Commentary A previously unseen Oct. 2020 email from Dr. Francis Collins, the outgoing head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to his colleague Dr. Anthony Fauci is raising concerns about government-sponsored suppression of free speech—a direct violation of the 1st Amendment. The email, which appears in a footnote of a Dec. 17 year-end staff report from House Democrats, shows the behind-the-scenes efforts from Collins and Fauci, who were pushing a fresh round of lockdowns, to discredit the Great Barrington Declaration and disparage its authors. The Great Barrington Declaration was an Oct. 2020 letter that ran counter to the efforts of Fauci and Collins by declaring a unified opposition to broad-based lockdowns, and choosing instead to focus on the protection of vulnerable groups. That declaration has been signed by many notable medical and epidemiological experts, including Harvard University epidemiologist Dr. Martin Kulldorff, University of Oxford epidemiologist Dr. Sunetra Gupta, Stanford Medical …