closely with the head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) behind closed doors towards a “quick and devastating” takedown of health experts opposed to lockdowns, raising concerns about forces within the government quashing dissenting opinions and the freedom of speech.

A previously unseen email from October 2020 between Fauci and Dr. Francis Collins, who was NIH director until Dec. 19, shows them discussing how to discredit the authors of The Great Barrington Declaration, which opposed sweeping lockdowns in favor of protecting the most vulnerable groups.

“This proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists … seems to be getting a lot of attention,” Collins told Fauci in the email. “There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises. I don’t see anything like that online yet—is it underway?”

Using “fringe” to describe the medical and epidemiological experts who signed the Declaration, like Harvard University epidemiologist Dr. Martin Kulldorff, University of Oxford epidemiologist Dr. Sunetra Gupta, Stanford Medical School epidemiologist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and Nobel Prize laureate Dr. Michael Levitt, seems inappropriately negative.

Fauci responded in agreement with a link to an op-ed from the tech website Wired, which he claimed “debunked” the Declaration but which offered no scientific rebuttal. Fauci’s chief of staff at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases provided more op-eds he could cite, but the arguments tended to be political rather than scientific.

Within a day of the emails, Google began to censor search results for “Great Barrington Declaration.”

This is not the only time Fauci has used tech companies to censor and shape the discussion around COVID. Government officials moved to censor theories that the coronavirus may have leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China, even though internal discussions agreed that was likely the case.

Emails also reveal a February 2020 exchange between Fauci and Tedros Adhanom Ghebreysus, Director-General of the World Health Organization, that led to the conservative website ZeroHedge being banned from Twitter for posting an article about the lab leak theory.