Putting faith in science
IN MAY 2020, DR. FRANCIS COLLINS, THE LONGTIME HEAD OF THE NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH (NIH), WAS CALLED TO THE WHITE HOUSE TO MEET WITH JARED KUSHNER, THE THEN PRESIDENT’S SON-IN-LAW AND ADVISER, AND DR. DEBORAH BIRX, THE HEAD OF THE WHITE HOUSE CORONAVIRUS TASK FORCE. A few weeks earlier, Congress had given the NIH $1.5 billion to try to speed up the process of developing new diagnostic tests for COVID-19, and the White House, which was dubious about increasing the rate of testing, wanted to know more about what the NIH was doing.
Collins is the boss of Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, but during the pandemic he has mostly taken a back seat when it comes to media. It’s not that Collins isn’t a great communicator; he’s known for his ability to talk about science at any level. But he did not wish to become an object of White House attention. So when he met with Kushner, “I did my best to try to describe what we were doing in a way that it wouldn’t attract a lot of desire on their part to interfere,” says Collins. “It was really technical and really geeky.”
In June, Kushner visited the NIH to hear about the new plan, known as RADx (Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics), from other points of view. This time Collins’ engineering staff went into nerd-overdrive detail. “And that was the last we heard of White House interest in what we were doing for diagnostics,” says Collins. “To this day I have never done a briefing about RADx in the White House task force. And that was just fine.”
Collins believes in God and science, probably in that order, but over the past 12 months, science has been hogging his attention. (To get in time for prayer and Bible study, he says, he has been waking up before 4 a.m.) As the head of the U.S. government body responsible for funding biomedical research, he’s the guy who has to figure out where to put the considerable resources of the U.S. purse to most effectively keep Americans healthy. The NIH runs 27 agencies and funds tens of thousands of research projects in universities around the country. As far as health research is concerned, the buck starts with Collins.
Bureaucrats are hardly ever the heroes of stories. It is hard to extol the virtues of the person who, when faced with a looming
