Smeagol Hates Nasty Hobbitses

Zygmunt Bauman’s argument about the bureaucratic mentality:

So. The historian Phil Magness has obtained email messages sent between officials at the NIH, and this one is especially interesting:

Phil Magness @PhilWMagness

Thread summarizing what we've learned so far of the Fauci/Collins email dump on the Great Barrington Declaration: It starts on 10/14/20 when Collins instructs Fauci and his staff to "take down" the GBD and the "fringe" scientists behind it.

In October of 2020, Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, sent a message to several subordinates — including Anthony Fauci — taking note of the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for an end to lockdowns and global panic over COVID-19. There are a thousand things to say about the contents of this message, but the best, clearest piece is the description Collins casually tossed at the three authors of the declaration: “the three fringe epidemiologists.”

The authors of the Great Barrington Declaration are Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta and Martin Kulldorff.

Jay Bhattacharya has an economics PhD and an MD; he’s a professor at Stanford University. The latest version of his academic c.v. I can find online is six years old, and it’s 16 pages long — because, among other things, it lists the 86 peer-reviewed articles published in academic journals with his byline.

Sunetra Gupta is a professor at the University of Oxford; her byline appears on 134 peer-reviewed articles.

Martin Kulldorff is a professor at Harvard Medical School. Here’s a fairly up-to-date version of his 45-page academic c.v., which lists the 201 peer-reviewed articles that have included his byline.

So: Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, with 400+ peer-reviewed articles between them, but the director of a government agency sees a statement from them that asserts a set of premises he doesn’t wish to see asserted, so he immediately and reflexively labels them “fringe.”

We have “leaders,” people in positions of significant authority and responsibility, who cannot argue. They can’t make an argument around a set of evidence, meet critics openly, defend their argument with an ordered deployment of fact, and logically sustain their views in transparent debate. They presumptively label critics and dissenters “fringe,” and deploy sneak attacks to undermine their reputations. They answer arguments built on facts and logic with character attacks and diversionary tactics.

Francis Collins has exceptional credentials and a formidable academic c.v.; he very much comes from the world of science and rational discourse. But somehow he’s forgotten how to do the thing he’s spent his adult life doing. Extended labor in a bureaucracy has trained him away from listening, debating, and considering opposing views. He’s trained in the discipline of science and the discipline of bureaucracy, and his messages tell us which set of training has prevailed in the ordering of his mind.

Institutions led by people who can’t make arguments and sustain them through open debate are institutions that fail.

And they are failing.