A few minutes into an interview with a “journalist” from a Showtime special, Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, sensed something wasn’t quite right.
“Why are big agriculture putting chemicals [trans fats] into our food to make people transgender?” asked the interviewer, who called himself Billy Wayne Ruddick Jr., PhD.
“Yeah, that was interesting,” Collins tells reporters, according to STAT News. “That interview was done last November and was presented as a Showtime special where the interviewer is somebody who doesn’t know a lot about medical research, but gives you a chance to talk about the exciting things that are happening at NIH. Sounds like a plausible thing that I’d want to do.”
That’s not exactly what happened, however. “It was pretty clear that this was not the usual circumstance,” Collins says. Ruddick was actually comedian Sacha Baron Cohen in disguise for “Who Is America,” a ...
