Covid lockdown advocate and former director of the National Institutes of Health, Frances Collins, revealed she is battling prostate cancer.
The doctor detailed his terrible experience in a personal essay in which he described the “aggressive” diagnosis of prostate cancer about a month ago.
Dr. Collins, 73, was director of the NIH from 2009 to 2021 and is credited with leading the groundbreaking Human Genome Project. He said doctors told him his cancer was a ‘9 on a scale that only goes up to a 10’ in terms of how aggressively it was multiplying.
But a scan revealed that his cancer had not spread beyond the prostate tumor, suggesting that the cancer is not life-threatening.
Dr. Collins’ op-ed in the Washington Post comes a day after disgraced football starter OJ Simpson died of the same disease.
Dr. Francis Collins, President Biden’s chief scientific adviser, was an advocate of blanket lockdowns in the early days of Covid, but has since admitted that such measures harmed millions of Americans.
Dr. Collins detailed his battle with aggressive prostate cancer in a new personal essay. His cancer has not advanced beyond the prostate and surgery to remove the entire gland is expected to cure him.
In fact, it doesn’t spread, which is good news because cancer has a five-year survival rate of 32 percent once it has spread to other parts of the body.
Dr. Collins has been hailed as a pioneer in genetic research, having spearheaded the achievement of completing a finished sequence of the human DNA instruction book.
But his legacy has become more complicated in recent years thanks to his advocacy of Covid lockdown measures and his efforts alongside Dr. Anthony Fauci to quell dissenting views on Covid’s origins as possibly a lab leak.
He was a strong supporter of the Covid-era lockdowns that kept millions of people away from work, school and socializing, harming children’s learning in the long term and wreaking havoc on Americans’ mental health.
He was previously reported to have dismissed the theory that COVID-19 leaked from a Wuhan lab as a “conspiracy” in a message to Dr. Anthony Fauci in recently released emails.
He also helped orchestrate the removal of the Great Barrington Declaration, a treatise written by infectious disease doctors that advocated for a more focused approach to lockdowns, looking only at communities most vulnerable to serious illness, such as older people.
The former head of the NIH until 2021, who now serves as President Joe Biden’s chief scientific adviser, revealed that a scan about a month ago found the enlarged tumor in his prostate that may have spread beyond that point to other parts of his body.
Prostate cancer, which claimed the life of disgraced footballer OJ Simpson on Thursday, is the second most common form of cancer in men, only behind skin cancer. The disease forms from cancer cells in the prostate, a walnut-sized gland found only in men.
Dr. Collins, who will soon undergo surgery to remove his prostate, wrote about his struggle in hopes of inspiring more men to be proactive about their health.
He said: ‘New biopsies taken from the mass showed the transformation into a much more aggressive cancer. When I heard that the diagnosis was now a 9 on a cancer grading scale that only goes up to 10, I knew everything had changed.’
A possible problem was detected about five years ago, when his doctor noticed an increase in his blood levels of prostate-specific antigen (PSA).
PSA is a protein produced by the prostate that, when it exceeds four nanograms per milliliter of blood, could indicate cancer.
Dr. Collins’ PSA started rising five years ago and hit 22 about a month ago.
He said: ‘Therefore the PET scan, which was ordered to determine whether the cancer had spread beyond the prostate, was of great importance. Would a cure still be possible or would it be time to get my affairs in order?
‘A few hours later, when my doctors showed me the results of the scan, I felt a wave of deep relief and gratitude. There was no detectable evidence of cancer outside the primary tumor.’
Dr. Collins had enrolled in an NIH study focused on prostate cancer research and treatment, which included performing DNA analysis of the tumor to guide therapies. He headed that agency from 2009 to 2021.
At first there was nothing to worry about. Doctors followed an “active surveillance” protocol that involves regular check-ups.
He wasn’t exactly surprised to receive his diagnosis. Dr. Collins’ Father Had Prostate Cancer and Genetic Factors Drive between 10 and 20 percent of prostate cancers.
What’s more, prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed type among American men. About 40 percent of men in the U.S. have low-grade prostate cancer, meaning it probably won’t kill them.
Dr Collins said: “My situation is much better than my father’s when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer four decades ago.
“He was about the same age as I am now, but then it was not possible to assess how advanced the cancer might be. He was treated with hormone therapy that may not have been necessary and had a significant negative impact on his quality of life. .
Detection measures have improved since his father’s time, a reflection of the mountain of additional information that researchers have accumulated over the years.
The PSA test was introduced in the late 1980s and revolutionized prostate screening and testing.
Dr. Collins’ career as a physician-scientist spans four decades. He was sworn in as NIH director in 2009. He appears in the photo of Charlie Rose in 1994.
Greater emphasis has also been placed on detecting high-risk groups and people with certain genetic predispositions, helping more men detect the disease early and giving them greater chances of survival.
And active surveillance, the course Dr. Collins’ doctors initially followed, is now the primary treatment option for early stages of prostate cancer.
In his father’s time, doctors often switched to surgical removal of the prostate gland, which has been associated with incontinence and impotence.
Many patients would be offered surgery or radiation, which also has similar side effects, even if their cancer grew slowly and was unlikely to cause harm during their lifetime.
Other treatments include chemotherapy, hormonal therapies, and medications that harness the body’s own immune system to fight cancer.
However, according to Dr. Collins, there is still room for improvement when it comes to detection. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends that all men ages 55 to 69 discuss screening and PSA testing with their primary care doctor.
But the USPSTF recommends against PSA screening after age 70 because it can lead to false-positive results that could lead to increased anxiety and possible overtreatment for a cancer that is unlikely to kill them.
Meanwhile, the American Urological Association takes a more cautious approach and recommends screening at an earlier age, especially if men have a family history of cancer, and for African-American men, who are more likely to get it.
Dr Collins said: “Having been diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer and feeling grateful for all the ways I have benefited from research advances, I feel compelled to tell this story openly.” I hope this helps someone. I do not wanna lose my time.’
Collins had left the NIH in 2021 to retire. But he reentered public service when President Biden hired him in 2022 to work in the White House on science initiatives.
Despite his stellar reputation as a scientist, Collins’ public image has been tarnished by the government’s flawed response to the Covid outbreak in 2020.
Lockdowns from coast to coast affected the health and financial stability of Americans, with millions of people out of work and hundreds of thousands of small businesses affected.
Researchers have called the negative effects of lockdown measures on children’s mental health “era-defining” and long-lasting.
The pandemic led to a rise in the number of children experiencing severe hopelessness and depression, caused by a combination of school closures and restrictions that kept them away from friends and addiction to social media.
Stanford scientists even found that the pandemic accelerated the aging process of adolescent brains.
Collins made headlines recently when videos of a public talk he had with the bipartisan organization Braver Angels, in which he admitted the serious defects of the blocking policies he defended.
In the discussion, he said, “If you’re a public health person and you’re trying to make a decision, you have a very narrow view of what the right decision is, and that’s something that will save a life.” It doesn’t matter what else happens. That is why infinite value is given to stopping the disease and saving a life.
“There’s no value placed on whether this really totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy and keeps a lot of kids out of school in a way that they never recover from.”
Lockdowns had a major knock-on effect on people’s access to preventive health care, such as prostate cancer screening.
Rates of advanced prostate cancer have been rising for years, according to a 2023 report, which found that cases of prostate cancer have increased increased by 3 percent per year from 2014 to 2019.
The main cause of this overall increase was the diagnosis of advanced cases of the disease, which has increased between 4 and 5 percent annually since 2011.
Experts estimate the disease will affect 300,000 American men this year and kill more than 35,000, most of whom are over 65 years old.