Francis Collins, who was the director of the National Institutes of Health during the pandemic, was candid and reflective in his recent public remarks on our government’s responses to COVID.

In a video publicized on X by Phil Kerpen, Collins admits that the government health experts in Washington, D.C., “weren’t really thinking about what that would mean for [families in] Minnesota, a thousand miles away from where the virus was hitting so hard. We weren’t really considering the consequences in communities that were not New York City or some other big city….”

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Then Collins said the more important stuff:

“If you’re a public health person and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is. And that is something that will save a life; it doesn’t matter what else happens. So you attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recover from.”

On one level, this sounds utterly inhumane: Who the heck thinks only about stopping the spread of germs and not even give a thought to how quarantines, school closures, and stay-at-home orders will ruin people’s lives and destroy communities?

Well, that’s what infectious disease specialists do. They are specialists. And in a big system, like the U.S. government, there is a place for monomaniacal specialists. You have Russian intelligence specialists, legal specialists, network security specialists, traffic fatality experts, severe weather experts, and so on. They all obsess over the particular problem they've been hired to think about.

The problem is putting those specialists in charge. A real leader listens to those specialists, then listens to other specialists, and then considers the bigger picture, and then makes decisions.

The same is true for individuals and families. Every parent should listen to experts when considering what is best for their family, but no parent should simply defer to the experts.

But in 2020 and 2021, it somehow became conventional wisdom that policymakers, families, and individuals should simply defer to the infectious disease experts like Collins.

For instance, look at how prominent liberal voices reacted when President Donald Trump suggested he might not defer to doctors’ prescriptions for lockdown.

The argument was that policymakers should let infectious disease experts make our public policy during a pandemic. This was the standard position held by the news media, and Joe Biden regularly echoed this position.

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In the summer of 2020, Biden’s DNC ran an ad attacking Trump’s call to reopen schools in the fall because the “experts” said schools should close. Biden would regularly defer to Anthony Fauci.

Collins’s frank admission doesn’t show that we should never listen to experts. It shows that we should never let them make our decisions for us.