NIH Director: We Need an Investigation Into the Wuhan Lab-Leak Theory
As Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, recounted the moment, his eyes welled with tears.
A few months before, he and his colleague Anthony Fauci had confided in each other their hopes for a COVID-19 vaccine. The FDA had set the threshold for approval at 50 percent efficacy, roughly what the flu vaccine achieves each year. They would have been quite happy to hit 70 percent.
Then, on December 9, 2020, Collins received a phone call reporting the first results of the Pfizer vaccine trials. “It was breathtaking,” he told me in a recent interview. “It was just so far beyond what Tony and I had dreamed the answer might be.” The efficacy for the Pfizer vaccine was 95 percent.
“I will admit, I cried,” he said. “A lot of prayer had gone into that.” A week later, Collins received the early results from Moderna, whose vaccine roughly matched the efficacy rate of Pfizer’s. It was a medical miracle.
[Peter Wehner: NIH director: ‘We’re on an exponential curve’]
Collins called the development of the vaccines “one of the most dramatic examples of scientific advancement, especially in the face of a worldwide crisis, that we have had the chance to witness.”
“I’ve been part of other scientific advances that were highly significant, like the Human Genome Project,” he added, “but nobody was going to live or die if we ended up being a couple years late. We weren’t, happily—we were a couple years early. But this one was so different.”
I , a longtime friend, in . At the time, he was focused on delivering a warning, which proved remarkably prescient, about the need to control the coronavirus. This time, though, I wanted to ask him about the origins of SARS-CoV-2, in light of speculation that it emerged from
