WSJ on Francis Collins

I take their point, and I take his point. 

Francis Collins Has Regrets, but Too Few

In the way we all remember the parts we got right and skate over the ones we um, did less well on, I recall that I said early that the CDC was going to be the far edge of safety recommendations, and various agencies and businesses would feel obliged to follow their recommendations because of liability. But that didn't mean that everyone was going to be as cautious as they were, nor should they be. And as a person who worked in a hospital for over forty years, I was much on the low-risk side of the spectrum. With omniscient retrospective, I wish I had believed with enough certainty to be noisy about it that outdoor transmission was almost nonexistent. We  didn't know that immediately, but we knew it soon.

I didn't realise that the WSJ had done me one better on that as early as March, and I had forgotten the Great Barrington Declaration. They have a very good point about Collins and Fauci on the following

Dr. Collins’s mini-mea culpa still doesn’t make up for his collaboration with Anthony Fauci to discredit the Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated a strategy of focused protection on the elderly and vulnerable while letting younger people at lower risk continue with their lives. Nor does the former NIH head apologize for trying to censor different health-policy advice.

Those were, in retrospect, huge.  The information was in front of people, but the overexcitement (which is quite natural) and the powerful advocates obscured some of the facts, so that not enough people made a critical mass to have fully alternative policies state to state.

Yet I can't get past the impression that a lot of people on all sides were putting their energy into being angry at someone rather than learning more and nailing it down. We would rather spend emotional than intellectual energy, it seems.