Former NIH director Francis Collins worries for his safety

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — As Francis Collins, longtime director of the National Institutes of Health, took to the steps below the Lincoln Memorial on Friday for a sound check before speaking at the Stand Up for Science rally, he was confronted by an agitated protester who warned, “You’re going to prison.”

The incident was witnessed by a reporter from STAT, and the man afterward identified himself only as “Jeff” and said he was there to protest Collins’ oversight of NIH, and specifically the agency’s funding of gain-of-function research at a lab in Wuhan, China, where some believe the SARS-CoV-2 virus may have originated. “He’s an indicted felon, he lied before Congress,’’ Jeff, baselessly, told the reporter.

The confrontation was the latest public manifestation of the dramatically altered public image of Collins, from a near-legendary geneticist who led the Human Genome Project and was beloved by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle — and was asked to stay on by President Trump in his first term — to a target demonized by Trump’s Make America Great Again followers. 

Collins told STAT he is so concerned for his personal safety that he has hired security at his home.

At ‘Stand Up for Science’ rally, Francis Collins warns major NIH research programs ‘at severe risk’

“If I become more outspoken now, as I was on Friday, about the harms that are being done, it probably increases my visibility and the chances that such threats or maybe even real actions will become more likely,” he said. “I don’t know what to do about that. I can’t go hide under my desk.”