NIH Head Francis Collins Emailed Fauci to Takedown the Authors of the Great Barrington Declaration

"Quick and devastating published take down."

Those were the words the head of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins, used in a private email to Anthony Fauci. He was describing what he wanted done to three tenured scientists who publicly disagreed with… pic.twitter.com/XnluOOZAcJ

— Students For Liberty (@sfliberty) August 13, 2026

… lockdowns.

The email exists because an undergraduate went and got it.

The scientists were the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration: Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, Martin Kulldorff of Harvard. They argued for focused protection of the vulnerable instead of society-wide lockdowns.

Collins called them "fringe… pic.twitter.com/kMumoV8woc

— Students For Liberty (@sfliberty) August 13, 2026

… epidemiologists."

Read that back.

The head of the federal agency that funds most of American biomedical research asked the country's top infectious disease official, in writing, to organize a takedown of three tenured scientists at Stanford, Oxford, and Harvard.

Instead of asking for a… pic.twitter.com/6KJAwQxJNh

— Students For Liberty (@sfliberty) August 13, 2026

… scientific reply, he was asking for a takedown. He wanted these scientists to be publicly discredited before their argument reached policymakers.

The Collins email was not isolated.

At the height of the pandemic, world-leading scientific voices were being scrubbed from platforms, smothered in press briefings, and silenced by administrative agencies coordinating with social media companies.

On American campuses, students… pic.twitter.com/7ueAOzqU7b

— Students For Liberty (@sfliberty) August 13, 2026

… had no platform to push back against the unified government line.