Collins and Fauci are not “scientists” they are “Statists”
This is not science, it’s statism. Francis, the former head of NIH, was the one who told Trump on C-Span when they first met about C19 back in early 2020 that NIH was responsible “for discovering lithium”, which was an absurdly ignorant statement even if he had meant “for treating bipolar disorder.”
In fact, lithium’s mood stabilizing effects were known as early as the late 1800’s and specifically for manic depression was credited to an Australian psychiatrist in 1949. While the rest of the world used it for that, Big Pharma fought to keep it off the US market for two decades until the FDA conducted the safety and efficacy trials itself and approved it in 1970. NIH had little if anything to do with it as I recall, but certainly didn’t “discover it.”
Ironically, lithium, a repurposed element prescribed as a drug for manic depression actually saved and revived the field of Psychiatry from certain extinction as people were freed from mental institutions.