NIH director says COVID-19 is the enemy, not the ‘people in the other political party’

Francis Collins, the outgoing director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), stressed during an interview on Sunday that people should view the pandemic as the enemy instead of fighting amongst themselves.

“We’ve got to remember [COVID-19] is the enemy. It’s not the other people in the other political party. It’s not the people on Facebook or posting all sorts of craziest conspiracies,” Collins said while appearing on “Fox News Sunday.”

“We in this country have somehow gotten all fractured into a hyper-polarized, politicized view that never should have been mixed with public health,” Collins said.

“It’s been ruinous and history will judge harshly those people who have continued to defocus the effort and focus on conspiracies and things that are demonstrably false,” he added. “Shame on all of us that we’ve gotten into this kind of pickle,” he added.

Collins, who announced in October that he would be stepping down after serving for 12 years, the longest tenure of any NIH director, also said he believed that “no single person should serve in the position too long, and that it’s time to bring in a new scientist to lead the NIH into the future.”

Collins, whose last day at NIH is Sunday, touched on the fast-spreading COVID-19 omicron variant as well during the interview, warning that “we are in for a world of trouble.”

“All of the other previous variants pale by comparison in terms of the rate at which this one is spreading, doubling every two to three days first in South Africa now in parts of Europe. And the U.S. is on that exponential curve right now,” he said.

“We have things we can do and especially those are vaccines and boosters and being careful about masking again. And I know people are sick of hearing this but the virus is not sick of us. It’s thrown us a new curveball, and we got to be ready to hit it.”