Outgoing Health Director Says Trump Pressured Him To Push Bogus COVID Treatments

Francis Collins, the former (as of Sunday) director of the NIH, came clean about what happened during the Trump administration's attempt to handle the pandemic. Collins says that Donald Trump tried to get him to push bogus treatments for COVID that had not been proven effective against the virus, and Collins says that other Republicans were pressuring him to fire Anthony Fauci. This is what science denial gets you, as Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

This past weekend, Francis Collins, the outgoing director of the national institutes of health, who by the way, his last day was on Sunday. The day he appeared on the cable news programs and really just let it all out about what he saw and what he experienced during the Trump administration's year of handling the COVID pandemic. Now, what he says is not surprising, but the fact that he stood up of course, to the Trump administration is because according to Mr. Collins here, Donald Trump repeatedly pressured him to push unproven COVID treatments like hydroxychloroquine. And Mr. Collins, as the director of the national Institute of health said, no, I'm not going to do that. We have not seen any evidence to suggest that these medications, these treatments you're suggesting have any effect whatsoever on COVID infections.

There is no science to back this up. I'm not going to say these things you want me to say. So that obviously was one of the big ones, right? Because Donald Trump was out there pushing hydroxychloroquine, pushing these weird alternative treatments and this of course came at a time before we had vaccines. And as of right now, we still don't have any true effective treatments. We have some going through the trial process. Hopefully those are successful and we can get those out there soon because that's another one of the big problems with COVID. It's not just about, oh, people aren't getting vaccinated, but it's that we still don't have effective treatments against it. We're, we're still kind of throwing everything at it and unfortunately, sometimes throwing everything means throwing these ridiculous not working treatments against it.

And then when the person gets better, they say, oh see it's because we threw the kitchen sink at it instead of, oh, well they had a mild case. They would've gotten over it anyway. They didn't need the dewormer. But you can't change the narrative this late in the game. But Mr. Collins did what he could to prevent those talking points from going out to the public. But even though he didn't say them himself, he couldn't stop Donald Trump from doing that as well. And then of course, there's Anthony Fauci. Collins says that Republican lawmakers repeatedly begged him to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci. Now they, they didn't really have any reason for it, you know, other than we just don't like the guy. And so Collins was like, yeah, I'm, I'm not gonna do that. He, he knows what he's doing. He's good at what he does. I have no cause for firing him.

So I'm not going to entertain your ridiculous suggestions here, go away. That's the kind of backbone that we wanna see more of, by the way, in our government agencies. Standing up to the powers that be by standing up for science, for the protection of the American public and that is exactly what Mr. Collins did. So knowing this now about him, I will say it's a little bit disappointing to know that he is no longer on the job. Hopefully he's being replaced by somebody who has the same kind of fortitude, the same kind of, you know, principles that Mr. Collins did, because what he said in this interview, if he hadn't stood up for himself and for science, things would look a lot different in this country today and by different, I mean a whole hell of a lot worse.