Stanford medical professor Jay Bhattacharya faces his first confirmation hearing to lead the National Institutes of Health next week, but his predecessor –  who once dismissed Bhattacharya as a "fringe epidemiologist" for opposing COVID-19 lockdowns – is still a lightning rod for controversy and could even find himself in legal trouble.

Lawyers for Francis Collins, the longest-serving director in NIH history, protested the "material misrepresentations" about COVID mitigations and himself in the final report of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, which said the feds lacked evidence for "broadly requiring masking," before it shuttered last year.

Yet Collins himself made material representations to the subcommittee in a Dec. 3 Arnold & Porter law firm letter, according to Paul Thacker, a former Senate investigator of drug industry bribery, who published the letter Thursday.

Still an NIH investigator until his sudden and unexplained resignation from NIH Friday, Collins could be prosecuted for lying to Congress through his bad-faith summary of a systematic review of mask research in 2023 and omission of the anticlimactic conclusion of a 15-month internal review, which reaffirmed the paper's original conclusion that masks "probably make little to no difference" against COVID or influenza, Thacker alleges.

The taxpayer-funded international research collaborative Cochrane published its first mask review in 2007 and has updated it four times, most recently the 2023 version cited in the subcommittee report and Collins' letter.

Its lead author rebuked Collins in a Dec. 13 letter to the subcommittee, also published by Thacker on Thursday. University of Oxford epidemiologist Tom Jefferson said the official statement by Collins' lawyers pertaining to the review is "misleading and requires correction."

Collins did not respond to Just the News queries about the allegations.

Congressional Republicans floated criminal referrals against former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci for allegedly lying about not funding gain-of-function research in China that may have unleashed SARS-CoV-2. The dispute turns on NIH's public definition of such research, which it scrubbed, versus its regulatory definition.

An outside watchdog also accused Fauci of lying to Congress about following public records law, which his senior scientific adviser David Morens said they routinely ignored.

While Fauci lost his taxpayer-funded security detail and a taxpayer-funded museum exhibit upon President Trump's return to office, he has yet to face legal consequences and reportedly retired as the richest federal employee in history by salary, benefits and pension.

He's not the only bureaucrat behind COVID policy decisions to have a soft landing, with Patrizia Cavazzoni joining Pfizer this week as chief medical officer after four years leading the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.

The pharma veteran told staff two weeks before Trump's inauguration she wanted to be "more present for my family," according to an email viewed by BioPharma Dive. 

She likely would have faced scrutiny from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who warned FDA staff last fall to "preserve your records" and "pack your bags," and FDA commissioner-nominee Marty Makary, a critic of federal COVID policy whose confirmation hearing is also next week.

The vaccine advisory committees for the FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention unexpectedly canceled meetings scheduled for this week and next month on which flu strains to target in upcoming vaccines, updating vaccination guidelines for several infections and discussing new vaccines including Moderna's mRNA jobs, BioSpace reported.

HHS also suspended a contract with Vaxart to develop an oral COVID vaccine, with Kennedy blaming the prior administration's "failed oversight," Fox News reported.

Cavazzoni joining Pfizer is typical of the revolving door between the FDA and industry, PharmaVoice reported: Former FDA commissioners Robert Califf, Scott Gottlieb and Stephen Hahn all went to regulated companies and Gottlieb is still on Pfizer's board.

One critic is the FDA's onetime No. 2 vaccine regulator, who told Congress last year he resigned in part because the Biden White House sidelined his office to rush full approval of Pfizer's COVID vaccine and that he opted against a COVID booster himself.

Philip Krause, now an independent consultant, spoke about the agency's politicization during COVID this week in a two-part episode of the podcast Illusion of Consensus, which NIH nominee Bhattacharya cofounded with writer Rav Arora in 2023.

Collins' letter via his lawyers lauded his "landmark discoveries of a number of disease genes" and honors including the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The subcommittee "acutely focused on reaching a set of pre-determined conclusions" after Collins agreed to sit for several hours of interviews, and its report "selectively credits evidence, inaccurately characterizes documents and transcribed interviews, and makes declarative statements not supported by the facts," the letter says.

It noted that Cochrane applied a scarlet letter to the 2023 update to its systematic review of masks, with editor-in-chief Karla Soares-Weiser claiming it had been "widely misinterpreted" as saying "masks don't work" and overruling the authors' interpretation.

Collins left out how Cochrane's lengthy internal probe ended, however: no changes to the "plain language summary and abstract" of the review, which had prompted a New York Times columnist who claims that masks work to pressure Soares-Weiser to reinterpret the findings.

He also said the subcommittee report mischaracterized the confidence of the systematic review's findings, which said the weakness of the reviewed studies "hampers drawing firm conclusions" about mask efficacy.

Now a Madrid-based investigative journalist, Thacker wrote Thursday that Collins "inverts the meaning" of this finding by implying it supports wearing masks. 

If researchers couldn't reach "firm conclusions" about a heart-attack drug, the drug should not be prescribed, because "every drug has unforeseen side effects, and if it’s not benefitting it could actually be harmful," as even the CDC has acknowledged with masks, he said.

Thacker told Just the News that House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, would make the call on whether to seek the prosecution of Collins if it were to happen. Committee spokespeople didn't answer queries.

Jordan targeted another set of entities crucial to U.S. COVID policies – tech companies that suppressed debate and even admittedly truthful statements on viral origins, masks, vaccines and lockdowns – in subpoenas to Google parent Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook parent Meta, Microsoft, Rumble, TikTok and X.

He sought their "communications with foreign governments regarding [their] compliance with foreign censorship laws, regulations, judicial orders, or other government-initiated efforts," particularly the European Union, U.K., Australia and Canada, some of which have threatened crippling fines on companies that don't censor globally.

The subpoenas add legislative heft to comparable efforts by the newly appointed chairmen of the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission.