Former National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins said job loss should be threatened to pressure citizens into getting COVID shots, and blamed former President Donald Trump for deaths early in the COVID pandemic, according to a leaked audio recording obtained by the Daily Wire.
Collins, appointed Feb. 17 to be President Joe Biden's new science adviser, also suggested he knew about controversial research that relied on organs harvested from aborted infants, the Daily Wire reported.
The video recording was from a private event — hosted by Christianity Today theologian Russell Moore on behalf of the Institute of Politics, an organization founded by senior Obama adviser David Axelrod — at the University of Chicago on Oct. 26.
In the recording, Collins seemed to contradict previous comments that he plays a nonpartisan role in the federal government, and that NIH policy recommendations were based solely on scientific data. He even told NPR that he and Dr. Anthony Fauci were "not political figures."
Collins responded to a question regarding the wisdom of federal vaccine mandates by pointing to Jacobson v. Massachusetts, a 1905 Supreme Court case that dealt with the smallpox virus.
The then-director told the students that because of Jacobson, "There's no question in my mind that the mandates are legal.
"The U.S. government does have the authority to mandate vaccinations if there is an outbreak that is threatening people, because it's not just about you, it's about the people you're going to infect," Collins said.
"Do [mandates] convince people who otherwise wouldn't get them?" he asked rhetorically, "Oh yeah, especially if it means losing your job."
Collins, who left NIH in December, then explained that the threat of unemployment was successful at persuading vaccine-hesitant NIH employees and contractors to get vaccinated.
After Moore asked Collins about the political opinions of his fellow Christians, the then-director said the Trump administration violated norms of separation of church and state in reaching out to white, Protestant voters.
"[Separation of church and state] all got pretty muddy under the Trump administration. There was clearly a heavy effort to try to build political alliances with particularly white evangelicals. And it worked," Collins said, the Daily Wire reported.
He then offered a personal attack on Trump, saying that "every aspect of that president's character seems to be the opposite of what evangelical Christians would admire."
After Moore asked Collins about his work with Fauci, the then-director blamed increasing unpopularity aimed at the two doctors on Trump shifting blame for deaths early in the pandemic.
"Great harm was done to the people in this nation by a very, very self-involved and misguided president in the previous administration," Collins said, the Daily Wire reported. "Hundreds of thousands of people have died who should not have had to do so.
"And so there was an effort to try to distract from that dreadful circumstance by finding somebody else to blame."
One of the students asked Collins about the NIH funding experiments involved harvesting body parts from full-term babies and grafting infant scalps onto lab rats. Collins did not deny knowing about or greenlighting such projects.
"Pregnancy termination is, at the present time, legal in the United State," Collins said, the Daily Wire reported. "Whether you're in support of it or not, it's happened.
"The material from those elective abortions is discarded. There are aspects of fetal tissue that can be extremely valuable in understanding how life works, how development happens, and how to treat certain diseases like Parkinson's disease, for instance."
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